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dental rapture; and its true significance is a temporary escape of the soul from the thrall of the body, a brief period of union of the divine spark within man with its infinite source. Very fortunate, too, it is that the soul does not fail, when it comes back to its personality or self, to remember, in its finite capacity, the infinite which it could not know in that capacity; else how could Plotinus ever have known, and been able to describe to others, the trial and success of his method? For that which he was unable to know as an individual, he was able, as an individual, to recount his knowledge of; notwithstanding the obvious difficulty of the natural man to comprehend how an experience which was only possible to him when his soul was separated from its consciousness, and he was infinite, could have been other than as good as nonexistent to him as an experience, and as information to others, when he was again conscious and finite.

Of this unique and mysterious method of obtaining revelations of the infinite, by being at one time infinite and at another time finite, and of communicating, as finite to finite beings, experiences as infinite, it is necessary here only to say two things. First, the theory of it is plainly at bottom a more refined

"Il n'y a qu'une chose nécessaire: posséder Dieu. . . . Il faut savoir se détacher de tout ce qu'on peut perdre, ne s'attacher absolument qu'à l'éternel et à l'absolu et savourer le reste comme un prêt, un usufruit." (Henri Frédéric Amiel, vol. i. p. 3.)

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evolution of the savage's cruder opinion that in dreaming the spirit leaves the person's body, coming back to it when he awakes; not coming back to it at all when he dies, but flitting dismally in ghost-like disconsolateness about the scenes of its former joys and sorrows. Second, the method is uncertain and useless uncertain, because the truth of its results rests entirely upon the authority of the individual, who may be misled himself, or may knowingly mislead; useless, because this possible vitiation renders it impossible ever to know when to depend upon it, seeing that there is no common measure by which to appraise its differing results in the hands of different persons. The perplexed inquirer is very much in the position of a belated traveller, who, about to cross some vast waste of unknown country, should appeal for assistance to a number of clamorous guides, not one of whom had ever set foot in the country, but each one of whom professed, by looking into a special magic crystal of his own, to be able to see and to trace clearly the right path through it. Although the traveller might feel pretty sure that one of the guides, no two of whom agreed, was seeing and speaking the truth, he would be quite uncertain which it was, and would certainly conclude it to be useless for him to take any notice of the contradictory revelations made to him.

SECTION II.

ECSTASY OF FEELING.

LARGE use was made of the method of direct communion with God by the early Christians. They were the enthusiastic devotees of it, and in their practice it reached a delirious rapture and high repute, though never, perhaps, so complete a development as among the Brahmins. It was the means by which faith found firm footing to transcend the limitations of the understanding, and to attain that strain of sublime exaltation in which it received and embraced blissfully truths which not only transcended but even contradicted reason. Tertullian's saying, "Credo quia impossible," was perhaps that faith's supreme flight, if indeed St. Theresa's saying, "The more it seems impossible, the more I believe it," were not a higher achievement.

In the threefold division of the Jewish temple into the holy of holies, the sanctuary, and the court, the Christians discerned the symbolical signification of a threefold division of the human mind and a threefold dignity of human knowledge: the external senses apprehending sensible things, which was the court; the intellect or understanding working on the materials

of sense to produce higher truths, which was the sanctuary; and the heart, or conscience, embracing things of faith, which was the holy of holies, the inner sanctuary, into which streamed the divine influx of love, and into which reason might not enter. Having discovered these significant similitudes of truth spiritual in a material temple, it was in accordance with the ingenuous habit of the human mind to believe that the ingenious similitudes were proof of the doctrine, which thenceforth had the guarantee of divine prefiguration; and, at any rate, no question could arise as to the existence of two distinct orders of truths-the knowledge of things without, obtained through observation of the senses and reflection; and the knowledge of things spiritual, obtained from within by an influx of divinity, and known, not by reason, but intuitively. The one was the means of becoming acquainted with the visible things of creation, the other the means of becoming acquainted with creation's invisible Creator.

St. Augustine has left on record in his Confessions an elaborate and instructive account of the long process of yearning thought and feeling through which he went while straining to attain to the knowledge and love of God. Passing from the knowledge of things obtained through the bodily senses, whither to reach the faculties of beasts, and thence to the reasoning

faculty, to which what is received from the senses is referred to be judged, as he said, and finding these all to be variable, his yearning and straining soul at last raised itself above its low understanding, withdrawing itself from things of sense and intellect, and reached by a sudden leap the knowledge of the unchangeable to be preferred to the changeable. "And thus," he continues, "with the faith of one trembling glance it arrived at THAT WHICH IS. And then I saw the invisible things understood by the things which are made. But I could not fix my gaze thereon; and, my infirmity being struck back, I was thrown again on my wonted habits, carrying along with me only a loving memory thereof, and a longing for what I had, as it were, perceived the odour of, but was not yet able to feed upon."

By concentration of his mental energies on a particular tract of thought and feeling, and by the persistent maintenance of this strain of activity, he was able to raise it to such an exclusive pitch that contact or circuit with other thoughts and feelings was broken, and it freed for a time from their restraining hold; and the condition of quasi-cataleptic or quasi-delirious function thus engendered, was accompanied by an indescribable feeling of spiritual illumination and rapture. It was only, as he says, by passing beyond the power whereby he was united to the body