It is a very vulgar error to suppose that the Mystics taught abstention from good works, or outward inactivity; for none were busier in blessing their fellow-men, as the twenty thousand letters above mentioned might indicate, as well as the ceaseless endeavors in this direction put forth by Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and the rest. Mystics are not impracticable dreamers; they have been in a very marked degree energetic and influential. Their passivity simply meant a calm yet glad acceptance of all God’s dispensations. They were also abundantly active in the highest sense, since the old faculties were transformed and uplifted and no longer shackled by the cramping chains of sin, but enabled to do far more for the good of mankind and the glory of God in their happy, healthy working than they ever had done before. They laid great stress upon faith, rather than rites or austerities, as a means of justification and sanctification, a peculiarity which seems at the bottom of the remark of the Romish ecclesiastic who wrote, under date of July 10, 1685, “I am informed that a Jesuit named Molinos has been put into the Inquisition at Rome, accused of wishing to become chief of a new sect called Quietists, whose principles are somewhat similar to those of the Puritans in England.” There is sufficient similarity between the Quietism of the seventeenth century and the Pietism and Methodism of Germany and England in the eighteenth century to give us a friendly feeling toward it. That the former was not so well guarded as the latter; was less directed to practical ends; was not in control of such cool, sensible minds; ran very easily into abuses; had stronger pantheistic leanings; was more open to the objection that it taught a strained, impossible perfection utterly out of reach of all but the few, and attainable by those few perhaps only under very favorable conditions,—may be freely granted. But it does not, and need not, prevent our sympathies going out strongly toward those who, in that earlier day and amid much difficulty, struck out the high path on lines not essentially at variance with those who, in easier times of greater enlightenment, came after them. The Mystics, with all their extravagances, possessed more of the truth of God than could be found elsewhere within the wide domains of the Roman Church. The Reformers recognized this, and sympathized far more deeply with them than with the schoolmen.