of universal history. One phenomenon explains another; taken all together, all phenomena explain each individual. Since the far-reaching results arrived at by Winckelmann, Schiller, and the romanticists, this method has continually gained in fruitfulness. It is a scientific procedure that was developed from the comparative methods of philology, and then transferred to the study of mythology. It follows logically that every systematic mental science must, in the course of its development, sooner or later, arrive at dependence upon this same comparative method." In the course of my studies in England, I was greatly indebted to courtesies extended by officials of the British Museum, Dr. Williams's Library (London), the Bodleian Library, the libraries of Queen's, Christ Church, Worcester, and Manchester Colleges of the University of Oxford, the collections of Magdalene, Trinity, and Peterhouse of the University of Cambridge, and the Library of the University of Cambridge. Particularly, I wish to thank Champlin Burrage, M.A., B.Litt., librarian of Manchester College, Oxford, for many valuable suggestions and Dr. Frederick W. C. Lieder of Harvard University for his kind assistance in reading proofs. January, 1914. M. L. B. I INTRODUCTION To speak of the sources or influence of any mystical writer or movement seems paradoxical indeed, in view of the absolute independence and separateness of every individual mystical experience. Yet a certain relationship is clearlydiscernible among the exponents of purely personal religion; their tradition, though not of forms and ceremonies, not bounded by the ordinary material facts of religious life, is nevertheless a tradition. They are not isolated phenomena, but are related to one another. The truths that they express can never age nor die. Each mystic, original though he be, receives much from the past; each, by his personal experience, enriches the heritage and hands it on to the future. Thus the names of the great mystics are connected, and around them may be grouped historical facts of religious progress. But the history of the period of greatest religious changes in England, the time of the great religious revival of the seventeenth century, when mysticism was most dominant and powerful there, is not a history mainly of a few tremendous personalities extending to the spiritual sphere man's conquest over his universe, but rather a history of an epoch when certain great spiritual ideas, certain farreaching mystical truths, struggled for expression in every realm of human activity. It is a history, not so much of great mystics, as of very many mystically-minded men and women. It deals with a mystical atmosphere which many |