The first peculiarity is that the older Mystics, especially those of the type of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. John of the Cross, but even also those of the more “mixed” type of Mysticism, such as St. Teresa, had indeed quite freely used terms which are vividly true as descriptions of the prima facie aspect and emotional impression of certain states and experiences of the soul: “empty,” “fixed,” “motionless,” “the reason and the will have ceased to act,” “doing nothing,” “incapable of doing anything,” “moved by irresistible grace,” “but one act,” “one single desire”: these and equivalent expressions occur again and again. But these sayings do not here lead up to such a deliberate and exclusive rule as is that given by Falconi, and repeated by Molinos in his _Guida_, Nos. 103-106.[136] This doctrine of the One Act, in this its negative form,--for it is not to be repeated,--and in its application to the whole waking and sleeping life, is first an exclusive concentration upon, and then a wholesale extension of, one out of the several trends of the older teaching, a doctrine which, compared with that teaching in its completeness, is thin and doctrinaire, and as untrue to the full psychological explanation and working requirements of the soul as it is readily abusable in practice and contrary to the Incarnational type of religion. It is impossible not to feel that the manifold great ocean-waters of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God’s Spirit are here, somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little shortcut, single channel, through a tiny pipe; one more infallible recipe or prescription is here offered to us, hardly more adequate than the many similar “sure” roads to salvation, declared by this or that body of devout religionists to attach to the practice or possession of this or that particular prayer or particular religious object. And the second difference is that the older Catholic Mystics leave less the impression that the external side of religion, its _body_, is of little or no importance, and indeed very readily an obstacle to its interior side, its _soul_. And this, again, for the simple reason that their teaching is, in general, less systematic and pointed, more incidental, and careless of much self-consistency.