To this rule spirit and body are summoned to do homage. But the spirit has an inherent tendency towards the unlimited, by virtue of its nature, which places it on the confines of the infinite. Consequently it is never easy under a rule which is imposed on it conjointly with the body; it strains after emancipation, strives to assert its independence of what is external, and to establish its claim to obey only the movements in the spiritual world. It throbs sympathetically with the auroral flashes in that realm of mystery, like the flake of gold‐leaf in the magnetometer. To be bound to the body, subjected to its laws, is degrading; to be unbounded, unconditioned, is its aspiration and supreme felicity. Thus the incessant effort of the spirit is to establish its law in the inner world of feeling, and remove it from the material world without. Moreover, inasmuch as the spirit melts into the infinite, cut off from it by no sharply‐defined line, it is disposed to regard itself as a part of God, a creek of the great Ocean of Divinity, and to suppose that all its emotions are the pulsations of the tide in the all‐embracing Spirit. It loses the consciousness of its individuality; it deifies itself. A Suffee fable representing God and the human soul illustrates this well. “One knocked at the Beloved’s door, and a voice from within cried, ‘Who is there?’ Then the soul answered, ‘It is I.’ And the voice of God said, ‘This house will not hold me and thee.’ So the door remained shut. Then the soul went away into a wilderness, and after long fasting and prayer it returned, and knocked once again at the door. And again the voice demanded ‘Who is there?’ Then he said, ‘It is THOU,’ and at once the door opened to him.” Thus the mystic always regards his unregulated wishes as divine revelations, his random impulses as heavenly inspirations. He has no law but his own will; and therefore, in mysticism, there, is no curb against the grossest licence. The existence of that evil which, knowing the constitution of man, we should expect to find prevalent in mysticism, the experience of all ages has shown following, dogging its steps inevitably. So slight is the film that separates religious from sensual passion, that uncontrolled spiritual fervour roars readily into a blaze of licentiousness. It is this which makes revivalism of every description so dangerous. It is a two‐edged weapon that cuts the hand which holds it. Yet the spiritual, religious element in man is that which is most beautiful and pure, when passionless. It is like those placid tarns, crystal clear and icy cold, in Auvergne and the Eifel, which lie in the sleeping vents of old volcanoes. We love to linger by them, yet never with security, for we know that a throb, a shock, may at any moment convert them into boiling geysirs or raging craters. So well is this fact known in the Roman Church, that a mystic is inexorably shut up in a convent, or cast out as a heretic.