The existence of antinomianism in the Churches of Greece and Asia Minor, synchronizing with their foundation, transpires from the Epistles of St. Paul. It was an open sore in the life‐time of the Twelve; it was a sorrow weighing daily on the great soul of the Apostle of the Gentiles. It called forth the indignant thunder of Jude and Peter, and the awful denunciations in the charges to the Seven Churches. The apocryphal literature of the sub‐apostolic period carries on the sad story. Under St. John’s presiding care, the gross scandals which defiled Gentile Christianity were purged out, and antinomian Christianity deserted Asia Minor for Alexandria. There it made head again, as revealed to us by the controversialists of the third century. And there it disappeared for a while. Yet the disease was never eradicated. Its poison still lurked in the veins of the Church, and again and again throughout the Middle Ages heretics emerged fitfully, true successors of Nicolas, Cerdo, Marcion and Valentine, shaking off the trammels of the moral law, and seeking justification through mystic exaltation or spiritual emotion. The Papacy trod down these ugly heretics with ruthless heel. But at the Reformation, when the restraint was removed, the disease broke forth in a multitude of obscene sects spotting the fair face of Protestantism. Nor has the virus exhausted itself. Its baleful workings, if indistinct, are still present and threatening. But how comes it that Christianity has thus its dark shadow constantly haunting it? The cause is to be sought in the constitution of man. Man, moving in his little orbit, has ever a face turned away from the earth and all that is material, looking out into infinity,—a dark, unknown side, about whose complexion we may speculate, but which we can never map. It is a face which must ever remain mysterious, and ever radiate into mystery. As the eye and ear are bundles of nerves through which the inner man goes out into, and receives impressions from, the material world, so is the soul a marvellous tissue of fibres through which man is placed _en rapport_ with the spiritual world, God and infinity. It is the existence of this face, these fibres—take which simile you like—which has constituted mystics in every age all over the world: Schamans in frozen Siberia, Fakirs in burning India, absorbed Buddhists, ecstatic Saints, Essenes, Witches, Anchorites, Swedenborgians, modern Spiritualists. Man, double‐faced by nature, is placed by Revelation under a sharp, precise external rule, controlling his actions and his thoughts.