f these have been treated as
precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based
upon them, in which everything legitimate finds its place.[250] The
basis of the system is "orison" or meditation, the methodical elevation
of the soul towards God. Through the practice of orison the higher
levels of mystical experience may be attained. It is odd that
Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly
have abandoned everything methodical in this line. Apart from what
prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been
almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind- curers to
reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life.

[250] Gorres's Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts.
So does Ribet's Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more
methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of Vallgornera, 2
vols., Turin, 1890.

The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind's detachment from
outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal
things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises recommend
the disciple to {398} expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts
to imagine holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a
semi-hallucinatory mono-ideism--an imaginary figure of Christ, for
example, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this
sort, whether literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in
mysticism.[251] But in certain cases imagery may fall away entirely,
and in the very highest raptures it tends to do so. The state of
consciousness becomes then insusceptible of any verbal description.
Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. Saint John of the Cross,
for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes the condition
called the "union of love," which, he says, is reached by "dark
contemplation." In this the Deity compenetrates the soul, but in such
a hidden way that the soul--

"finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the
sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with
which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of God
clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible
representations, which our mind makes use of in other circumstances.
Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagination are
not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can