It should be said, also, that the Quietists vehemently repudiated the constructions put upon their writings by their enemies, and the evil inferences which were drawn from them. They protested against what others professed to find there as being no part of their real belief. It seems to us that they have a perfect right to be heard in explanation of their tenets, and much allowance must be made for those endeavoring to find expressions that would convey such profound and lofty thoughts. Professor George P. Fisher, in his “History of the Christian Church,” says, “The real ground of hostility to Quietism was its tendency to lead to the dispensing with auricular confession and penances and outward rites altogether.” It will be sufficiently evident from what has been now written that there is Mysticism _and_ Mysticism; and that that which has the best right to the name lies very close to the most essential truth of the best religion, inseparable from it so far as it is to answer the deepest yearnings of the human heart. If religion is not to be made wholly objective, reduced to a round of external performances, accounted synonymous with philanthropy and morality; if its subjective side is to have proper recognition as the controlling one; if being is to take rank above doing, as we firmly believe it should,—then we are all Mystics in the true sense of the word. Since we have to do with “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,” and which must be known by some higher faculty than the understanding; since the new birth is fitly compared by the Master to the mysterious coming and going of the winds of heaven, and can not be completely comprehended by the human reason; since the method of God with the soul of man passes all metes and bounds of man’s finite mind, and the operations of the Holy Spirit can not be wholly fathomed by cold intellect,—Mysticism has extremely close relations with all parts of supernaturalism. It is grounded in a profounder philosophy than those can offer who assume to scout and scorn it. We as Methodists, especially, believe firmly in feeling, and in a first-hand knowledge of God as the privilege of each genuine believer. We hold fast to experience as having rights which logic and dogma must respect; we have exalted life above theory, and the vision divine above dead orthodoxy; we maintain that there is a God-consciousness, as well as a self-consciousness and a world-consciousness; and that spiritual facts can be, and should be, verified in personal experience. We count the words of Pascal divinely true: “The things of this world must be known in order to be loved; but the things of God must be loved in order to be known.”