There is always the gravest danger from blind rage and sullen wrath. The passionate resentment for the suffering of immemorial wrongs, when once it breaks through the dams of restraint, is an almost irresistible force; but sooner or later the sound, serious sense of the intelligent human race comes into play and brings the world back to order and system. The real gains in these crises are made not by the smashings and the blind iconoclastic blows, but by the wise, clear-sighted fulfillment of the slowly formed ideals which have been the inspiration of many lives before the crisis came. May it be so now! It must not be, it cannot be, that these millions of men shall have unavailingly faced death and mutilation. It was not wreckage and chaos they sought in their brave adventure with death. They went out to build a new world and to destroy, only that a new re-creation might begin. This is the time of incubation and birth, for ripening into reality those mighty hopes that make us men. It means at once that we must deepen down our lives into the life of God, that we must suppress our petty individual passions and feel the sweep of God’s purposes for the new age. In a multitude of ways the world moves on, and as it moves the Spirit of God ends old forms and methods and brings fresh and living ways to light. May we have eyes to see what is of his divine hatching and what is empty shell! CHAPTER IX THE MYSTIC’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD I The revival of mysticism which has been one of the noteworthy features in the Christianity of our time has presented us with a number of interesting and important questions. We want to know, first of all, what mysticism really is. Secondly, we want to know whether it is a normal or abnormal experience. And omitting many other questions which must wait their turn, we want to know whether mystical experiences actually enlarge our sphere of knowledge, i.e., whether they are trustworthy sources of authentic information and authoritative truth concerning realities which lie beyond the range of human senses.