e
element in our nature. This conviction, like other mystical
intuitions, is formless: the forms or symbols under which we represent
it are the best that we can get. They are, as Plato says, "a raft" on
which we may navigate strange seas of thought far out of our depth. We
may use them freely, as if they were literally true, only remembering
their symbolical character when they bring us into conflict with
natural science, or when they tempt us to regard the world of
experience as something undivine or unreal.

It is important to insist on this point, because the extreme
difficulty (or rather impossibility) of determining the true relations
of becoming and being, of time and eternity, is constantly tempting us
to adopt some facile solution which really destroys one of the two
terms. The danger which besets us if we follow the line of thought
natural to speculative Mysticism, is that we may think we have solved
the problem in one of two ways, neither of which is a solution at all.
Either we may sublimate our notion of spirit to such an extent that
our idealism becomes merely a sentimental way of looking at the
actual; or, by paring down the other term in the relation, we may fall
into that spurious idealism which reduces this world to a vain shadow
having no relation to reality. We shall come across a good deal of
"acosmistic" philosophy in our survey of Christian Platonism; and the
sentimental rationalist is with us in the nineteenth century; but
neither of the two has any right to appeal to St. John. Fond as he is
of the present tense, he will not allow us to blot from the page
either "unborn to-morrow or dead yesterday." We have seen that he
records the use by our Lord of the traditional language about future
judgment. What is even more important, he asserts in the strongest
possible manner, at the outset both of his Gospel and Epistle, the
necessity of remembering that the Christian revelation was conveyed by
certain historical events. "The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled
among us, and we have seen His glory." "That which was from the
beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our
eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word
of Life ... that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you."
And again in striking words he lays it down as the test whereby we may
distinguish the spirit of truth from Antichrist or the spirit of
error, that the latter "confesseth not