"The Neo-Platonists became ascetics and enthusiasts; Plato was neither. Where Plato acknowledges the services of the earliest philosophers—the imperfect utterances of the world's first thoughts-Neo-Platonism (in its later period at least) undertakes to detect, not the similarity merely, but the identity between Pythagoras and Plato, and even to exhibit the Platonism of Orpheus and of Hermes. Where Plato is hesitant or obscure, Neo-Platonism inserts a meaning of its own, and is confident that such, and no other, was the master's mind. Where Plato indulges in a fancy, or hazards a bold assertion, NeoPlatonism, ignoring the doubts Plato may himself express elsewhere, spins it out into a theory, or bows to it as an infallible revelation. Where Plato has the doctrine of Reminiscence, Neo-Platonism has the doctrine of Ecstasy. In the Reminiscence of Plato, the ideas the mind perceives are without it. Here there is no mysticism, only the mistake incidental to metaphysicians generally, of giving an actual existence to mere mental abstractions."

The opinions of Plotinus did serious injury to the Christian Church of the third century; as, thirteen centuries later, were the wild views of some who were favorable to Protestantism, exceedingly detrimental to the purity and progress of the German Reformation. But if Plotinus was a Plato worshiper, Porphyry did equal honors to Aristotle. The latter did not accept paganism as it existed, although he contended for it. His battle was against two powerful foes: the superstitions of old paganism, and the growing power of young Christianity. But Christianity could not be repulsed, and paganism could not be reformed. It is true that Porphyry was the most powerful of all the enemies of the early Church; but it should be remembered that he was not an unmitigated heathen. For "he and men like him constituted themselves the defenders of a paganism which did but partially acknowledge their advocacy. Often suspected by the emperors, they were still oftener maligned and persecuted by the jealousy of the priests. They were the unaccredited champions of paganism, for they sought to refine while they conserved it. They defended it, not as zealots, but as men of letters. They defended it, because the old faith could boast of great names and great achievements in speculation, literature, and art, and because the new appeared novel and barbarian in its origin, and humiliating in its claims. They wrote, they lectured, they disputed in favor of the temple and against the Church, because they dreamed of the days of Pericles under the yoke of the empire; not because they worshiped idols, but because they worshiped Plato." This same error is a prominent feature of the Unitarianism of the nineteenth century. We mean a mistaking of the esthetics for religion, and of cultivating the abstractions of the mind to the complete overthrow and annihilation of the emotions of the heart. Heaven deliver us from our Boston Porphyrys!

Theurgic mysticism claims Jamblicus for its founder. According to him there are four great orders of spiritual existence: gods,

demons, heroes or demigods, and souls. Below these are the malignant demons, or antigods. The gods confer blessings on the body and soul, and the demons afflict them. The subordinate powers confer temporal advantages, preside over matter, and stimulate the soul to great actions. Proclus closes the list of Neo-Platonists; and what an end to Neo-Platonism in general, and Proclus in particular!

"After years of austerity and toil, Proclus-the scholar, stored with the opinions of the past, surrounded by the admiration of the present; the astronomer, the geometrician, the philosopher; learned in the lore of symbols and of oracles, in the rapt utterances of Orpheus and of Zoroaster; an adept in the ritual of invocations among every people in the world-he, at the close, pronounces Quietism the consummation of the whole, and an unreasoning contemplation, an ecstasy which casts off as an incumbrance all the knowledge so painfully acquired, the bourne of all the journey."

Thus far has mysticism been on the side of paganism, and battling with the doctrines of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us now see it in warm friendship with Christianity as it existed in the early Greek Church. They have never met before; we must therefore not be shocked at the ridiculous visions of St. Anthony and the mystic Anchorites. But the first prominent character whose acquaintance we make is Dionysius the Areopagite. Whether or not Dionysius wrote the books that bear his name is a disputed point, which, like so many others in the thread of history, research and ingenuity have never been able to untie. The most we can do is to look at them as they are. Dionysius was a convert to Christianity under the preaching of St. Paul on Mars Hill. But the works ascribed to him were not considered genuine until A. D. 533. As they were afterward found to favor the claims of the hierarchy, the Church stamped them with her seal of approval, and it soon became heresy to deny that Dionysius was their author. The probabilities, however, are against their genuineness, and history long ago called the writer of them the pseudo-Dionysius. He labored "to accommodate the theosophy of Proclus to Christianity, . . . to strengthen all the pretensions of the priesthood, and to invest with a new traditionary sanction the ascetic virtues of the cloister." His views on hierarchies form the boldest and most influential part of his whole system: God and the lowest angel are united by many intermediate links, and the members of one spiritual class are always striving to attain the next highest, so as to approach as near as possible to God. Thus he demonstrates the celestial hierarchy, "a corresponding series to the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the visible world. . . . The Saviour is rather the Logos of the Platonist than the Son of God revealed in Scripture. He is

allowed to be, as incarnate, the founder of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; but, as such, he is removed from men by the long chain of priestly orders, and is less the Redeemer than remotely the illuminator of the species." Such are the opinions of the man who began at Byzantium to dig the channels for the flow of European mysticism. No wonder that both great branches of the Church began to believe in the supernatural powers of the priesthood.

Mysticism now comes westward, and from its home among the Greek Christians it takes up its residence within the pale of the Latin Church. Through John Scotus Erigena and Hugo, of St. Victor, the hierarchal system of the pseudo-Dionysius is transplanted from the Euxine to Atlantic. And now let us turn from its revels in Byzantium to witness its operations within the celebrated Abbey of Clairvaux. St. Bernard is prior. At the mention of his name what a series of wonderful events rise up before us like spirits from the past! Bernard was not a mere dreamer, but he did whatever his hand, his head, or his heart found to do. He was as willing to work with his monks in the abbey garden as to strive to reconcile rival popes; to speak words of encouragement and love to his inferiors as to fight the fearless Abelard; and to found abbeys and organize a crusade as to help cook a dinner in the kitchen of Clairvaux. Though carried away at times by fanaticism, he was withal a practical man; far more so than could be expected in an age when superstition was held to be religion, and enthusiasm the noblest development of a virtuous heart. His opinions had a large admixture of truth, though we can see that his brilliant imagination had much to do with all of them. But hear our author's estimate:

"In the theology of Bernard reason has a place, but not the right one. His error in this respect is the primary source of that mystical bias so conspicuous in his religious teaching. Like Anselm, he bids you believe first, and understand, if possible, afterward. He is not prepared to admit the great truth, that if reason yields to faith, and assigns itself anywhere a limit, it must be on grounds satisfactory to reason. Faith, with Abelard, receives the treasure of divine truth wrapped up involutum. The understanding may afterward cautiously unfold the envelope and perfect the prize, but may never examine the contents at first to determine whether it shall be received or not.... Great, accordingly, was Bernard's horror when he beheld Abelard throwing open to discussion the dogmas of the Church; when he saw the alacrity with which such questions were taken up all over France, and learned that not the scholars of Paris merely, but an ignorant and stripling laity were discussing every day at street corners, in hall, in cottage, the mysteries of the Trinity and the immaculate conception. Faith,' he cried, 'believes, does not discuss.''

Now behold his mysticism:

"The design of Christianity is, in his idea, not to sanctify and elevate all our powers, to raise us to our truest manhood, accomplishing in every excel

lence all our faculties both of mind and body, but to teach us to nullify our corporeal part, to seclude ourselves, by abstraction, from its demands, and to raise us, while on earth, to a superhuman exaltation above the flesh-a vision and a glory approaching that of the angelic state. He extols the state of those who, not by gradual stages of ascent, but by a sudden rapture are elevated at times, like St. Paul, to the immediate vision of heavenly things. . . . Totally withdrawn into themselves, they are not only, like other good men, dead to the body and the world, and raised above the grosser hinderances of sense, but even beyond those images and similitudes drawn from visible objects which color and obscure our ordinary conceptions of spiritual truths.”

Bernard carried the symbolical meaning of the Scriptures to a ridiculous extent. In fact, he spiritualized the whole Bible, deeming it his duty "to draw as much meaning as possible from the sacred text." But this, with many other errors of his life, should entitle him rather to our pity than to unmitigated criticism. His eventful career is a lesson to the world of what a man can do when he has the will, and a warning to the unwary of the power. wielded by an uncontrolled imagination over even the strongest

reason.

Hugo of St. Victor appears in the early part of the twelfth century. Bernard had fought against the speculations of the schoolmen, and he always waxed warm in the struggle; but Hugo of St. Victor labored to unite mysticism and scholasticism. In this he was successful; for under his hands "mysticism lost much of its vagueness, and scholasticism much of its frigidity." Hugo drew his doctrines from the pseudo- Dionysius, and wrote a large commentary on the Heavenly Hierarchies. The result was, as Mr. Vaughan pointedly expresses it, Dionysius became more scriptural and human. Our faculties he classified into three divisions: 1. Cogitatio, the lowest; 2. Meditatio, the middle; 3. Contemplatio, the highest. These he subdivides and spiritualizes. After Hugo came Richard of St. Victor. He did more in the development of previous views than in the conception of new ones. With him we find our matter-of-fact Bible changed into a bundle of metaphors. His fancy casts a silken robe over every scriptural event. Like Bernard, Richard laid special stress on ecstasy: "When the body is asleep, and the soul is off in the presence of the Lord."

From the Latin Church mysticism takes up its abode in Germany. German mysticism, how full of fancies, legends, and romance! Though half of them are better to doze over and dream about than to narrate, yet there is much that is instructive and entertaining. Unwillingly do we desist from gathering some of the fine flowers in this magnificent garden to give them to the readers of the Quarterly; but we must content ourselves with plucking only a leaf or two; or, at most, of sipping the honey from a few of the

sweetest. These may impress us with the charms of the spot and the luxuriance of the parent flowers.

In the fourteenth century the Rhineland was teeming with different sects and conflicting opinions. Indeed, it reminds us forcibly of a certain village in the United States, where there are several churches in the place; but so theological or independent are the people that you must multiply their churches by five before reaching the sum total of their creeds. The river Rhine flowed by the door of many a church whose shibboleth was very different from that of its neighbors. A black-gowned and scuttle-hatted man you could meet in your shortest morning excursion. No wonder that "folks called the Rhineland the Parson's Walk."" Of all the preachers, Master Eckhart and Tauler are leading the van. Everybody is frantic about them. Master Eckhart preaches in Cologne, and when it is . announced that he is to speak the whole city puts on its finest clothes and goes to hear him. The multitudes gaze on him with wonder, and listen to him with rapt attention as he rises from ideas clear to a child to theories which no one of his auditors could comprehend. But obscurity the people mistook for brilliance, which error was not confined to Master Eckhart's day. But there were a stateliness and grandeur about his best thoughts which filled his hearers with astonishment. He overawed them. Tauler's style is altogether different. He has more of the comprehensible and emotional in his sermons. He possesses the highest style of eloquence, for he makes you weep, while Master Eckhart only lifts you up in wonder. Better see something where you are that makes you feel and think, than to be lifted above the highest peaks to be dropped into the deepest chasm. Tauler is a fine character for study. It is a relief to meet with such a one when we find so many of his age carried away into the wildest extravagances. There are passages in his sermons that exhibit the finest diction as well as the purest doctrine. Would there had been more John Taulers at that time to lay stress on the condition of the heart, instead of indulging in such meaningless fancies! After Tauler the first prominent Mystic we meet is Suso, who had been a disciple of Master Eckhart at Cologne. It is a sad sight to behold his self-torture. He seems, indeed, to have taxed all his inventive powers to devise means for inflicting upon himself the most exquisite pain. Suso had remarkable visions withal. They surpass all that St. John claims to have seen; and his adventures are so remarkable that they throw David's and Paul's quite in the shade. Poor man! he passed from earth believing

To the labors of Miss Susanna Winkworth are we indebted for an excellent translation of Tauler's best sermons, as well as of the Theologica Germanica.