that Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh." The later history of Mysticism shows that this warning was
very much needed. The tendency of the mystic is to regard the Gospel
history as only one striking manifestation of an universal law. He
believes that every Christian who is in the way of salvation
recapitulates "the whole process of Christ" (as William Law calls
it)--that he has his miraculous birth, inward death, and
resurrection; and so the Gospel history becomes for the Gnostic (as
Clement calls the Christian philosopher) little more than a
dramatisation of the normal psychological experience.[68] "Christ
crucified is teaching for babes," says Origen, with startling
audacity; and heretical mystics have often fancied that they can rise
above the Son to the Father. The Gospel and Epistle of St. John stand
like a rock against this fatal error, and in this feature some German
critics have rightly discerned their supreme value to mystical
theology.[69] "In all life," says Grau, "there is not an abstract
unity, but an unity in plurality, an outward and inward, a bodily and
spiritual; and life, like love, unites what science and philosophy
separate." This co-operation of the sensible and spiritual, of the
material and ideal, of the historical and eternal, is maintained
throughout by St. John. "His view is mystical," says Grau, "because
all life is mystical." It is true that the historical facts hold, for
St. John, a subordinate place as _evidences_. His main _proof_ is, as
I have said, experimental. But a spiritual revelation of God without
its physical counterpart, an Incarnation, is for him an impossibility,
and a Christianity which has cut itself adrift from the Galilean
ministry is in his eyes an imposture. In no other writer, I think, do
we find so firm a grasp of the "psychophysical" view of life which we
all feel to be the true one, if only we could put it in an
intelligible form.[70]

There is another feature in St. John's Gospel which shows his affinity
to Mysticism, though of a different kind from that which we have been
considering. I mean his fondness for using visible things and events
as symbols. This objective kind of Mysticism will form the subject of
my last two Lectures, and I will here only anticipate so far as to say
that the belief which underlies it is that "everything, in being what
it is, is symbolic of something more." The Fourth Gospel is steeped in
symbolism of this kind. The eight miracles which S