THE world is looking about for something which it has lost, namely, its soul. Men think they will find it in a new religion, or a hashed-up old one. The ancient faiths, the forms of creed and worship which were once so living, appear to our generation like a fading fresco on a convent wall, faint outlines of awful figures from which the radiance has departed, and which mean little or nothing to the people of to-day. Or is it that their eyes have become dim, and their heart cold?

Once we were exhorted to turn away from things of another world, from vain seeking after God, and to busy ourselves with social betterment, with human rights and human wrongs, with wage and housing problems, with the emancipation of womanhood, and the coming democracy. But that quest also has fallen into dust. After recent experience of the thing at work, no one will be able to idealize democracy again, nor will the most sentimental bishop or dean care to identify selfish and bullying, pound-a-day earning tyrants in cloth caps with the Christi pauperes. The world is now covered, largely through the efforts of President Wilson and this country, with a crazy-quilt of non-Christian republics. No one can say that the boasted new 'kingdom of God' has not had its chance. And it has proved to be pure and undisguised materialism.

So the search of the world to recover its soul turns elsewhere. Ladies meet in fashionable drawing-rooms of London and New York to discuss karmas or mahatmas, and to play with the latest importation from the hoary

heathenisms of the mysterious Orient. Literary coteries, but lately prostrate before the fetish of the modern spirit, or at most recognizing the very limited power of a constitutional God, the elected Chairman of a free and independent universe, have begun to chatter ecstatically about The Absolute and the Unconditioned. The value and sacredness of individual personality has been claimed as the special discovery of modern enlightenment; yet we are now, one and all, bidden to seek eagerly for fusion with the Ultimate Reality, the grand Totality of Everything, which in another aspect is Nothing.

Discarding the passion of Equality, thousands of voices are acclaiming the dawn of that new Light of Theosophic Wisdom which can never illuminate the dim, common populations of valley and plain, but only touch the highest peaks of the Election. What message has Mysticism for Hob and Dick and Jane the lodging-house maid-of-allwork? To be sure, if the light spread from the few to the many, that would be in accordance with the usual Divine plan, which is always aristocratic and sacerdotal. But the 'transsubjective validity of mystical experience, manifesting the subliminal mind,' is not for the plain householder. He wants to say his prayers and do his duty.

We are not pleading for philistinism. John Bull is an unspiritual animal. His Saxon forefathers spent the eve of the battle at Hastings swilling and shouting, while the Normans were at their devotions. There is no fear of his becoming hyper-etherealized, a

thing enskied. But there is considerable fear of the modern world drifting about rudderless on an indeterminate ocean of muddy pseudo-spiritualism, without horizon or harbors. Elderly Oxford men remember undergraduate Lent-terms, when the whole valley of the Isis was a sheet of water from which all landmarks had disappeared - someone called the view 'Spires and Pond.' Such is the sloppy and vague 'message' of modern mysticism. It is not deep calling unto deep, but a puddle spreading itself. Its shallowness is disguised by a ridiculous jargon supposed to be borrowed from furthest Ind; in fact, as the East tires of its superstitions, it passes them on to silly Europeans.

Since Toland, the eighteenth century deist, wrote his Christianity not Mysterious, we have had the theory that St. Paul concocted Christianity out of the Oriental mystery-religions and magical cults, which had driven out the jovial old Olympian deities. A sounder scholarship grants the mystic character of Pauline doctrine, but ascribes it to the essential supernaturalism and sacrificialism of the Gospel. However, Christianity is not mantic, hierophantic, hysterical, or chaotic enough for our neo-Buddhist devotees, who are demanding a New Dispensation. This dispensation is to be free from dogma and creed, but is to be 'something compelling and intoxicating, which will open a larger life to the soul.' Artemus Ward, thou should 'st be living at this hour. Those immortal pages describing the Showman among the Shakers, the Free Lovers, the Mormons and the Spiritualists, should have included a visit to the Children of the Dawn:

Yet there are mystics and mystics. All who search for the Pearl of great price, who dig for the unum necessarium as for hid treasures, all who

painfully follow The Way amid the tangled boscage of terrene things, from Plato and Plotinus through St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa, Mother Cecilia, and a thousand more to Keble, or Patmore, or Francis Thompson in our own day, are mystics. A peculiarly sweet and fragrant mysticism breathed in Stuart England from the school of Cambridge Platonists and Poets, one of whom, Thomas Traherne, has recently been rediscovered. How few read to-day the exquisite pages of Drummond of Hawthornden! We are tempted to quote a few sentences:

"The huge compasse of the rolling circles, the brightness and continuall motion of those rubies of the night, the silver countenance of the wandering moon, the shining by another's light, the hanging of the erthe as invironed by a girdle of chrystal, the sunne inthronized in the midst of the planets, eye of the heavens, gem of this precious ringe the erth-with wonder and amazement I gazed on these celestiall splendors and the beaming lampes of that glorious temple.

"Though man be born on the erth hee is not born for the erth. Fools which think that this faire and admirable frame was by the Supreme Wisdom brought forth that all things in a circulary course should arise and dissolve. But more fools they which believe that He doth no otherwise regard this His worke than as a theater, raised theater, raised for bloodie swordplaiers, wrastlers, chasers of timorous and combatters of terrible beasts, delighting in the daily torments, sorrows, distress and misery of mankind. No, no. The eternall Wisdom hath made man an excellent creature, and tho' he seeke his felicitie among the reasonless wights He hath fixed it above. He brought him into this

world as master to a sumptuous wellordered and furnished inne, a prince to a populous and rich empery, a pilgrim and spectator to a stage full of delightful wonders — man, a great miracle formed to His own patterne to be an interpreter and trunchman of His creation.

'God containeth all in Him as the beginning of all; man containeth all in him as the midst of all. Inferior things be in man more nobly than they exist, superior things more meanly; celestiall things favor him, erthly things are vassaled unto him; he is the knotte and bande of both, neither is it possible but that both have peace in man if man have peace with Him who made the covenant between them and him. He was made that he might in the glasse of the world behold the infinite goodness, power, magnificence and glory of his Maker, and hold the erth of Him as his Lord paramount. Here is the palace royall of the Almighty King, in which the Uncomprehensible comprehensibly manifesteth Himselfe; in place highest, in quantity greatest, in quality more pure and orient.'

The Philosophy of Mysticism, from the Christian and Catholic standpoint, has lately had an able expositor,* who

The_Philosophy of Mysticism. E. I. Watkins. Grant Richards. 21s net.

urges that life must be sacramentalized by the taking up of earthly realities into heavenly, and not absorbed in a passionless Infinite. Directly people write Reality with a big R, they begin to lose touch with real things. But it is the essence of the sacramental that outward and inward shall both be real, and both be sacred, though on different planes. Oriental mysticism, however, with its transmigration of souls, is ever seeking redemption from the body, rather than the redemption of it. It desires not union and communion with a personal God, but fusion with an impersonal and universal Brahman-Atman. The Johannine writings of the New Testament exhibit a mystical contemplativeness and rapture, but the writer always comes back to what he and others have heard, have seen with their eyes, and their hands have handled. His lofty apprehension of the Eternal is not just a subjective experience. Nor are earthly facts an illusion. As Scott Holland remarks, the Greek effort to rise above the antithesis of Infinite and Finite to a higher unity is meaningless to him; there is no gulf to be bridged, for the Infinite has taken on Him the reality of human nature. St. John is neither dualist nor monist, but a Hebrew

seer.

THE difficulty of answering the question 'What is truth?' involves a corresponding problem in the definition of what is fiction; and it needs little ingenuity to show that truth and fiction are not entirely incompatible with one another. A work of fiction may be true to life, and things unseen as real as others. Pericles's famous speech is probably due as much to the imagination as to the to the memory of Thucydides; but imagination itself may be a means of truth, and what an intelligent Athenian of his day thought Pericles would have said may be almost as valuable historically as a verbatim report of his words. When Holbein painted a 'lively image' of Anne of Cleves he was not producing a work of imagination; and it requires as much imagination to see things as they are as it does to fancy the things which are not. The visionary may be a true realist, and sight is none the less sight because it is insight or foresight. The vision may, indeed, have a greater effect upon the actual course of events than the photographic reality, and history may owe more to the 'City of God' than to the City of London. Zion is more than it seems to the bodily eye of the tourist; and what the reformer sees in the present or dreams of the past may do more to determine the future than any literal truth.

For actual facts have but an indirect and sometimes a remote bearing upon the opinion which moulds men's actions; and there are various media through which facts have to be transmitted before they influence conduct. First, there are the facts them

selves, about which men seldom agree. Then there is the report of the facts, which varies with the reporter. Thirdly, there are the different impressions which the same facts, and even the same report of them, make upon the recipients; and fourthly, there are the diverse reactions produced by the impressions in different minds. There is not merely the broad distinction between the seed and the soil. The sower comes in as well, and there are infinite varieties in the seeds and the soils themselves.

It is a crude criterion, albeit an onerous task, to separate historical fact from fiction and label the latter tares; and no intelligent student of history can be blind to the beneficent use of fictions in human progress. The actual working of the British Constitution depends upon its conventions, which are a species of fiction unknown to the law, and the law itself consists to a large extent in legal fictions. Legal fictions remedied the rigidity of the common law in the later Middle Ages, and occasionally brought about reforms which Parliament rejected. Sovereignty is a legal fiction built up to a large extent on the fiction that the sovereign was the master of fiction. Solus princeps fingit quod in rei veritate non est; the Crown alone can legally create that which does not exist. But the Crown soon lost its monopoly. Peers and Parliaments created fictions of their own to wit, the law of peerage and the sovereignty of Parliament; and in time the prerogatives of the Crown became the privileges of the people. Fiction, indeed, was too valuable an

instrument of progress ever to have been abandoned by popular aspirations; and what reformers could not do by legal or constitutional fictions they sought to achieve by religious, philosophical, or historical imagination. So Plato wrote his Republic, St. Augustine his De Civitate Dei, Sir Thomas More his Utopia, Tacitus his Germania, Bacon his New Atlantis, Harrington his Oceana, and Rousseau his Contrat Social.

Some of these and of their modern counterparts do not profess to be history. But most of them do; for man is at heart a conservative, or rather a reactionary. He tends to rely upon instinct and to revert to his original type. Hence the scorn of the agitator for the 'intellectuals,' and his anxiety to represent his new panacea as a reversion to medievalism or some more primitive stage of civilization. The instinct is natural, if not sound, psychology; and the vogue of the golden age is not merely popular but inevitable. The legend of the fall of man was, indeed, the first step in his ascent. It would not be possible to persuade a man to rise if he were convinced that he had always been prone upon the ground and possessed no means to raise himself. The indispensable preliminary was to convince him that he had not always been thus, that his natural posture was erect, and that only his own or other people's sins had brought him where he was. He had had a fall, but he could get up if he chose and regain the Paradise he had lost. It was not nature but sin that made him a slave; natura omnes homines aequales sunt. It was the law to which he was in bondage, and the law was made because of his corruption.

From that conception of the fall of man there came the chance of his recovery. Progress was, therefore, not

an unfamiliar journey to an unknown land, but retracing homeward steps; and for two thousand years the human race has suffered from nostalgia and visualized its pioneers as homewardbound. Men could only be persuaded to move forward by the conviction that they were going back, and the leaders encouraged and shared the conviction. They still do so, except the unpopular and tactless intellectuals. Hobbes was one of these; he had no belief in a golden age in the past. His idea of nature was one in which the life of man was 'nasty, short, brutish, and mean,' and from which there was no escape except through the surrender of every man of himself to an absolute sovereign, a Christian idea perverted to the uses of secular government. Sovereignty was the remedy for, and the antithesis to, the state of nature. Darwin was another 'intellectual' with a similar view of nature, 'red in tooth and claw.' With their loss of faith in the past both Hobbes and Darwin lost their faith in the future, and thus gave color to the impression that hope depended upon historical fiction. Those who believed in the future hugged more than ever their golden age of the past.

Philosophers and poets, politicians and historians have held up these mirrors of Paradise as beacons to mankind; and progress is commonly made to the accompaniment of a recessional. The Reformation appealed to a 'primitive' Christianity, and sought to prove that error was modern invention and authority usurpation. Tudor politicians, seeking to prove the claims of national independence against both Empire and Papacy, boasted a donation from Constantine older than that to the Pope, and began to talk of an Empire of Great Britain. Stuart Parliamen