There are many different degrees of intensity, concentration and conviction in the experiences of different individual mystics, and also in the various experiences of the same individual from time to time. There has been a tendency in most studies of mysticism to regard the state of ecstasy as _par excellence_ mystical experience. That is, however, a grave mistake. The calmer, more meditative, less emotional, less ecstatic experiences of God are not less convincing and possess greater constructive value for life and character than do ecstatic experiences which presuppose a peculiar psychical frame and disposition. The seasoned Quaker in the corporate hush and stillness of a silent meeting is far removed from ecstasy, but he is not the less convinced that he is meeting with God. For the _essentia_ of mysticism we do not need to insist upon a certain “sacred” mystic way nor upon ecstasy, nor upon any peculiar type of rare psychic upheavals. We do need to insist, however, upon a consciousness of commerce with God amounting to conviction of his presence. “Where one heard noise And one saw flame, I only knew He named my name.” Jacob Boehme calls the experience which came to him, “breaking through the gate,” into “a new birth or resurrection from the dead,” so that, he says, “I knew God.” “I am certain,” says Eckhart, “as certain as that I live, that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself.” One of these experiences—the first one—was an ecstasy, and the other, so far as we can tell, was not. It was the flooding in of a moment of God-consciousness in the act of preaching a sermon to the common people of Cologne. The experience of Penington, again, was not an ecstasy; it was the vital surge of fresh life on the first occasion of hearing George Fox preach after a long period of waiting silence. A simple normal case of a mild type is given in a little book of recent date, reprinted from the _Atlantic Monthly_: “After a long time of jangling conflict and inner misery, I one day, _quite quietly and with no conscious effort_, stopped doing the dis-ingenuous thing [I had been doing]. Then the marvel happened. It was as if a great rubber band which had been stretched almost to the breaking point were suddenly released and snapped back to its normal condition. Heaven and earth were changed for me. Everything was glorious because of its relation to some great central life—nothing seemed to matter but that life.” Brother Lawrence, a barefooted lay-brother of the seventeenth century, according to the testimony of the brotherhood, attained “an unbroken and undisturbed sense of the Presence of God.” He was not an ecstatic; he was a quiet, faithful man who did his ordinary daily tasks with what seemed to his friends “an unclouded vision, an illuminated love and an uninterrupted joy.” Simple and humble though he was, he nevertheless acquired, through his experience of God, “an extraordinary spaciousness of mind.”