Grounding

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Notes

Rufus Jones: "It is this conformation of mysticism to the type of religion out of which it springs, and the fact that it is always imbedded in the life of a social group that gives it its sanity and safeguard from vagaries and caprices. The greatest danger from mysticism, and there are dangers, is just this of becoming relatively detached from the experience of the race, the illumination of the great revealers of the past. Religion and morality are ' the consummate gains of the travail of the ages, and no 1 Tennyson's Holy Grail. 8 This feature of mystical experience is well treated in Delacroix, op. cit. person can cut loose from the spiritual group-life in which he is rooted without entailing serious loss. To sever one's roots in history and in the slowly-gathered content of religious faith, " to build all inward" and to have no light but what comes " pure " by the inward way, is to suffer shrinkage, and to run the tremendous risk of ending in moral and spiritual bankruptcy...