permitted her hours of ecstatic communion with God to interfere with her duty to the sick? Taken as a class, the Christian mystics are distinguished by nothing so much as by their heroic and unselfish activities; by their varied and innumerable services to the corporate life of the church. From their ranks have come missionaries, preachers, prophets, social reformers, poets, founders of institutions, servants of the poor and the sick, patient guides and instructors of souls. We sometimes forget that even those known chiefly by the writings they have left behind them have sacrificed to the difficult task of reducing their transcendent experience to words, hours in which—were the popular idea of the mystic a true one—they might have been idly basking in the Divine Light. But these practical activities, though often great, are only a part of the mystic’s contribution to the corporate life. If his special claim to communion with the Transcendent be true at all—and this argument is based on the assumption that there is at least some truth in it—then he does really tap a source of vitality higher than that with which other men have contact. In the language of theology, he has not merely “efficient” but also “extraordinary” grace; a larger dower of life, directly dependent on his larger, more generous love. This is a claim to which his strange triumphs over circumstance, his conquests over ill-fortune, ill-health, oppositions and deprivations of every kind, give weight. Not many strong and normal persons would willingly face, or indeed endure, the hardships which St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Joan of Arc, St. Teresa, gladly and successfully embraced. This larger and intenser vitality the mystic does not and cannot keep to himself. He infects with it all with whom he comes in contact, kindles the latent fire in them: for the spiritual consciousness is caught, not taught. Under his influence—sometimes from the mere encounter with his personality—other men begin to live a more real, a more eternal life. Ruysbroeck says that the Spirit of God, when it is truly received into a soul, becomes a spreading light; and history confirms this. Corporate experience of God always begins in a personal experience of God. The rise of Christianity is the classic illustration of this truth; but Hindu and Moslem religious history also declare it. Round each of the great unitive mystics little groups of ardent disciples, of spiritual children, have grown up. This is true both of those who remained within and those who seceded from the official Church—for instance, St. Bernard, Eckhart, St. Francis, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, Boehme, Fox. Nor did their influence cease with death.