by living correspondence with God, and acting as human channels and organs of His Life and Spirit. Such a Church can meet new formulations of science and history and social ideals with no authoritative and conclusive word of God which automatically settles the issue. Its only weapons are truth and light, and these have to be continually re-discovered and re-fashioned to fit the facts which the age has found and verified. Its mission is _prophetic_. It does not dogmatically decide what facts must be believed, but it sees and announces the spiritual significance of the facts that are discovered and verified. It was, thus, in their thought a growing, changing, ever-adjusting body--the living body of Christ in the world. To the Protestant Reformers this spiritual ideal presented "a Church" so shorn and emasculated as to be {li} absolutely worthless. It seemed to them a propaganda which threatened and endangered the mighty work of reformation to which they felt themselves called, and they used all the forces available to suppress and annihilate those of this other "way." Nearly four hundred wonderful years have passed since the issue was first drawn, since the first of these spiritual prophets uttered his modest challenge. There can be no question that the current of Christian thought has been strongly setting in the direction which these brave and sincere innovators took. I feel confident that many persons to-day will be interested in these lonely men and will follow with sympathy their valiant struggles to discover the road to a genuine spiritual religion, and their efforts to live by the eternal Word of God as it was freely revealed as the Day Star to their souls. [1] 1 Cor. xv. 50. [2] 2 Cor. v. 1-4. [3] John iii. 6. [4] 1 John iv. 13; John xiii. 34 and xvi. 13; 1 John iv. 4. [5] They found their authority for this outer sheath of body in the text which says: "The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them."--Gen. iii. 21. [6] Many of these historical reappearances are considered in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_. [7] Isaac Penington, "A True and Faithful Relation of my Spiritual Travails," _Works_ (edition of 1761), i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii. [8] Isaac Penington's _Works_, i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii. [9] The exact and sharply-defined "ladders" of mystic ascent which form a large part of the descriptive material in books on Mystical Religion are far from being universal ladders. Like creeds, or like religious institutions, they powerfully assist certain minds to find the way home, but they seem unreal and artificial to many other persons, and they must be considered only as symbolisms which speak to the condition of a limited number of spiritual pilgrims. [10] Wordsworth's "Prelude," Bk. ii. [11] _Theologia Germanica_, chaps. xxii. and xliii. [12] _Ibid._ chap. liii. [13] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 20.