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48 assure us of the reality of that fulfilment which is the life of God.

The conception of God thus reached offers itself to you, not as destroying, but as fulfilling, the large collection of slowly evolving notions that have appeared in the course of history in connection with the name of God.

The foregoing definition of God as an Absolute Experience transparently fulfilling a system of organised ideas, is, as you all doubtless are aware, in essence identical with the conception first reached, but very faintly and briefly developed, by Aristotle. Another definition of God, as the Absolute (or Perfect) Reality, long struggled in the history of speculation with this idea of God as Fulfilled Thought, or as Self-possessed Experience. The interrelation of these two central definitions has long occupied philosophical thinking. Their rational identification is the work of recent speculation. The all-powerful and righteous World-Creator of the Old and New Testaments was first conceived, not speculatively, but ethically; and it is to the rich experience of Christian mysticism that the historical honour belongs, of having bridged the gulf that seemed to separate, and that to many minds still separates, the God of practical faith from the God of philosophical definition. Mysticism is not philosophy; but, as a stage of human experience, it is the link that binds the contemplative to the practical in the history of religion, since the saints have taken refuge in it, and the philosophers have endeavoured to emerge from its mysteries to the light of clearer insight. To