Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to an _essential_ union between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel’s followers, therefore, could say to another: “I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.” We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God’s immanent life, in morals it is God’s transcendent life, with which we commune.” Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624‐1677), audaciously wrote: “I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.” Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase “Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,” and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that “the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics” (Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224). “Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender.... ‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, in _knowledge_, a principle of unification; in _existence_, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation” (Seth). Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a real _substitution_ of the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.” Lyman Abbott: “In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.” Here Dr. Abbott’s view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine. (_d_) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High‐Church Episcopalians.