The Mystic and the Corporate Life

One of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type of religion; that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong. Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.

In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a "religious individualist," we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was "in union with God. " The certitude then gained -- a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not generally diffused -- governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away.