either "unborn to-morrow or dead yesterday." We have seen that he
records the use by our Lord of the traditional language about future
judgment. What is even more important, he asserts in the strongest
possible manner, at the outset both of his Gospel and Epistle, the
necessity of remembering that the Christian revelation was conveyed by
certain historical events. "The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled
among us, and we have seen His glory." "That which was from the
beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our
eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word
of Life ... that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you."
And again in striking words he lays it down as the test whereby we may
distinguish the spirit of truth from Antichrist or the spirit of
error, that the latter "confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh." The later history of Mysticism shows that this warning was
very much needed. The tendency of the mystic is to regard the Gospel
history as only one striking manifestation of an universal law. He
believes that every Christian who is in the way of salvation
recapitulates "the whole process of Christ" (as William Law calls
it)--that he has his miraculous birth, inward death, and
resurrection; and so the Gospel history becomes for the Gnostic (as
Clement calls the Christian philosopher) little more than a
dramatisation of the normal psychological experience.[68] "Christ
crucified is teaching for babes," says Origen, with startling
audacity; and heretical mystics have often fancied that they can rise
above the Son to the Father. The Gospel and Epistle of St. John stand
like a rock against this fatal error, and in this feature some German
critics have rightly discerned their supreme value to mystical
theology.[69] "In all life," says Grau, "there is not an abstract
unity, but an unity in plurality, an outward and inward, a bodily and
spiritual; and life, like love, unites what science and philosophy