India has especially profited by the considerable number of such Mystics
found within its borders in past times, and to a lesser extent to-day;
every one who practises, for instance, meditation, knows that it is
easier here than elsewhere, and all sensitive persons feel the Indian
"atmosphere". Outside this, such Mystics occasionally write valuable
books, containing high ideals of the spiritual life. As a rule, they do
not concern themselves with the affairs of the outer world, which they
regard as unimportant. Their cry continually is that the world is evil,
and they call on men to leave it, not to improve it. To them God and the
world are in opposition, "the world, the flesh, and the devil" are the
three great enemies of the spiritual life. In the West, this is almost
universal, for in the Roman Catholic Church seclusion is the mark of
the religious life, and "the religious" are the monk and the nun, the
"religious" and the "secular" being in opposition. In truth, where the
realisation of God outside himself is sought by the devotee, seclusion
is a necessity for success, if only for the time which is required for
meditation, the essential preliminary of ecstacy. In the very rare
Mystics of non-Catholic communions, full ecstacy is scarcely, if at all,
known or even recognised; an overpowering sense of the divine Presence
is experienced, but it is a Presence outside the worshipper; it is
accompanied with a deliberate surrender of the will to God, and a
feeling on the part of the man that he becomes an instrument of the
divine Will; this he carries with him into outer life, and, undirected
by love and the illuminated reason, it often lands the half-developed
Mystic into fanaticism and cruelty; no one who has read Oliver
Cromwell's letters can deny that he was a Mystic, half-developed, and it
is on him that Lord Rosebery founded his dictum of the formidable nature
of the "practical Mystic"; the ever present sense of a divine Power
behind himself gives such a man a power that ordinary men cannot
successfully oppose; but this sense affords no moral basis, as, witness