martyrs and saints, most, if not all of whom, were mystics. She was predisposed by nature to a distinctively religious life, though she was not without affections for the vanities of the world. Under the instructions of her mother she began to think seriously when she was six or seven years old." As a child she longed for a martyr's crown, built hermitages at play, "wished to be a nun but more to be a hermit." At eighteen, under the influence of a prudent and devout nun, she turned her mind to eternal things" and read with avidity the religious books of her uncle. The habit of reading she continued through life, and commends it to those who desire to advance in the way of perfection. She came into close personal fellowship with the great ascetic and mystic, Peter of Alcantara, whose manner of life she describes graphically in her Autobiography.

By conscious effort she tried to attain certain forms of prayer, especially that which was treated in Francisco's Tercer Abecadario. When she was but twenty "she spent much time in solitude," made a beginning in the prayer of recollection; and the Lord gave her "the gift of tears." Then already she was raised "to the prayer of quiet and occasionally to that of union," though "I understood not what either one or the other was." 92

She had a frail body and a highly sensitive soul, physical and mental traits which made her receptive to all kinds of religious stimuli. In her vain attempt for twenty years "to reconcile God and the world," she reached a crisis, a point of final decision, when through a deep inward struggle, supported by pictures, books and prayers, she completely renounced the world and gave herself wholly to God. The new religious experience found expression in visions, locutions, raptures, and tears of sweetness and joy.

She, also, had a way of "practicing the presence of God" by deliberate effort. "I used to labor to picture our Lord's 92 Autobiography, chap. 4, 9.

Humanity and I never could." But in time the effort was crowned by vision. She "contrived to picture Christ as within me. On such occasions "a feeling of the presence of God would come over me unexpectedly, so that I could no more doubt either that He was within me and that I was wholly absorbed in Him." She concentrated her attention on the prayer in the garden." This she did "for years, nearly every night before she fell asleep."

The eager desire for communion with God, the persistent effort to reach Him, the condition of body and soul, the mystical and ascetic traditions to which she was heir through books, institutions, and living men and women, her native genius which is inexplicable - these furnish sufficient ground for her unique religious life. While she "differed greatly from other mystics in her estimates of the various facts and is the starting-point of a new tradition," her originality is not due to the revelations she received or to the emotions she felt, but to the unparalelled mastery of the art of describing her religious states. The gift of analysis and clear statement made her the founder of a new school of mysticism which is in high favor in the Catholic Church to this day.

The visualizing of the fleeting images of a highly stimulated fancy and the materializing of the figures which tramp across the field of consciousness in the day dreams of a devout saint, are to be expected in a church and a land where pictures of Christ, the virgin, and the saints, angels and demons, confront the plastic mind of the child on canvas and in marble, on parchment and in ritual. Excitable natures, subject to nervous instability and bodily infirmities, naturally express their religious emotions in such tangible forms. This is done spontaneously and in sincerity, without thought of deception. It is a psychic process controlled by certain conditions and when these meet, the result follows as by necessity. It has value only for him who experiences

it, and then only as it promotes the life of faith and love. It is a mark, not so much of a high type, as of a unique kind, of saintliness.

Professor Hermann, in The Communion of the Christian with God, after discussing mysticism in general, asks whether or not, it seeks God as a Christian ought to seek Him? whether the God whom the mystics believe they find is the living God of our faith? He answers in the negative. One must put the mysticism of St. Theresa to this test. She, like all her kind, put aside "everything which affects us from without," nature, history, cultus, doctrine, even the historical Christ. All these are simply means to an end, at most useful only to produce the frame of mind in which God comes inwardly near us. St. Theresa soared above and left behind the faculties of the soul, the Scriptures, the record of Jesus, and came into immediate and rapturous contact with God, the Holy Trinity, the Divine Humanity, angels and demons. However admirable her life may have been, beneficent her deeds, and sane and sound her counsels, her way of perfection is no longer in harmony with the highest spiritual and ethical views of life or with the ideals of evangelical piety. Men now do not seek God by mystic vision, dogmatic tradition, or the way of ratiocination. There is a more excellent and a less spectacular way, the way of faith working in love. When the will conforms to the purposes of a Christ-like God, men will see Him as He is, see Him always not apart from nature, history, the historical Jesus and the church, but in these and through these; see Him not in tangible and visible forms but feel His presence in life that is active in works of faith, labors of love, and is sustained by the patience of hope.

The mysticism of St. Theresa belongs to an age and a mood that are vitally related to a view of the world and of life which men to-day can no longer hold. They are not a spontaneous product of the modern spirit. They

belong to the mediæval order. The modern man is not less religious and perchance equally mystical, but he seeks access to God in other ways and voices his religious experiences in other words than those used by St. Theresa.

In the preparation of this chapter the writer used the following books of St. Theresa in English translation:

St. Teresa of Jesus, embracing the Life, Relations, Maxims and Foundations Written by the Saint, edited by John J. Burke, C.S.P., the Columbia Press, New York, 1911.

The Interior Castle of the Mansions, translated by the Rev. John Dalton, John J. McVey, Philadelphia, 1893.

The Book of the Foundations of S. Teresa of Jesus, translated from the Spanish by David Lewis, Benziger Bros., New York.

THE MYSTICISM OF GEORGE FOX

RUFUS M. JONES

George Fox was born in 1624, the same year that Jacob Boehme, the great Silesian mystic, died. Fox had no interest in the theosophical alchemical interpretations of the universe which were so dear to Boehme, but in almost every other way these two Protestant mystics were kindred. They were both unlearned men the peasant type and not the scholar type. They both were born and brought up in narrow rural, provincial surroundings, having almost no contact with the great currents of business and thought. They both kept sheep and they both learned the shoemaker's trade. They reveal the same general psychological traits of personality. They were both shy, retiring, introspective, conscientious, morbidly inclined boys. They naturally withdrew from games and sports; they shunned fellowship; they were solitary and meditative. They lived in companionship with the Bible and found their real world in the unseen rather than in the seen. They were both of unstable psychical disposition - the type that hears voices and sees sights which are not there for other people. They were both acutely sensitive to suggestion. Certain ideas burst into their consciousness with explosive force, and, as they could not trace them to any external source in the world of men, they were convinced that these ideas were "communicated" to them. They both passed through a momentous crisis-experience which inaugurated a new era for their lives, from which event they began to interpret to the world the revelation which they had received. Of course they both suffered from