mystici, a kind of religious sect, distinguished by their professing pure, sublime, and perfect devotion, with an entire disinterested love of God, free from all selfish considerations.

The mystics, to excuse their fanatic ecstasies and amorous extravagancies, allege that passage of St Paul, The Spirit prays in us by sighs and groans that are unutterable. Now, if the spirit, say they, pray in us, we must resign ourselves to its motions, and be swayed and guided by its impulse, by remaining in a state of mere inaction.

Passive contemplation is that state of perfection to which the mystics all aspire.

The authors of this mystic science, which sprung up towards the close of the third century, are not known; but the principles from which it was formed are manifest. Its first promoters proceeded from the known doctrine of the Platonic school, which was also adopted by Origen and his disciples, that the divine nature was infused through all human souls, or that the faculty of reason, from which proceed the health and vigour of the mind, was an emanation from God into the human soul, and comprehended in it the principles and elements of all truth, human and divine. They denied that men could by labour or study excite this celestial flame in their breasts; and therefore they disapproved highly of the attempts of those, who by definitions, abstract theorems, and profound speculations, endeavoured to form distinct notions of truth, and to discover its hidden nature. On the contrary, they maintained that silence, tranquillity, repose, and solitude, accompanied with such acts as might tend to extenuate and exhaust the body, were the means by which the hidden and internal word was excited to produce its latent virtues, and to instruct men in the knowledge of divine things. For thus they reasoned; those who behold with a noble contempt all human affairs, who turn away their eyes from terrestrial vanities, and shut all the avenues of the outward senses against the contagious influences of a material world, must necessarily return to God, when the spirit is thus disengaged from the impediments that prevented that happy union. And in this blest frame they not only enjoy inexplicable raptures from their communion with the Supreme Being, but also are invested with the inestimable privilege of contemplating truth undisguised and uncorrupted in its native purity, while others behold it in a vitiated and delusive form.

The number of the mystics increased in the fourth century, under the influence of the Grecian fanatic, who gave himself out for Dionysius the Areopagite, disciple of St Paul, and probably lived about this period; and by pretending to higher degrees of perfection than other Christians, and practising greater austerity, their cause gained ground, especially in the eastern provinces, in the fifth century. A copy of the pretended works of Dionysius was sent by Balbus to Lewis the Meck, in the year 824, which kindled the holy flame of mysticism in the western provinces, and filled the Latins with the most enthusiastic admiration of this new religion.

In the twelfth century, these mystics took the lead in their method of expounding Scripture; and by searching for mysteries and hidden meaning in the plainest expressions, forced the word of God into a conformity with their visionary doctrines, their enthusiastic feelings, and the system of discipline which they had drawn from the excursions of their irregular fanatics. In the thirteenth century, they were the most formidable antagonists of the schoolmen; and towards the close of the fourteenth, many of them retired and propagated their tenets almost in every part of Europe. They had, in the fifteenth century, many persons of distinguished merit in their number: and in the sixteenth century, previous to the Reformation, if any sparks of real piety subsisted under the despotic empire of superstition, they were only to be found among the mystics.

The principles of this sect were adopted by those called Quietists in the seventeenth century, and, under different modifications, by the Quakers and Methodists.