ing, joy-bringing,
and light-supplying.

In instances where the intensity is great, unusual psychological
phenomena appear. Sometimes voices are heard, or sounds "like a mighty
rushing wind"; sometimes there are automatic visions of light, or of
forms or figures, as, for instance, of Christ, or of a cross; sometimes
automatic writing or speaking attends the experience; sometimes there
are profound body-changes of a temporary, or even permanent character;
sometimes there {xxi} is a state of swoon or ecstacy, lasting from a
few seconds to entire days. These physical phenomena, however, are as
spiritually unimportant and as devoid of religious significance as are
the normal bodily resonances and reverberations which accompany, in
milder degrees, all our psychic processes. They indicate no high rank
of sainthood and they prove no miracle-working power. The significant
features of the experience are the consciousness of fresh springs of
life, the release of new energies, the inner integration and
unification of personality, the inauguration of a sense of mission, the
flooding of the life with hope and gladness, and the conviction,
amounting in the mind of the recipient to certainty, that God is found
as an environing and vitalizing presence--as the recipient already
quoted reports his conviction: "I have met with my God; I have met with
my Saviour. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His
wings."[8]

If _everybody_ had experiences of that sort there would be no more
doubt of the existence of an actual spiritual environment in vitalizing
contact with the human spirit than there now is of an external world
with which we correspond. There is _a priori_ no reason against the
reality of such an inner spiritual universe. It is precisely as
conceivable that constructive and illuminating influences should stream
into our inner selves from that central Light with which our inmost
self is allied, as that objects in space and time should bombard us
with messages adapted to our senses. The difference is that we all
experience the outer environment and only a few of us experience the
inner. The mystic himself has no doubt--_he sees_, but he cannot give
quite his certainty of vision to any one else. He cannot, like "the
weird sisters" of Greek story, lend out his eye for others to see with.
He can only talk about, or write about, what he has seen, and his words
are often words of little meaning to those who la