This is why in all ages of the Church, when the outward has come to usurp and absorb attention, when formalism and ceremonialism have dominated the mind, when scholasticism has gained ascendency, and especially when a corrupt looseness of morals has set in to degrade the very ideals of humanity, there have been those who have arisen to make a stand for a purer, more fervent, more spiritual type of piety. They have met, of course, with bitter opposition; they have troubled those who did not wish to be disturbed in their carnal indulgences or worldly conformities, and they have had various uncomplimentary epithets thrown at them: such as, Pietists, Quietists, Mystics, Puritans, Quakers, and Methodists. They have been misrepresented in manifold ways. They have been persecuted even unto the death. But they have been the salt of the earth, and the succession has been kept up under one name or another from the earliest days to the present. They have not always been endowed with philosophic minds or skilled in the learning of the schools. They have been keenly conscious of the difficulty, the impossibility, of completely expressing, in imperfect human words, the deep things of God revealed to them on the mounts of vision with which they have been favored. They have struggled hard with the inadequacy of the only language at their command, and have been driven to a liberal use of figures of speech, some of them questionable in point of propriety. They have had a cramped vocabulary, have made mistakes, have not found themselves able to translate into intelligible terms all that was in their minds. To mint the secrets of the interior life into the current coin of language suited to the comprehension of common souls requires a skill given to but few. And more especially have their expressions been found unintelligible, or worse, by adversaries not qualified by any experience to comprehend what it was all about. For, as St. Paul says (I Cor. ii): “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him, and he can not know them, because they are spiritually judged. We speak wisdom among the perfect, God’s wisdom in a mystery, even a wisdom which hath been hidden, which none of the rulers of this world knoweth. Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men.” The adversaries were also eager in many cases to remove out of the way those who, by their purity of life and their opposition to priestly claims and gains, were esteemed dangerous to the peace of the Church. We are confident that in the main this is a fair interpretation of the course which events have taken. Not but what some of the Mystics have really laid themselves open to the complaints of their enemies. They have been unguarded in their language, have been so carried away with ecstasy, as some new precious