1. _Nash's Definition._--In trying to set forth the "main mood and motives of religious speculation" in the early Christian centuries, Professor Nash takes, as perhaps the two strongest influences in determining the type of man to whom Christian apologetics had then to appeal, Philo and Plotinus, and says: "By what road shall the mind enter into a deep and intimate knowledge of God? That is the decisive question. Plotinus the Gentile and Philo the Jew are at one in their answer. The reason must rise above reasoning. It must pass into a state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy before it can truly know God. Philo gave up for the sake of his theory, the position of the prophets. Plotinus, for the same theory, forsook the position of Plato and Aristotle. The prophets conceived the inmost essence of things, the being and will of God, as a creative and redemptive force that guided and revealed itself through the career of a great national community. Plato and Aristotle conceived the essence of life as a labor of reason; and, for them, the labors of reason found their sufficient refreshment and inspiration in those moments of clear synthesis which are the reward of patient analysis. Revelation came to the prophet through his experience of history. To the philosopher it came through hard and steady thinking. But Philo and Plotinus together declared these roads to be no thoroughfares. The Greek and the Jew met on the common ground of a mysticism that sacrificed the needs of sober reason and the needs of the nation to the necessities of the monk."[29] Mysticism is here conceived as unethical, unhistorical, and unrational. 2. _Herrmann's Definition._--Herrmann's definition of mysticism is the second one to which attention is directed. He says: "When the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an inward experience of the individual; when certain excitements of the emotions are taken, with no further question, as evidence that the soul is possessed by God; when, at the same time, nothing external to the soul is consciously and clearly perceived and firmly grasped; when no thoughts that elevate the spiritual life are aroused by the positive contents of an idea that rules the soul--then that is the piety of mysticism. He who seeks in this wise that for the sake of which he is ready to abandon all beside, has stepped beyond the pale of Christian piety. He leaves Christ and Christ's Kingdom altogether behind him when he enters that sphere of experience which seems to him to be the highest."[30] The marks of mysticism for Herrmann, then, are: that it is purely subjective; that it is merely emotional and unethical; and hence that it has no clear object, and is abstract, unrational, unhistorical, and so unchristian. II. THE OBJECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE FALSELY MYSTICAL