it through a symbolic vision. Then comes a boundless joy, an ^-absorbing ecstasy or an enthralling rapture: God is there, fand the soul is in God. Mystery is no more. Problems vanish, darkness is dispelled; everything is flooded with light. But for how long? An imperceptible anxiety, hovering above the ecstasy, descends and clings to it like its shadow. This anxiety alone would suffice, even without the phases which are to come, to distinguish true and complete mysticism from what HI CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 197 was in bygone days its anticipated imitation or preparation. For it shows that the soul of the great mystic does not stop at ecstasy, as at the end of a journey. The ecstasy is indeed rest, if you like, but as though at a station, where the engine is still under steam, the onward movement becoming a vibra- tion on one spot, until it is time to race forward again. Let us put it more clearly: however close the union with God may be, it could only be final if it were total. Gone, doubtless, is the distance between the thought and the object of the thought, since the problems which measured and indeed con- stituted the gap have disappeared. Gone the radical separa- tion between him who loves and him who is beloved: God is there, and joy is boundless. Bjjtt thougkibe soul becomes, in thought and feeling, absorbed in God, something of it remains outside; that something, is the will, whence its action, if