Now, I think that, in the strict use of language, the word mystic should be applied, not to St. John, but to those who more or less exaggerate his doctrine concerning spiritual influence and life in God. The Scripture is the standard whereby alone the spirits are to be tried, in all candour and charity. To those who repudiate this authority I do not write. But if any one, understanding by ‘mystics’ simply those who give full force to the language of St. John, shall praise them, however highly, I am perfectly at one with him in his admiration—my only difference is about the use of the mere word. So much then is settled. It will be obvious, however, that the _historian_ of mysticism will scarcely find it possible always to confine his use of the word to the exaggeration just specified. For he must take up, one after the other, all those personages who have at any time been reckoned by general consent among the mystics. But an age which has relapsed into coldness will inevitably stigmatize as a mystic any man whose devout ardour rises a few degrees above its own frigidity. It is as certain as anything can be that, if a German had appeared among the Lutherans of the seventeenth century, teaching in his own way just as St. John taught, without one particle of exaggeration, he would have been denounced as a mystic from a hundred pulpits. Hence it has come to pass that some men, who have figured largely as mystics in the history of the Church, have in them but a comparatively small measure of that subjective excess which we would call mysticism, in the strict sense. Tauler is one of these. But it may be said,—You talk of testing these men by Scripture; yet you can only mean, by _your interpretation_ of Scripture. How are you sure that your interpretation is better than theirs? Such an objection lies equally against every appeal to Scripture. For we all appeal to what we suppose to be the meaning of the sacred writers, ascertained according to the best exercise of our judgment. The science of hermeneutics has established certain general principles of interpretation which are acknowledged by scholars of every creed. But if any one now-a-days resolves the New Testament into allegory, and supposes, for example, that by the five husbands of the woman of Samaria we are to understand the five Senses, I cannot of course try my cause with him before a Court where he makes the verdict what he pleases. I can only leave him with his riddles, and request him to carry my compliments to the Sphinx.