ble when the soul's spiritual eyes are opened; when, through
finding higher spiritual possibilities within itself, the soul throws
itself open to the light which issues from Christ in Jesus. The union
of the soul with its highest powers is at the same time union with the
historical Christ. For mysticism is an immediate consciousness and
feeling of the divine within the soul. But a God far transcending
everything human can never dwell in the soul in the real sense of the
word. The Gnosis and all subsequent Christian mysticism represent the
effort, in some way or other, to lay hold of that God, and to
apprehend Him directly in the soul.

A conflict in this case was inevitable. It was really only possible
for a man to find his own divine part, but this is both human and
divine,--the divine at a certain stage of development. Yet the
Christian God is a definite one, perfect in himself. It was possible
for a person to find in himself the power to strive upwards to this
God, but he could not say that what he experienced in his own soul, at
any stage of development, was one with God. A great gulf was fixed
between what it was possible to find in the soul, and what
Christianity called divine. It is the gulf between science and faith,
between knowledge and religious feeling.

This gulf does not exist for the Mystic in the old sense of the word.
For he knows for a certainty that he can only comprehend the divine by
degrees, and he also knows why this is so. It is clear to him that
this gradual attainment is a real attainment of real divine life, and
he finds it difficult to speak of a perfect, isolated divine
principle. A Mystic of this kind does not seek a perfect God, but he
wishes to experience the divine life. He seeks to be made divine, not
to gain an external relation to the Godhead.

It is of the essence of Christianity that its mysticism in this sense
starts with an assumption. The Christian Mystic seeks to behold
divinity within him, but at the same time he looks up to the
historical Christ as his physical eyes do to the sun. Just as the sun
is the means by which physical eyes behold physical objects, so does
the Christian Mystic intensify his inner nature that it may behold the
divine, and the light which makes such vision possible for him is the
fact of the appearance of Christ. It is He who enables man to attain
his highest possibilities. It is in this way that the Christian
Mystics of the Middle Ages differ from th