Nature Mysticism

John Edward Mercer (1857-1922) was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, the son of a minister. After studying at Lincoln College, Oxford, he was ordained by the Bishop of Durham in 1880 and nearly all his work in his early years was in poor, working-class parishes. He took great interest in social work, including work to improve living conditions in Manchester where he held incumbencies at Angel Meadow and Gorton. He was appointed Bishop of Tasmania in May 1902, and consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury at St Paul's Cathedral in July that year, having received the honorary degree Doctor of Divinity (DD) from the University of Oxford the previous month. He served in Tasmania until 1914 and on his return from the colonial episcopate he continued to serve the Church as a Canon Residentiary at Chester Cathedral and finally, from 1919 until his death, as Archdeacon of Macclesfield. In this work first published in 1913, Mercer sets out to study the mystical aspects of the 'phenomena' of nature, though he is at pains to point our that his use of the term 'mysticism' covers the causes and the effects involved in that wide range of intuitions and emotions which nature stimulates without definite appeal to conscious reasoning processes, and not the magical or supernatural. When treating of specific natural phenomena he makes use of quotations from the prose and poetry of those, both ancient and modern, who he ranks as nature-mystics and these extracts form an integral part of the study.