seize truth beyond that possible to formal and systematic reason.
Mysticism of this sort is the very height of spiritual power. The
Master's word: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,"
does not refer to merely negative virtue. It means also the power of
soul accumulated in the positive doing of good. It means entrance into
the life of quick spiritual awareness through the adjustment of the
whole nature to the single moral purpose.

In all promise of revelation the Scriptures insist upon the importance
of keeping upon the basis of solid obedience. The finer the instrument
is to be, the more massive must be the foundation. Professor Hocking, of
Harvard University, has used a remarkable illustration to enforce this
very conception. The scientific instrument, he says, which must be kept
freest from distracting influences so that it may make the finest
registries must rest upon a foundation broad and deep. So the soul that
is to catch the finest stirrings of the divine must rest upon the
solidest stones of hard work for the moral purposes of the scriptural
Kingdom.

Still some one will insist that the Bible is a book built around great
crises in human experience; that it is a record of these crises; that
the people in whose history the crises occurred were a peculiar people,
apparently arbitrarily chosen as a medium for religious world-
instruction; that the crises cast sudden bursts of intense light upon
the meaning of human life, but that they themselves are far apart from
ordinary experience. Here, again, we must insist that the scriptural
stress is always upon obedience to what is conceived of as revealed
truth. We have already said that Jesus regarded revelation as organic.
In everything organic we find instances of quick crisis following long
and slow periods of growth. The crisis or the climax of the sudden