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{299} Fraser's Magazine, September, 1856. -- "Hours with the Mystics. " By Robert Alfred Vaughan, B. A. Two Volumes. London: John W. Parker and Son. 1856.
Few readers of this magazine probably know anything about "Mystics; " know even what the term means: but as it is plainly connected with the adjective "mystical" they probably suppose it to denote some sort of vague, dreamy, sentimental, and therefore useless and undesirable personage. Nor can we blame them if they do so; for mysticism is a form of thought and feeling now all but extinct in England. There are probably not ten thorough mystics among all our millions; the mystic philosophers are very little read by our scholars, and read not for, but in spite of, their mysticism; and our popular theology has so completely rid itself of any mystic elements, that our divines look with utter disfavour upon it, use the word always as a term of opprobrium, and interpret the mystic expressions in our liturgy -- which mostly occur in the Collects -- according to the philosophy of Locke, really ignorant, it would seem, that they were written by Platonist mystics.