Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/104

Rh facts, named in many tongues. Hence the mystics may be of any human creed. Their doctrine passes “Like night from land to land” and “has strange power of speech.” It says, like the Ancient Mariner: —

And the mystic always thus appeals, in the ordinary world, to the individual man. Hence, in history, the mystics have been great awakeners of the very spirit that they have most condemned, namely of individuality. The great and stormy individuals, like St. Augustine, or like Luther, have loved them, and have learned from them, although in a sense that indeed soon transformed the mystic conception of Being, for such men, into quite another. Mysticism has been the ferment of the faiths, the forerunner of spiritual liberty, the inaccessible refuge of the nobler heretics, the inspirer, through poetry, of countless youth who know no metaphysics, the teacher, through the devotional books, of the despairing, the comforter of those who are weary of finitude. It has determined, directly or indirectly, more than half of the technical theology of the Church. The scholastic philosophy endeavored in vain to give it a subordinate place. In the doctrine of St. Thomas, the faithful, in this life, are permitted only a moderate though respectful use of mystical notions. Yet it is plain that the God of St. Thomas’s theology is himself a mystic, and even a pantheistic mystic, since the Being of the world, although for us real in the formal or realistic sense, makes abso-