Further, in reckoning up the value of the mystics to the church as a whole, we sometimes forget the extent to which that church is indebted to mystic intuition for the actual data upon which her corporate life is based. Christianity, it is true, is fundamentally a historical religion; but it is also a religion of experience, and its very history deals quite as much with the events which attend human intercourse with the Transcendent and Eternal as with concrete and visible happenings in space and time. The New Testament is thick with reports of mystical experiences. The Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul depend for their whole character on the soaring mystical genius their writers possessed. Had St. Paul never been caught up to the third heaven, he would have had a very different outlook on the world, and Christianity would have been a different religion in consequence. Had the Fourth Evangelist never known what it was to feel the sap of the Mystic Vine flow through him, his words would have lacked their overwhelming certitude. So, too, the liturgies bear the stamp of mystical feeling, and most of the great religious concepts which the church has gradually added to her store come from the same source. If we ask ourselves what the history of the church would be without the history of her mystics, then we begin to see how much of her light and colour emanates from them; how much of her doctrine represents their experience translated into dogmatic form. That communion with—that feeding on—the Divine Life which she offers to every believer in the Eucharist is the central fact of their existence. From Clement of Alexandria downwards, again and again they appeal to Eucharistic images in order to express what it is that really happens to the soul immersed in contemplative prayer. “I am the food of the full-grown,” said the voice of God to St. Augustine. “Every time we think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat and drink,” says Ruysbroeck. So, too, the church’s language concerning new birth, divine sonship, regeneration, union with Christ, and the whole concept of grace, regarded as a transcendent life and love perpetually pressing in on humanity—all this is of mystical origin, and represents not the speculations but the concrete experience of the great mystics. They are pushed out, as it were, by the visible church like tentacles, to explore the unseen world which surrounds her, and drawn back again to her bosom that they may impart to the whole body the more abundant life which they have found. Were it not for the unfailing family of the mystics, thus perpetually pushing out beyond the protective edges of the organism, and bringing back official Christianity into direct touch with the highest spiritual values, and so constantly reaffirming the fact—by them felt and experienced—of the intimate correspondence, the regenerating contact of God with the soul, the church would long ago have fallen victim to that tendency to relapse