BY contemplation here I am not referring to any merely natural operation of the intellect, however sublime it may be, but to an operation much more elusive, namely, supernatural contemplation, called also mysticism. It may be defined as an immediate or experimental knowledge of God. Our ordinary knowledge of God, of his existence and. of his nature, comes to us not immediately but only mediately, that is through intellectual concepts or ideas in the mind derived from reason and faith. By our natural reason it is possible to know of God's existence and to some extent his attributes, but only by faith can “we know his inner nature, for example, his threefold personality. But mysticism, or mystical knowledge of God which is supernatural contemplation, is something quite different. This is immediate knowledge of God and experience of his presence through union with him by charity.

Christianity has produced without any doubt men and women who have fulfilled in themselves the greatest potentiality of the human personality. In all the centuries of the Christian era there stand out men and women, and no small number of them, whom everyone felt were fully developed and integrated and whom mankind could take as patterns of the mature and develped personality. This has been more so than in any other period of history.

It is very true that it is the triumph of the life of Christ in these men and women that has brought them to holiness, maturity and integration; but in the process their psychological development has taken place. The life of grace does not by-pass nature but adds to it, and lifts it on to another plane.