In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a “religious individualist:’ we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we believe his account is true, it means he has had an interaction with the spiritual side of things and and is aware of it. which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. A mystic talks to God as one human being to another, and not as a spokesman for his tribe. He survives by an immediate knowledge far greater than by belief; by a knowledge possessed in the hours of direct, uninterrupted intercourse with the Transcendent, which he calls ‘an union with God’.The certainty then gained – a certitude which he cannot explain or share, and which is not generally diffused – governs all his reactions to the Universe around him. Even in his darkest times when he loses his entire sense of spiritual reality, it still continues to support him.

Such a personality as this seems at first sight to stand in little need of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. But even so, the term ‘mystic’ alone indicates a certain aloofness from the majority, suggesting that he holds a secret that the community together does not and cannot share and that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise.we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I saw,” said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a respectful or an exasperated silence.

Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Although there are those who have managed to escape the churches that they were raised in, many of them ended up attracting others who viewed them as powerful or insightful leaders and leading them to become the centers of their own new groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth while to examine, if we can, the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group consciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?