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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day, by Evelyn Underhill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
+
+Author: Evelyn Underhill
+
+Release Date: February 16, 2005 [EBook #15082]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Garrett Alley, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+AND
+
+THE LIFE OF TO-DAY
+
+BY
+
+EVELYN UNDERHILL
+
+Author of "MYSTICISM," "THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM," etc.
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+
+681 FIFTH AVENUE
+
+
+Copyright, 1922.
+
+BY E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+IN MEMORIAM
+
+E.R.B.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This book owes its origin to the fact that in the autumn of 1921 the
+authorities of Manchester College, Oxford invited me to deliver the
+inaugural course of a lectureship in religion newly established under
+the will of the late Professor Upton. No conditions being attached to
+this appointment, it seemed a suitable opportunity to discuss, so far as
+possible in the language of the moment, some of the implicits which I
+believe to underlie human effort and achievement in the domain of the
+spiritual life. The material gathered for this purpose has now been
+added to, revised, and to some extent re-written, in order to make it
+appropriate to the purposes of the reader rather than the hearer. As the
+object of the book is strictly practical, a special attempt has been
+made to bring the classic experiences of the spiritual life into line
+with the conclusions of modern psychology, and in particular, to suggest
+some of the directions in which recent psychological research may cast
+light on the standard problems of the religious consciousness. This
+subject is still in its infancy; but it is destined, I am sure, in the
+near future to exercise a transforming influence on the study of
+spiritual experience, and may even prove to be the starting point of a
+new apologetic. Those who are inclined either to fear or to resent the
+application to this experience of those laws which--as we are now
+gradually discovering--govern the rest of our psychic life, or who are
+offended by the resulting demonstrations of continuity between our most
+homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to
+themselves the plain words of Thomas à Kempis: "Thou art a man and not
+God, thou art flesh and no angel."
+
+Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity but the normal
+life of the Spirit, as it may be and is lived in the here-and-now, I
+have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in
+the ordinary terms of present day thought, and with little or no use of
+the technical language of mysticism. For the same reason, no attention
+has been given to those abnormal experiences and states of
+consciousness, which, too often regarded as specially "mystical," are
+now recognized by all competent students as representing the unfortunate
+accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirituality. Readers of
+these pages will find nothing about trances, Ecstasies and other rare
+psychic phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and sometimes only
+disease. For information on these matters they must go to larger and
+more technical works. My aim here is the more general one, of indicating
+first the characteristic experiences--discoverable within all great
+religions--which justify or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and
+the way in which these experiences may be accommodated to the
+world-view of the modern man: and next, the nature of that spiritual
+life as it appears in human history. The succeeding sections of the book
+treat in some detail the light cast on spiritual problems by mental
+analysis--a process which need not necessarily be conducted from the
+standpoint of a degraded materialism--and by recent work on the
+psychology of autistic thought and of suggestion. These investigations
+have a practical interest for every man who desires to be the "captain
+of his soul." The relation in which institutional religion does or
+should stand to the spiritual life is also in part a matter for
+psychology; which is here called upon to deal with the religious aspect
+of the social instincts, and the problems surrounding symbols and cults.
+These chapters lead up to a discussion of the personal aspect of the
+spiritual life, its curve of growth, characters and activities; and a
+further section suggests some ways in which educationists might promote
+the up springing of this life in the young. Finally, the last chapter
+attempts to place the fact of the life of the Spirit in its relation to
+the social order, and to indicate some of the results which might follow
+upon its healthy corporate development. It is superfluous to point out
+that each of these subjects needs, at least, a volume to itself: and to
+some of them I shall hope to return in the future. Their treatment in
+the present work is necessarily fragmentary and suggestive; and is
+intended rather to stimulate thought, than to offer solutions.
+
+Part of Chapter IV has already appeared in "The Fortnightly Review"
+under the title "Suggestion and Religious Experience." Chapter VIII
+incorporates several passages from an article on "Sources of Power in
+Human Life" originally contributed to the "Hubert Journal." These are
+reprinted by kind permission of the editors concerned. My numerous debts
+to previous writers are obvious, and for the most part are acknowledged
+in the footnotes; the greatest, to the works of Baron Von Hugely, will
+be clear to all students of his writings. Thanks are also due to my old
+friend William Scott Palmer, who read part of the manuscript and gave me
+much generous and valuable advice. It is a pleasure to express in this
+place my warm gratitude first to the Principal and authorities of
+Manchester College, who gave me the opportunity of delivering these
+chapters in their original form, and whose unfailing sympathy and
+kindness so greatly helped me: and secondly, to the members of the
+Oxford Faculty of Theology, to whom I owe the great Honor of being the
+first woman lecturer in religion to appear in the University list.
+
+  E.U.
+
+  _Epiphany_, 1922.
+
+[** Transcriber's Note: This text contains just a few instances of a
+    character with a diacritical mark. The character is a lower-case
+    'u' with a macron (straight line) above it. In the text, that
+    character is depicted thusly: [=u] **]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+      PREFACE                                             vii
+
+   I. THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE                      1
+
+  II. HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT                   38
+
+ III. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
+     (I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND                              74
+
+  IV. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
+     (II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION                    112
+
+   V. INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT   153
+
+  VI. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL            191
+
+ VII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION                228
+
+VIII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER         266
+
+      PRINCIPAL WORKS USED AND CITED                      300
+
+      INDEX                                               307
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+AND
+
+THE LIFE OF TO-DAY
+
+  Initio tu, Domine, terram fundasti; et opera manuum tuarum sunt caeli.
+  Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanes; et omnes sicut vestimentum
+        veterascent.
+  Et sicut opertorium mutabis eos, et mutabuntur;
+  Tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient.
+  Filii servorum tuorum habitabunt; et semen eorum in seculum dirigetur.
+
+                                 --Psalm cii: 25-28
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE
+
+
+This book has been called "The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day" in order to emphasize as much as possible the practical,
+here-and-now nature of its subject; and specially to combat the idea
+that the spiritual life--or the mystic life, as its more intense
+manifestations are sometimes called--is to be regarded as primarily a
+matter of history. It is not. It is a matter of biology. Though we
+cannot disregard history in our study of it, that history will only be
+valuable to us in so far as we keep tight hold on its direct connection
+with the present, its immediate bearing on our own lives: and this we
+shall do only in so far as we realize the unity of all the higher
+experiences of the race. In fact, were I called upon to choose a motto
+which should express the central notion of these chapters, that motto
+would be--"There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." This
+declaration I would interpret in the widest possible sense; as
+suggesting the underlying harmony and single inspiration of all man's
+various and apparently conflicting expressions of his instinct for
+fullness of life. For we shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful
+sense, of the tangle of material which is before us, until we have
+subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one transcendent Object towards
+which all our twisting pathways run, and one impulsion pressing us
+towards it.
+
+As psychology is now teaching us to find, at all levels of our craving,
+dreaming, or thinking, the diverse expressions of one psychic energy; so
+that type of philosophy which comes nearest to the religion of the
+Spirit, invites us to find at all levels of life the workings and
+strivings of one Power: "a Reality which both underlies and crowns all
+our other, lesser strivings."[1] Variously manifested in partial
+achievements of order and goodness, in diversities of beauty, and in our
+graded apprehensions of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us
+in the transcendent values of holiness and love. The more deeply it is
+loved by man, the nearer he draws to its heart: and the greater his
+love, the more fully does he experience its transforming and energizing
+power. The words of Plotinus are still true for every one of us, and are
+unaffected by the presence or absence of creed:
+
+"Yonder is the true object of our love, which it is possible to grasp
+and to live with and truly to possess, since no envelope of flesh
+separates us from it. He who has seen it knows what I say, that the soul
+then has another life, when it comes to God, and having come possesses
+Him, and knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the
+dispenser of true life and that it needs nothing further."[2]
+
+So, if we would achieve anything like a real integration of life--and
+until we have done so, we are bound to be restless and uncertain in our
+touch upon experience--we are compelled to press back towards contact
+with this living Reality, however conceived by us. And this not by way
+of a retreat from our actual physical and mental life, but by way of a
+fulfilment of it.
+
+More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the
+searching question of the disciple in Boehme's Dialogue on the
+Supersensual Life: "Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature
+into the supersensual ground, without destroying nature?"[3] And such a
+coming through into the ground, such a finding and feeling of Eternal
+Life, is I take it the central business of religion. For religion is
+committed to achieving a synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting,
+of nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to a greater
+reality, because a greater participation in eternity. Such a
+participation in eternity, manifested in the time-world, is the very
+essence of the spiritual life: but, set as we are in mutability, our
+apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative. Absolutes are
+known only to absolute mind; our measurements, however careful and
+intricate, can never tally with the measurements of God. As Einstein
+conceives of space curved round the sun we, borrowing his symbolism for
+a moment, may perhaps think of the world of Spirit as curved round the
+human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, and therefore presenting
+to us innumerable angles of approach. This means that God can and must
+be sought only within and through our human experience. "Where," says
+Jacob Boehme, "will you seek for God? Seek Him in your soul, which has
+proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living fountain of forces
+wherein the Divine working stands."[4]
+
+But, on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for
+agnosticism. For this our human experience in its humbling imperfection,
+however we interpret it, is as real within its own system of reference
+as anything else. It is our inevitably limited way of laying hold on the
+stuff of existence: and not less real for that than the monkeys' way on
+one hand, or the angels' way on the other. Only we must be sure that we
+do it as thoroughly and completely as we can; disdaining the indolence
+which so easily relapses to the lower level and the smaller world.
+
+And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call
+the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all
+times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which
+is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or
+rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of
+fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some
+form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and
+also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience,
+whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as
+effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most
+readily understand and respond to it.
+
+
+Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of
+analysis, can only say: "The soul knows when in that state that it is in
+the presence of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, does he
+not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful
+longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of
+Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying "More than all
+else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless
+life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known
+that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious
+experience, in so far as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is
+only of course in a limited and relative sense. The subjective element,
+all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and
+control it. Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an
+independent objective Reality. This experience is more real and
+concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which
+theology seeks to explain it. We may then take it, without prejudice to
+any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is _one
+life_; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the
+diversity of gifts and graces which men have been willing to call true,
+holy, beautiful and good. For the moment at least we may accept the
+definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as "oneness with the Supreme
+Good in every facet of the heart and will."[6] And since without
+derogation of its transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and worth,
+it is in human experience rather than in speculation that we are bound
+to seek it, we shall look first at the forms taken by man's intuition of
+Eternity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next at the actual
+appearance of this life in history. Then at the psychological machinery
+by which we may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious
+institutions make to its realization; and last, turning our backs on
+these partial explorations of the living Whole, seek if we can to seize
+something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way in
+which education may best prepare its fulfilment, and the part it must
+play in the social group.
+
+We begin therefore at the starting point of this life of Spirit: in
+man's vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and
+transcendent reality--his instinct for God. The characteristic forms
+taken by this instinct are simple and fairly well known. Complication
+only comes in with the interpretation we put on them.
+
+By three main ways we tend to realize our limited personal relations
+with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real; and
+these, appearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, might
+be illustrated from all places and all times.
+
+First, there is the profound sense of security: of being safely held in
+a cosmos of which, despite all contrary appearance, peace is the very
+heart, and which is not inimical to our true interests. For those whose
+religious experience takes this form, God is the Ground of the soul, the
+Unmoved, our Very Rest; statements which meet us again and again in
+spiritual literature. This certitude of a principle of permanence within
+and beyond our world of change--the sense of Eternal Life--lies at the
+very centre of the religious consciousness; which will never on this
+point capitulate to the attacks of philosophy on the one hand (such as
+those of the New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, assuring
+him that what he mistakes for the Eternal World is really his own
+unconscious mind. Here man, at least in his great representatives--the
+persons of transcendent religious genius--seems to get beyond all
+labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that
+satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that
+transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art.
+If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever
+its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived,
+as George Fox was so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know
+the great passage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes
+how "the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never
+changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence."[7] There is
+nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend
+on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as
+fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine
+and discipline of Christian prayer have always admitted its validity.
+
+Here and in many other examples which might be quoted, the spiritual
+fact is interpreted in a non-personal and cosmic way; and we must
+remember that what is described to us is always, inevitably, the more or
+less emotional interpretation, never the pure immediacy of experience.
+This interpretation frequently makes use of the symbolisms of space,
+stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is "lost in the ocean of
+the Godhead," "enters His silence" or exclaims with Dante:
+
+        "la mia vista, venendo sincera,
+      e più e più entrava per lo raggio
+    dell' alta luce, che da sè è vera."[8]
+
+But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the
+relationship is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of
+a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the
+great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while
+doubtless including in its span all the values we associate with
+personality, must far overpass it: and this conclusion has been reached
+again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians
+we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
+Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of
+finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a
+prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and
+emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to
+God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is
+significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of
+rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus
+we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox
+Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing--
+
+"I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
+of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
+leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself
+suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself
+at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in
+choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no
+turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique
+moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious,
+sovereign and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens
+out the way of the Lord."[9]
+
+Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: "If," he says, "this Absolute
+Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our
+life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new
+life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite
+infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is
+only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it
+associations too human and too limited adequately to express this
+profound God-consciousness."[10]
+
+Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those
+moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic
+activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.
+We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their
+philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the
+self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so
+to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an
+"intellectual fountain," hears the Divine Voice crying:
+
+    "I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
+    Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me."[11]
+
+Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say:
+
+    "O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!"[12]
+
+Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father
+and ever-present Companion of the soul,[13] and Kabir, for whom God is
+the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim:
+
+"From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and
+thee: and how shall such love be extinguished?"[14]
+
+Christianity, through its concepts of the Divine Fatherhood and of the
+Eternal Christ, has given to this sense of personal communion its
+fullest and most beautiful expression:
+
+    "Amore, chi t'ama non sta ozioso,
+    tanto li par dolce de te gustare,
+    ma tutta ora vive desideroso
+    como te possa stretto piú amare;
+    ché tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso,
+    chi nol sentisse, nol porría parlare
+    quanto é dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore."[15]
+
+On the immense question of _what_ it is that lies behind this sense of
+direct intercourse, this passionate friendship with the Invisible, I
+cannot enter. But it has been one of the strongest and most fruitful
+influences in religious history, and gives in particular its special
+colour to the most perfect developments of Christian mysticism.
+
+Last--and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially
+to concern us--Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable
+accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group,
+impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its
+existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh
+levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions
+of the Spirit. "He giveth power to the faint," says the Second Isaiah,
+"and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that
+wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
+wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk,
+and not faint."[16] "I live--yet not I," "I can do all things," says St.
+Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading
+and controlling him: and assures his neophytes that they too have
+received "the Spirit of power." "My life," says St. Augustine, "shall be
+a real life, being wholly full of Thee."[17] "Having found God," says a
+modern Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained
+fresh strength."[18] All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the
+same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and
+endurance.
+
+So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be
+resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The
+cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite
+Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living
+and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The
+dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us.
+These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving
+objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into
+account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual
+life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be
+present in some measure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine
+says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same
+time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power,[19] and her Indian contemporary
+the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers after God must realize
+Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without,
+and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And
+it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
+Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
+these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
+us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
+an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
+which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
+part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
+knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
+how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power,
+of beauty which are contained in them.
+
+And if the first type of experience, with the immense feeling of
+assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive
+contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the "world that is
+unwalled,"[21] and from the mind's utter surrender and abolition of
+resistances--if all this seems to lead to a merely static or
+contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of
+experience, with its impulse towards action, its often strongly felt
+accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and
+dynamic interpretation of that life. Indeed, if the first moment in the
+life of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal Life, the second
+moment--without which the first has little worth for him--consists of
+his response to that transcendent Reality. Perception of it lays on him
+the obligation of living in its atmosphere, fulfilling its meaning, if
+he can: and this will involve for him a measure of inward
+transformation, a difficult growth and change. Thus the ideas of new
+birth and regeneration have always been, and I think must ever be,
+closely associated with man's discovery of God: and the soul's true path
+seems to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral effort, and
+thence to charity.
+
+Even so did the Oxford Methodists, who began by trying only to worship
+God and _be_ good by adhering to a strict devotional rule, soon find
+themselves impelled to try to _do_ good by active social work.[22] And
+at his highest development, and in so far as he has appropriated the
+full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should
+find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and
+contemplation. Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss
+in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich
+and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a
+fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent
+love, and its felt possession of and duty towards immanent love--a paradox
+which only some form of incarnational philosophy can solve. It is said
+of Abu Said, the great S[=u]fi, at the full term of his development,
+that he "did all normal things while ever thinking of God."[23] Here, I
+believe, we find the norm of the spiritual life, in such a complete
+response both to the temporal and to the eternal revelations and demands
+of the Divine nature: on the one hand, the highest and most costing
+calls made on us by that world of succession in which we find ourselves;
+on the other, an unmoved abiding in the bosom of eternity, "where was
+never heard quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to
+turne."[24]
+
+There have been many schools and periods in which one half of this dual
+life of man has been unduly emphasized to the detriment of the other.
+Often in the East--and often too in the first, pre-Benedictine phase of
+Christian monasticism--there has been an unbalanced cultivation of the
+contemplative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imperfectly
+vitalized a-social type of spirituality. On the other hand, in our own
+day the tendency to action usually obliterates the contemplative side of
+experience altogether: and the result is the feverishness, exhaustion
+and uncertainty of aim characteristic of the over-driven and the
+underfed. But no one can be said to live in its fulness the life of the
+Spirit who does not observe a due balance between the two: both
+receiving and giving, both apprehending and expressing, and thus
+achieving that state of which Ruysbroeck said "Then only is our life a
+whole, when work and contemplation dwell in us side by side, and we are
+perfectly in both of them at once."[25] All Christian writers on the
+life of the Spirit point to the perfect achievement of this two-fold
+ideal in Christ; the pattern of that completed humanity towards which
+the indwelling Spirit is pressing the race. His deeds of power and
+mercy, His richly various responses to every level of human existence,
+His gift to others of new faith and life, were directly dependent on the
+nights spent on the mountain in prayer. When St. Paul entreats us to
+grow up into the fulness of His stature, this is the ideal that is
+implied.
+
+In the intermediate term of the religious experience, that felt
+communion with a Person which is the _clou_ of the devotional life, we
+get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of
+transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of
+contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that
+religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual
+growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity
+has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the
+exaggerations to which it has led. Both extremes are richly represented
+in the literature of mysticism. But we should remember that Christianity
+is not alone in thus requiring place to be made for such a conception of
+God as shall give body to all the most precious and fruitful experiences
+of the heart, providing simple human sense and human feeling with
+something on which to lay hold. In India, there is the existence, within
+and alongside the austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of the
+ardent personal Vaishnavite devotion to the heart's Lord, known as
+Bhakti Marga. In Islam, there is the impassioned longing of the S[=u]fis
+for the Beloved, who is "the Rose of all Reason and all Truth."
+
+    "Without Thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest;
+    Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon.
+    Tho' every hair on my body becomes a tongue
+    A thousandth part of the thanks due to Thee I cannot tell."[26]
+
+There is the sudden note of rapture which startles us in the
+Neoplatonists, as when Plotinus speaks of "the name of love for what is
+there to know--the passion of the lover testing on the 'bosom of his
+love."[27] Surely we may accept all these, as the instinctive responses
+of a diversity of spirits to the one eternal Spirit of life and love:
+and recognize that without such personal response, such a discovery of
+imperishable love, a fully lived spiritual life is no more possible than
+is a fully lived physical life from which love has been left out.
+
+When we descend from experience to interpretation, the paradoxical
+character of such a personal sense of intimacy is eased for us, if we
+remember that the religious man's awareness of the indwelling Spirit, or
+of a Divine companionship--whatever name he gives it--is just his
+limited realization, achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of a
+universal and not a particular truth. To this realization he brings all
+his human--more, his sub-human--feelings and experiences: not only those
+which are vaguely called his spiritual intuitions, but the full weight
+of his impulsive and emotional life. His experience and its
+interpretation are, then, inevitably conditioned by this apperceiving
+mass. And here I think the intellect should show mercy, and not probe
+without remorse into those tender places where the heart and the spirit
+are at one. Let us then be content to note, that when we consult the
+works of those who have best and most fully interpreted their religion
+in a universal sense, we find how careful they are to provide a category
+for this experience of a personally known and loved indwelling
+Divinity--man's Father, Lover, Saviour, ever-present Companion--which
+shall avoid its identification with the mere spirit of Nature, whilst
+safeguarding its immanence no less than its transcendent quality. Thus,
+Julian of Norwich heard in her meditations the voice of God saying to
+her, "See! I am in all things! See! I lift never mine hand from off my
+works, nor ever shall!"[28] Is it possible to state more plainly the
+indivisible identity of the Spirit of Life? "See! I am in _all_ things!"
+In the terrific energies of the stellar universe, and the smallest song
+of the birds. In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much
+a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the
+more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive. This
+sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and
+transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of
+effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual
+experience, wherever found. It chimes well with the definition of
+Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly spiritual man, though he
+may not be any better morally than his non-religious neighbour, "has a
+confidence in the universe and an inner joy which the other does not
+know--is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men."[29]
+
+If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning
+Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and
+symbols of poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order
+to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love. Such a
+divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic
+incarnation, though not limited by it: and it is continued into history
+by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.
+The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest
+and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that
+this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.
+
+Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as
+a genuine and abiding human fact--a form of life--independent of the
+dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed. I now
+wish to go on to a second point: this--that it follows that any complete
+description of human life as we know it, must find room for the
+spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it
+finds expression. This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal
+series, as we might find room for any special human activity or
+aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but
+deep-set in the enduring stuff of man's true life. We must believe that
+the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot _in fact_ be
+broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth with the universe
+as a whole. But the extent in which we find and feel it is the measure
+of the fullness of spiritual life that we enjoy. Organic union must be
+lifted to conscious realization: and this to do, is the business of
+religion. In this act of realization each aspect of the psychic
+life--thought, will and feeling--must have its part, and from each must
+be evoked a response. Only in so far as such all-round realization and
+response are achieved by us do we live the spiritual life. We do it
+perhaps in some degree, every time that we surrender to pure beauty or
+unselfish devotion; for then all but the most insensitive must be
+conscious of an unearthly touch, and hear the cadence of a heavenly
+melody. In these partial experiences something, as it were, of the
+richness of Reality overflows and is experienced by us. But it is in the
+wholeness of response characteristic of religion--that uncalculated
+response to stimulus which is the mark of the instinctive life--that
+this Realty of love and power is most truly found and felt by us. In
+this generous and heart-searching surrender of religion, rightly made,
+the self achieves inner harmony, and finds a satisfying objective for
+all its cravings and energies. It then finds its life, and the
+possibilities before it, to be far greater than it knew.
+
+We need not claim that those men and women who have most fully realized,
+and so at first hand have described to us, this life of the Spirit, have
+neither discerned or communicated the ultimate truth of things; nor need
+we claim that the symbols they use have intrinsic value, beyond the
+poetic power of suggesting to us the quality and wonder of their
+transfigured lives. Still less must we claim this discovery as the
+monopoly of any one system of religion. But we can and ought to claim,
+that no system shall be held satisfactory which does not find a place
+for it: and that only in so far as we at least apprehend and respond to
+the world's spiritual aspect, do we approach the full stature of
+humanity. Psychologists at present are much concerned to entreat us to
+"face reality," discarding idealism along with the other phantasies that
+haunt the race. Yet this facing of reality can hardly be complete if we
+do not face the facts of the spiritual life. Certainly we shall find it
+most difficult to interpret these facts; they are confused, and more
+than one reading of them is possible. But still we cannot leave them out
+and claim to have "faced reality."
+
+Höffding goes so far as to say that any real religion implies and must
+give us a world-view.[30] And I think it is true that any vividly lived
+spiritual life must, as soon as it passes beyond the level of mere
+feeling and involves reflection, involve too some more or less
+articulated conception of the spiritual universe, in harmony with which
+that life is to be lived. This may be given to us by authority, in the
+form of creed: but if we do not thus receive it, we are committed to the
+building of our own City of God. And to-day, that world-view, that
+spiritual landscape, must harmonize--if it is needed to help our
+living--with the outlook, the cosmic map, of the ordinary man. If it be
+adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless
+conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving world of
+biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical
+relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy--these great
+constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind,
+must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view
+which centres on the God known in religious experience. They are true
+within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis
+wide enough to contain them.
+
+It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional
+type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which
+devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an
+explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to
+live. But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of
+modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the
+explorations of history and of psychology. Even contrasted with our
+every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in
+a wilderness. Whilst we are inside everything seems all right.
+
+Beauty and fragrance surround us. But emerging from its doors, we find
+ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of
+reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we possess has got to
+accommodate itself to the conditions in which they live. If the claim of
+religion be true at all, it is plain that the conservatory-type of
+spiritual world is inconsistent with it. Imperfect though any conception
+we frame of the universe must be--and here we may keep in mind Samuel
+Butler's warning that "there is no such source of error as the pursuit
+of absolute truth"--still, a view which is controlled by the religious
+factor ought to be, so to speak, a hill-top view. Lifting us up to
+higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. Hence, the wider
+the span of experience which we are able to bring within our system, the
+more valid its claim becomes: and the setting apart of spiritual
+experience in a special compartment, the keeping of it under glass, is
+daily becoming less possible. That experience is life in its fullness,
+or nothing at all. Therefore it must come out into the open, and must
+witness to its own most sacred conviction; that the universe as a whole
+is a religious fact, and man is not living completely until he is living
+in a world religiously conceived.
+
+More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading
+of existence. The revolt from the last century's materialism is almost
+complete. In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and
+feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and
+realization the meaning, and perhaps--if we may dare to use such a
+word--the purpose of life. It suggests--and here, more and more,
+psychology supports it--that, real and alive as we are in relation to
+this system with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet we are
+not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to be. The characters of
+our psychic life point us on and up to other levels. Already we perceive
+that man's universe is no fixed order; and that the many ways in which
+he is able to apprehend it are earnests of a greater transfiguration, a
+more profound contact with reality yet possible to him. Higher forms of
+realization, a wider span of experience, a sharpening of our vague,
+uncertain consciousness of value--these may well be before us. We have
+to remember how dim, tentative, half-understood a great deal of our
+so-called "normal" experience is: how narrow the little field of
+consciousness, how small the number of impressions it picks up from the
+rich flux of existence, how subjective the picture it constructs from
+them. To take only one obvious example, artists and poets have given us
+plenty of hints that a real beauty and significance which we seldom
+notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us to contradict the statement
+of religion that God is standing there too.
+
+That thought which inspires the last chapters of Professor 'Alexander's
+"Space, Time, and Deity," that the universe as a whole has a tendency
+towards deity, does at least seem true of the fully awakened human
+consciousness.[31] Though St. Thomas Aquinas may not have covered all
+the facts when he called man a contemplative animal,[32] he came nearer
+the mark than more modern anthropologists. Man has an ineradicable
+impulse to transcendence, though sometimes--as we may admit--it is
+expressed in strange ways: and no psychology which fails to take account
+of it can be accepted by us as complete. He has a craving which nothing
+in his material surroundings seems adequate either to awaken or to
+satisfy; a deep conviction that some larger synthesis of experience is
+possible to him. The sense that we are not yet full grown has always
+haunted the race. "I am the Food of the full-grown. _Grow,_ and thou
+shalt feed on Me!"[33] said the voice of supreme Reality to St.
+Augustine. Here we seem to lay our finger on the distinguishing mark of
+humanity: that in man the titanic craving for a fuller life and love
+which is characteristic of all living things, has a teleological
+objective. He alone guesses that he may or should be something other;
+yet cannot guess what he may be. And from this vague sense of being _in
+via,_ the restlessness and discord of his nature proceed. In him, the
+onward thrust of the world of becoming achieves self-consciousness.
+
+The best individuals and communities of each age have felt this craving
+and conviction; and obeyed, in a greater or less degree, its persistent
+onward push. "The seed of the new birth," says William Law, "is not a
+notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting, a magnetic
+desire."[34] Over and over again, rituals have dramatized this, desire
+and saints have surrendered to it. The history of religion and
+philosophy is really the history of the profound human belief that we
+have faculties capable of responding to orders of truth which, did we
+apprehend them, would change the whole character of our universe;
+showing us reality from another angle, lit by another light. And time
+after time too--as we shall see, when we come to consider the testimony
+of history--favourable variations have arisen within the race and proved
+in their own persons that this claim is true. Often at the cost of great
+pain, sacrifice, and inward conflict they have broken their attachments
+to the narrow world of the senses: and this act of detachment has been
+repaid by a new, more lucid vision, and a mighty inflow of power. The
+principle of degrees assures us that such changed levels of
+consciousness and angles of approach may well involve introduction into
+a universe of new relations, which we are not competent to
+criticize.[35] This is a truth which should make us humble in our
+efforts to understand the difficult and too often paradoxical utterances
+of religious genius. It suggests the puzzlings of philosophers and
+theologians--and, I may add, of psychologists too--over experiences
+which they have not shared, are not of great authority for those whose
+object is to find the secret of the Spirit, and make it useful for life.
+Here, the only witnesses we can receive are, on the one part, the
+first-hand witnesses of experience, and on the other part, our own
+profound instinct that these are telling us news of our native land.
+
+Baron von Hügel has finely said, that the facts of this spiritual life
+are themselves the earnests of its objective. These facts cannot be
+explained merely as man's share in the cosmic movement towards a yet
+unrealized perfection; such as the unachieved and self-evolving Divinity
+of some realist philosophers. "For we have no other instance of an
+unrealized perfection producing such pain and joy, such volitions, such
+endlessly varied and real results; and all by means of just this vivid
+and persistent impression that this Becoming is an already realized
+Perfection."[36] Therefore though the irresistible urge and the effort
+forward, experienced on highest levels of love and service, are plainly
+one-half of the life of the Spirit--which can never be consistent with a
+pious indolence, an acceptance of things as they are, either in the
+social or the individual life--yet, the other half, and the very
+inspiration of that striving, is this certitude of an untarnishable
+Perfection, a great goal really there; a living God Who draws all
+spirits to Himself. "Our quest," said Plotinus, "is of an End, not of
+ends: for that only can be chosen by us which is ultimate and noblest,
+that which calls forth the tenderest longings of our soul."[37]
+
+There is of course a sense in which such a life of the Spirit is the
+same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Even if we consider it in relation
+to historical time, the span within which it has appeared is so short,
+compared with the ages of human evolution, that we may as well regard it
+as still in the stage of undifferentiated infancy. Yet even babies
+change, and change quickly, in their relations with the external world.
+And though the universe with which man's childish spirit is in contact
+be a world of enduring values; yet, placed as we are in the stream of
+succession, part of the stuff of a changing world and linked at every
+point with it, our apprehensions of this life of spirit, the symbols we
+use to describe it--and we must use symbols--must inevitably change too.
+Therefore from time to time some restatement becomes imperative, if
+actuality is not to be lost. Whatever God meant man to do or to be, the
+whole universe assures us that He did not mean him to stand still. Such
+a restatement, then, may reasonably be called a truly religious work;
+and I believe that it is indeed one of the chief works to which religion
+must find itself committed in the near future. Hence my main object In
+this book is to recommend the consideration of this enduring fact of the
+life of the Spirit and what it can mean to us, from various points of
+view; thus helping to prepare the ground for that synthesis which we may
+not yet be able to achieve, but towards which we ought to look. It is
+from this stand-point, and with this object of examining what we have,
+of sorting out if we can the permanent from the transitory, of noticing
+lacks and bridging cleavages, that we shall consider in turn the
+testimony of history, the position in respect of psychology, and the
+institutional personal and social aspects of the spiritual life.
+
+In such a restatement, such a reference back to actual man, here at the
+present day as we have him--such a demand for a spiritual interpretation
+of the universe, which will allow us to fit in all his many-levelled
+experiences--I believe we have the way of approach to which religion
+to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that
+museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which--agreeable as it
+may be to the historic or æsthetic sense--makes it so unreal to our
+workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the
+tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is
+already a marked character of contemporary thought.
+
+And note that, working on this basis, we need not in order to find room
+for the facts commit ourselves to the harsh dualism, the opposition
+between nature and spirit, which is characteristic of some earlier forms
+of Christian thought. In this dualism, too, we find simply an effort to
+describe felt experience. It is an expression of the fact, so strongly
+and deeply felt by the richest natures, that there _is_ an utter
+difference in kind between the natural life of use and wont, as most of
+us live it, and the life that is dominated by the spiritual
+consciousness. The change is indeed so great, the transfiguration so
+complete, that they seize on the strongest language in which to state
+it. And in the good old human way, referring their own feelings to the
+universe, they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds of matter
+and of spirit, of nature and of grace. But those who have most deeply
+reflected, have perceived that the change effected is not a change of
+worlds. It is rather such a change of temper and attitude as will
+disclose within our one world, here and now, the one Spirit in the
+diversity of His gifts; the one Love, in homeliest incidents as well as
+noblest vision, laying its obligations on the soul; and so the true
+nature and full possibilities of this our present life.
+
+Although it is true that we must register our profound sense of the
+transcendental character of this spirit-life, its otherness from mere
+nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature
+receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more
+naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language
+of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this
+perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it.
+And whatever its special, language and personal colour be--for all our
+news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual men, and
+arrives tinctured by their feelings and beliefs--in the end it does
+this by disclosing us to ourselves as spirits growing up, though
+unevenly and hampered by our past, through the physical order into
+completeness of response to a universe that is itself a spiritual fact.
+"Heaven," said Jacob Boehme, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the
+Eternal One, wherein all worketh and willeth in quiet love."[38] Such a
+manifestation of Spirit must clearly be made through humanity, at least
+so far as our own order is concerned: by our redirection and full use of
+that spirit of life which energizes us, and which, emerging from the
+more primitive levels of organic creation, is ours to carry on and
+up--either to new self-satisfactions, or to new consecrations.
+
+It is hardly worth while to insist that the need for such a redirection
+has never been more strongly felt than at the present day. There is
+indeed no period in which history exhibits mankind as at once more
+active, more feverishly self-conscious, and more distracted, than is our
+own bewildered generation; nor any which stood in greater need of
+Blake's exhortation: "Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage
+himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit
+for the Building up of Jerusalem."[39]
+
+How many people do each of us know who work and will in quiet love, and
+thus participate in eternal life?
+
+Consider the weight of each of these words. The energy, the clear
+purpose, the deep calm, the warm charity they imply. Willed work; not
+grudging toil. Quiet love, not feverish emotionalism. Each term is quite
+plain and human, and each has equal importance as an attribute of
+heavenly life. How many politicians--the people to whom we have confided
+the control of our national existence--work and will in quiet love? What
+about industry? Do the masters, or the workers, work and will in quiet
+love? that is to say with diligence and faithful purpose, without
+selfish anxiety, without selfish demands and hostilities? What about the
+hurried, ugly and devitalizing existence of our big towns? Can we
+honestly say that young people reared in them are likely to acquire this
+temper of heaven? Yet we have been given the secret, the law of
+spiritual life; and psychologists would agree that it represents too the
+most favourable of conditions for a full psychic life, the state in
+which we have access to all our sources of power.
+
+But man will not achieve this state unless he dwells on the idea of it;
+and, dwelling on that idea, opening his mind to its suggestions, brings
+its modes of expression into harmony with his thought about the world of
+daily life. Our spiritual life to-day, such as it is, tends above all to
+express itself in social activities. Teacher after teacher comes forward
+to plume himself on the fact that Christianity is now taking a "social
+form"; that love of our neighbour is not so much the corollary as the
+equivalent of the love of God, and so forth. Here I am sure that all can
+supply themselves with illustrative quotations. Yet is there in this
+state of things nothing but food for congratulation? Is such a view
+complete? Is nothing left out? Have we not lost the wonder and poetry of
+the forest in our diligent cultivation of the economically valuable
+trees; and shall we ever see life truly until we see it with the poet's
+eyes? There is so much meritorious working and willing; and so little
+time left for quiet love. A spiritual fussiness--often a material
+fussiness too--seems to be taking the place of that inward resort to the
+fontal sources of our being which is the true religious act, our chance
+of contact with the Spirit. This compensating beat of the fully lived
+human life, that whole side of existence resumed in the word
+contemplation, has been left out. "All the artillery of the world," said
+John Everard, "were they all discharged together at one clap, could not
+more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamourings of desires in the
+soul deaf its ears, so you see a man must go into the silence, or else
+he cannot hear God speak."[40] And until we remodel our current
+conception of the Christian life in such a sense as to give that silence
+and its revelation their full value, I do not think that we can hope to
+exhibit the triumphing power of the Spirit in human character and human
+society. Our whole notion of life at present is such as to set up
+resistances to its inflow. Yet the inner mood, the consciousness, which
+makes of the self its channel, are accessible to all, if we would but
+believe this and act on our belief. "Worship," said William Penn, "is
+the supreme act of a man's life."[41] And what is worship but a
+reach-out of the finite spirit towards Infinite Life? Here thought must
+mend the breach which thought has made: for the root of our trouble
+consists in the fact that there is a fracture in our conception of God
+and of our relation with Him. We do not perceive the "hidden unity in
+the Eternal Being"; the single nature and purpose of that Spirit which
+brought life forth, and shall lead it to full realization.
+
+Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our view, in rushing
+round the sun; but perhaps found from another angle to fill quite
+another part in the cosmic scheme. And on this apparently unimportant
+speck, wandering among systems of suns, the appearance of life and its
+slow development and ever-increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain
+and of pleasure; and presently man with his growing capacity for
+self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, for rapture and for grief. Love
+with its unearthly happiness, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain;
+all the ecstasy, all the anguish that we extract from the rhythm of life
+and death. It is much, really, for one little planet to bring to birth.
+And presently another music, which some--not many perhaps yet, in
+comparison with its population--are able to hear. The music of a more
+inward life, a sort of fugue in which the eternal and temporal are
+mingled; and here and there some, already, who respond to it. Those who
+hear it would not all agree as to the nature of the melody; but all
+would agree that it is something different in kind from the rhythm of
+life and death. And in their surrender to this--to which, as they feel
+sure, the physical order too is really keeping time--they taste a larger
+life; more universal, more divine. As Plotinus said, they are looking at
+the Conductor in the midst; and, keeping time with Him, find the
+fulfilment both of their striving and of their peace.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Von Hügel: "Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of
+Religion," p. 60.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Ennead I, 6. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Op. cit., loc. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Bernard Bosanquet: "What Religion Is" p. 32.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Aug.: Conf. VII, 27.]
+
+[Footnote 8: "My vision, becoming more purified, entered deeper and
+deeper into the ray of that Supernal Light, which in itself is
+true"--Par. XXXIII, 52.]
+
+[Footnote 9: "The Tragic Sense of Life In Men and Peoples," p. 194.]
+
+[Footnote 10: T. Upton: "The Bases of Religious Belief," p. 363.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Blake: "Jerusalem," Cap. i.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Nicholson: "The Divãni Shamsi Tabriz," p. 141.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Ennead V. i. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Kabir, op. cit., p. 41.]
+
+[Footnote 15: "Love, whoso loves thee cannot idle be, so sweet to him to
+taste thee; but every hour he lives in longing that he may love thee
+more straitly. For in thee the heart so joyful dwells, that he who feels
+it not can never say how sweet it is to taste thy savour"--Jacopone da
+Todi: Lauda 101.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Isaiah xl, 29-31.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Aug.: Conf. X, 28.]
+
+[Footnote 18: "Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
+12.]
+
+[Footnote 19: "Le Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine," p. ii.]
+
+[Footnote 20: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
+20.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Ruysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Béguines;" Cap. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Overton: "Life of Wesley." Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 23: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies In Islamic Mysticism," Cap. I.]
+
+[Footnote 24: "Donne's Sermons," edited by L. Pearsall Smith, p. 236.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Ruysbroeck, "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Bishr-i-Yasin, cf. Nicholson, op. cit., loc. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Ennead VI. 9. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 28: "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. II.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Höffding: "Philosophy of Religion," Pt. II, A]
+
+[Footnote 31: Op. cit., Bk. 4, Cap. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 32: "Summa contra Gentiles," L. III. Cap. 37.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Aug: Conf. VII, 10.]
+
+[Footnote 34: "The Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p.
+154.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Cf. Haldane, "The Reign of Relativity," Cap. VI.]
+
+[Footnote 36: Von Hügel: "Eternal Life," p. 385.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Ennead I. 4. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Blake: "Jerusalem": To the Christians.]
+
+[Footnote 40: "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 600.]
+
+[Footnote 41: William Penn, "No Cross, No Crown."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+We have already agreed that, if we wish to grasp the real character of
+spiritual life, we must avoid the temptation to look at it as merely a
+historical subject. If it is what it claims to be, it is a form of
+eternal life, as constant, as accessible to us here and now, as in any
+so-called age of faith: therefore of actual and present importance, or
+else nothing at all. This is why I think that the approach to it through
+philosophy and psychology is so much to be preferred to the approach
+through pure history. Yet there is a sense in which we must not neglect
+such history; for here, if we try to enter by sympathy into the past, we
+can see the life of the Spirit emerging and being lived in all degrees
+of perfection and under many different forms. Here, through and behind
+the immense diversity of temperaments which it has transfigured, we can
+best realise its uniform and enduring character; and therefore our own
+possibility of attaining to it, and the way that we must tread so to do.
+History does not exhort us or explain to us, but exhibits living
+specimens to us; and these specimens witness again and again to the fact
+that a compelling power does exist in the world--little understood,
+even by those who are inspired by it--which presses men to transcend
+their material limitations and mental conflicts, and live a new creative
+life of harmony, freedom and joy. Directly human character emerges as
+one of man's prime interests, this possibility emerges too, and is never
+lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian,
+Moslem and Christian all declare with more or less completeness a way of
+life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment;
+and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women
+who have followed this way, and found its promise to be true.
+
+It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did
+truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the
+pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic
+love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to
+them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not
+of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to
+our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it
+could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest
+actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been
+given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete
+image--and ever the more concrete, the greater his art--the results of
+his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. Thus, as the
+tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made
+of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic
+answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of
+the Spirit--eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the
+circumstances of their own time--are the earnests of our own latent
+destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to "grow taller in
+Christ."[42] These powers--that ability--are factually present in the
+race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which
+may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.
+
+In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of
+vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold
+on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the
+quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic
+spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we
+can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who
+have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types,
+varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that
+form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured
+with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative
+for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle
+of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens
+exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less
+picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete
+thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs
+now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as
+some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden
+atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such
+conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense;
+and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit--that
+is to say, with the Saints--they are particularly common and
+particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very
+condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated
+must live and be present in the soul of the historian; must be
+emotionally realized by him _now,_ as a concrete fact weighted with
+significance. It must answer to a present, not to a past interest of the
+race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward
+truth.
+
+Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rolle, who has been
+called the father of English mysticism. It is easy enough for those who
+regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something
+different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of
+the soul's reaction to God--the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of
+his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his
+austere, self-giving life[43]--as the probable result of the reaction of
+a neurotic temperament to mediæval traditions. But if, for instance the
+Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque
+fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student--another Oxford
+undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time--who gave
+up that university and the career it could offer him, under the
+compulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then he re-enters the
+living past. If, standing by him in that small hut in the Yorkshire
+wolds, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the
+north of England, he hears Rolle saying "Nought more profitable, nought
+merrier than grace of contemplation, the which lifteth us from low
+things and presenteth us to God. What thing is grace but beginning of
+joy? And what is perfection of joy but grace complete?"[44]--if, I say,
+he so re-enters history that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not as
+a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life's very secret--then,
+his heart may be touched and he may begin to understand. And then it may
+occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard
+life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his
+own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental
+life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition
+or of pathology.
+
+When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past,
+our time-span is enlarged, and history is born and becomes contemporary;
+thus both widening and deepening our vital experience. It then becomes
+not only a real mode of life to us; but more than this, a mode of social
+life. Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time
+stream to achieve by ourselves, and in defiance of tradition, a true
+integration of existence. Thus to defy tradition is to refuse all the
+gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off from the cumulative
+experiences of the race. The Spirit, as Croce[45] reminds us, is
+history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all
+preceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, the creative
+formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed.
+
+It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical
+aspect of the life of Spirit; re-entering the past by sympathetic
+imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but
+seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which
+persist and have significance for it--getting, if we can, face to face
+with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it. This
+is not easy. In studying all such experience, we have to remember that
+the men and women of the Spirit are members of two orders. They have
+attachments both to time and to eternity. Their characteristic
+experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth;
+the earth of their own day. Therefore two factors will inevitably appear
+in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free
+movements of creative life: and we, if we would understand, must
+discriminate between them. In this power of taking from the past and
+pushing on to the future, the balance maintained between stability and
+novelty, we find one of their abiding characteristics. When this balance
+is broken--when there is either too complete a submission to tradition
+and authority, or too violent a rejection of it--full greatness is not
+achieved.
+
+In complete lives, the two things overlap: and so perfectly that no
+sharp distinction is made between the gifts of authority and of fresh
+experience. Traditional formulæ, as we all know, are often used because
+they are found to tally with life, to light up dark corners of our own
+spirits and give names to experiences which we want to define.
+Ceremonial deeds are used to actualize free contacts with Reality. And
+we need not be surprised that they can do this; since tradition
+represents the crystallization, and handling on under symbols, of all
+the spiritual experiences of the race.
+
+Therefore the man or woman of the Spirit will always accept and use some
+tradition; and unless he does so, he is not of much use to his
+fellow-men. He must not, then, be discredited on account of the
+symbolic system he adopts; but must be allowed to tell his news in his
+own way. We must not refuse to find reality within the Hindu's account
+of his joyous life-giving communion with Ram, any more than we refuse to
+find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with
+Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout
+Buddhist who faithfully follows the Middle Way, or deny that Pagan
+sacramentalism was to its initiates a channel of grace. For all these
+are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of
+history; and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this
+fact with all that it involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see
+when we come to discuss the laws of suggestion and the function of
+belief, the weight of tradition presses the loyal and humble soul which
+accepts it, to such an interpretation of its own spiritual intuitions as
+its Church, its creed, its environment give to it. Thus St. Catherine of
+Genoa, St. Teresa, even Ruysbroeck, are able to describe their intuitive
+communion with God in strictly Catholic terms; and by so doing renew,
+enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow
+them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the
+current formulæ--Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the
+sterility of the contemporary Church--were forced to find elsewhere some
+tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it
+in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic
+system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic and
+Christian connections. And all these regarded themselves far less as
+bringers-in of novelty, than as restorers of lost truth. So we must be
+prepared to discriminate the element of novelty from the element of
+stability; the reality of the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral
+situation, from the traditional and often symbolic language in which it
+is given to us. The comparative method helps us towards this; and is
+thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but rightly
+used the revealer of the Spirit of Life in its variety of gifts. In this
+connection we might remember that time--like space--is only of secondary
+importance to us. Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of
+years of our animal and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as
+it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous
+rather than successive. We may borrow the imagery of Donne's great
+discourse on Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the spiritual
+life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique, or
+mediæval men, were "but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some
+at seven, some at eight--all in one morning in respect of this day."[46]
+
+Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere
+differences of language and appearance, and grasp the warmly living and
+contemporary character of all historic truth. It preserves us, too, from
+the common error of discriminating between so-called "ages of faith" and
+our own. The more we study the past, the more clearly we recognize that
+there are no "ages of faith." Such labels merely represent the arbitrary
+cuts which we make in the time-stream, the arbitrary colours which we
+give to it. The spiritual man or woman is always fundamentally the same
+kind of man or woman; always reaching out with the same faith and love
+towards the heart of the same universe, though telling that faith and
+love in various tongues. He is far less the child of his time, than the
+transformer of it. His this-world business is to bring in novelty, new
+reality, fresh life. Yet, coming to fulfil not to destroy, he uses for
+this purpose the traditions, creeds, even the institutions of his day.
+But when he has done with them, they do not look the same as they did
+before. Christ himself has been well called a Constructive
+Revolutionary,[47] yet each single element of His teaching can be found
+in Jewish tradition; and the noblest of His followers have the same
+character. Thus St. Francis of Assisi only sought consistently to apply
+the teaching of the New Testament, and St. Teresa that of the Carmelite
+Rule. Every element of Wesleyanism is to be found in primitive
+Christianity; and Wesleyanism is itself the tradition from which the new
+vigour of the Salvation Army sprang. The great regenerators of history
+are always in fundamental opposition to the common life of their day,
+for they demand by their very existence a return to first principles, a
+revolution in the ways of thinking and of acting common among men, a
+heroic consistency and single-mindedness: but they can use for their own
+fresh constructions and contacts with Eternal Life the material which
+this life offers to them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis,
+Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith.
+They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding
+apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with
+society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with
+the Spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and
+spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even
+eccentric at the time at which it appears. We are accustomed to think of
+"The Imitation of Christ" as the classic expression of mediæval
+spirituality. But when Thomas à Kempis wrote his book, it was the
+manifesto of that which was called the Modern Devotion; and represented
+a new attempt to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to
+surrounding apathy.
+
+When we re-enter the past, what we find, there is the persistent
+conflict between this novelty and this apathy; that is to say between
+man's instinct for transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of
+the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his tendency to lag
+behind towards animal levels, in which we see the influence of his
+racial past. So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion
+means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by
+sin under the second head. And the most striking--though not the
+only--examples of the forward reach of life towards freedom (that is, of
+conquering grace) are those persons whom we call men and women of the
+Spirit. In them it is incarnate, and through them, as it were, it
+spreads and gives the race a lift: for their transfiguration is never
+for themselves alone, they impart it to all who follow them. But the
+downward falling movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit; and
+tends to drag back to the average level the group these have vivified,
+when their influence is withdrawn. Hence the history of the Spirit--and,
+incidentally, the history of all churches--exhibits to us a series of
+strong movements towards completed life, inspired by vigorous and
+transcendent personalities; thwarted by the common indolence and
+tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. We have no reason to
+suppose that this history is a closed book, or that the spiritual life
+struggling to emerge among ourselves will follow other laws.
+
+We desire then, if we can, to discover what it was that these
+transcendent personalities possessed. We may think, from the point at
+which we now stand, that they had some things which were false, or, at
+least, were misinterpreted by them. We cannot without insincerity make
+their view of the universe our own. But, plainly, they also possessed
+truths and values which most of us have not: they obtained from their
+religion, whether we allow that it had as creed an absolute or a
+symbolic value, a power of living, a courage and clear vision, which we
+do not as a rule obtain. When we study the character and works of these
+men and women, observing their nobility, their sweetness, their power of
+endurance, their outflowing love, we must, unless we be utterly
+insensitive, perceive ourselves to be confronted by a quality of being
+which we do not possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet one of
+them in the flesh, though his conduct is commonly more normal than our
+own, we know then with Plotinus that the soul _has_ another life. Yet
+many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies,
+acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law. But as
+something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the
+great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes
+more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new,
+intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable
+variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life
+and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the
+race.
+
+Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two
+groups:
+
+First, _Type._ What are the characters which mark this life of the
+Spirit?
+
+Secondly, _Process._ What is the line of development by which the
+individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?
+
+First, then, the _Spiritual Type._
+
+What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated
+that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort
+to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and
+real source of power is this single-mindedness. They aim at God: the
+phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the
+Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that "the householder
+must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions."[48] Thus the Sufi says
+he has but two laws--to look in one direction and to live in one
+way.[49] Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ;
+and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that
+all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The
+New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord's
+life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility
+to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were
+inspired by this union; and that He declared it, not as a unique fact,
+but as a possible human ideal. This Is not a theological, but a
+historical statement, which applies, in its degree to every man and
+woman who has been a follower of Christ: for He was, as St. Paul has
+said, "the eldest in a vast family of brothers." The same single-minded
+effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths; though these may
+lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love. And by a paradox
+repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to
+the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant
+fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do
+difficult things, but that creative charity which "wins and redeems the
+unlovely by the power of its love."[50] The man or woman of prayer, the
+community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the
+most practical ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was
+the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the
+soul; and it became one of the chief instruments in the civilization of
+Europe, carrying forward not only religion, but education, pure
+scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The object of St. Bernard's
+reform was the restoration of the life of prayer. His monks, going out
+into the waste places with no provision but their own faith, hope and
+charity, revived agriculture, established industry, literally compelled
+the wilderness to flower for God. The Brothers of the Common Life
+joined together, in order that, living simply and by their own industry,
+they might observe a rule of constant prayer: and they became in
+consequence a powerful educational influence. The object of Wesley and
+his first companions was by declaration the saving of their own souls
+and the living only to the glory of God; but they were impelled at once
+by this to practical deeds of mercy, and ultimately became the
+regenerators of religion in the English-speaking world.
+
+It is well to emphasize this truth, for it conveys a lesson which we can
+learn from history at the present time with much profit to ourselves. It
+means that reconstruction of character and reorientation of attention
+must precede reconstruction of society; that the Sufi is right when he
+declares that the whole secret lies in looking in one direction and
+living in one way. Again and again it has been proved, that those who
+aim at God do better work than those who start with the declared
+intention of benefiting their fellow-men. We must _be_ good before we
+can _do_ good; be real before we can accomplish real things. No
+generalized benevolence, no social Christianity, however beautiful and
+devoted, can take the place of this centring of the spirit on eternal
+values; this humble, deliberate recourse to Reality. To suppose that it
+can do so, is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect for
+cause.
+
+This brings us to the _Second Character_: the rich completeness of the
+spiritual life, the way in which it fuses and transfigures the
+complementary human tendencies to contemplation and action, the
+non-successive and successive aspects of reality. "The love of God,"
+said Ruysbroeck, "is an indrawing _and_ outpouring tide";[51] and
+history endorses this. In its greatest representatives, the rhythm of
+adoration and work is seen in an accentuated form. These people seldom
+or never answer to the popular idea of idle contemplatives. They do not
+withdraw from the stream of natural life and effort, but plunge into it
+more deeply, seek its heart. They have powers of expression and
+creation, and use them to the full. St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard,
+St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius organizing families which shall
+incarnate the gift of new life; Fox, Wesley and Booth striving to save
+other men; Mary Slessor driven by vocation from the Dundee mill to the
+African swamps--these are characteristic of them. We perceive that they
+are not specialists, as more earthly types of efficiency are apt to be.
+Theirs are rich natures, their touch on existence has often an artistic
+quality, St. Paul in his correspondence could break into poetry, as the
+only way of telling the truth. St. Jerome lived to the full the lives of
+scholar and of ascetic. St. Francis, in his perpetual missionary
+activities, still found time for his music songs; St. Hildegarde and St.
+Catherine of Siena had their strong political interests; Jacopone da
+Todi combined the careers of contemplative politician and poet. So too
+in practical matters. St. Catherine of Genoa was one of the first
+hospital administrators, St. Vincent de Paul a genius in the sphere of
+organized charity, Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform. Brother
+Laurence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in
+the Presence of God. Jacob Boehme was a hard-working cobbler, and
+afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition. The
+perpetual journeyings and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller
+compass the career of St. Paul: he was also an exact scholar and a
+practical educationist. Mary Slessor showed the quality of a ruler as
+well as that of a winner of souls. In the intellectual region, Richard
+of St. Victor was supreme in contemplation, and also a psychologist far
+in advance of his time. We are apt to forget the mystical side of
+Aquinas; who was poet and contemplative as well as scholastic
+philosopher.
+
+And the third feature we notice about these men and women is, that this
+new power by which they lived was, as Ruysbroeck calls it, "a spreading
+light."[52] It poured out of them, invading and illuminating other men:
+so that, through them, whole groups or societies were re-born, if only
+for a time, on to fresh levels of reality, goodness and power. Their own
+intense personal experience was valid not only for themselves. They
+belonged to that class of natural, leaders who are capable,--of
+infecting the herd with their own ideals; leading it to new feeding
+grounds, improving the common level It is indeed the main social
+function of the man or woman of the Spirit to be such a crowd-compeller
+In the highest sense; and, as the artist reveals new beauty to his
+fellow-men, to stimulate in their neighbours the latent human capacity
+for God. In every great surge forward to new life, we can trace back the
+radiance to such a single point of light; the transfiguration of an
+individual soul. Thus Christ's communion with His Father was the
+life-centre, the point of contact with Eternity, whence radiated the joy
+and power of the primitive Christian flock: the classic example of a
+corporate spiritual life. When the young man with great possessions
+asked Jesus, "What shall I do to be saved?" Jesus replied in effect,
+"Put aside all lesser interests, strip off unrealities, and come, give
+yourself the chance of catching the Infection of holiness from Me."
+Whatever be our view of Christian dogma, whatever meaning we attach to
+the words "redemption" and "atonement," we shall hardly deny that in the
+life and character of the historic Christ something new was thus evoked
+from, and added to, humanity. No one can read with attention the Gospel
+and the story of the primitive Church, without being struck by the
+consciousness of renovation, of enhancement, experienced by all who
+received the Christian secret in its charismatic stage. This new factor
+is sometimes called re-birth, sometimes grace, sometimes the power of
+the Spirit, sometimes being "in Christ." We misread history if we regard
+it either as a mere gust of emotional fervour, or a theological idea, or
+discount the "miracles of healing" and other proofs of enhanced power by
+which it was expressed. Everything goes to prove that the "more abundant
+life" offered by the Johannine Christ to His followers, was literally
+experienced by them; and was the source of their joy, their enthusiasm,
+their mutual love and power of endurance.
+
+On lower levels, and through the inspiration of lesser teachers, history
+shows us the phenomena of primitive Christianity repeated again and
+again; both within and without the Christian circle of ideas. Every
+religion looks for, and most have possessed, some revealer of the
+Spirit; some Prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the
+characteristic demonstrations of the human power of transcendence--a
+supernatural life which can be lived by us--have begun in one person,
+who has become a creative centre mediating new life to his fellow-men:
+as were Buddha and Mohammed for the faiths which they founded. Such
+lives as those of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley,
+Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of this law. The parable
+of the leaven is in fact an exact description of the way in which the
+spiritual consciousness--the supernatural urge--is observed to spread in
+human society. It is characteristic of the regenerate type, that he
+should as it were overflow his own boundaries and energize other souls:
+for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours out inevitably from
+those who possess it to other men. We notice that the great mystics
+recognize again and again such a fertilizing and creative power, as a
+mark of the soul's full vitality. It is not the personal rapture of the
+spiritual marriage, but rather the "divine fecundity" of one who is a
+parent of spiritual children; which seems to them the goal of human
+transcendence, and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels, in
+real union with God. "In the fourth and last degree of love the soul
+brings forth its children," says Richard of St. Victor.[53] "The last
+perfection to supervene upon a thing," says Aquinas, "is its becoming
+the cause of other things."[54] In a word, it is creative. And the
+spiritual life as we see it in history is thus creative; the cause of
+other things.
+
+History is full of examples of this law: that the man or woman of the
+spirit is, fundamentally, a life-giver; and all corporate achievement of
+the life of the spirit flows from some great apostle or initiator, is
+the fruit of discipleship. Such corporate achievement is a form of group
+consciousness, brought into being through the power and attraction of a
+fully harmonized life, infecting others with its own sharp sense of
+Divine reality. Poets and artists thus infect in a measure all those
+who yield to their influence. The active mystic, who is the poet of
+Eternal Life, does it in a supreme degree. Such a relation of master and
+disciples is conspicuous in every true spiritual revival; and is the
+link between the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration. We see
+it in the little flock that followed Christ, the Little Poor Men who
+followed Francis, the Friends of Fox, the army of General Booth. Not
+Christianity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify to this
+necessity. The Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a
+_guru_ who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere; and
+must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience. The S[=u]fi
+neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his _sheikh_ "as a
+corpse in the hands of the washer"; and all the great saints of Islam
+have been the inspiring centres of more or less organized groups.
+
+History teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through
+men. We most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring
+human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic
+contagion. Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into
+the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous
+outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful
+analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment,
+tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it.
+There is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human
+experience and education. Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of
+God are also the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped by those
+who go before them. And as regards the generality, not isolated effort
+but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher--and every man
+and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of
+influence--the unselfconscious trust of the disciple, are the means by
+which the secret of full life has been handed on. "One loving spirit,"
+said St. Augustine, "sets another on fire"; and expressed in this phrase
+the law which governs the spiritual history of man. This law finds
+notable expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; a type of
+association, found in more or less perfection in every great religion,
+which has not received the attention it deserves from students of
+psychology. If we study the lives of those who founded these
+Orders--though such a foundation was not always intended by them--we
+notice one general characteristic: each was an enthusiast, abounding in
+zest and hope, and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a
+source of spiritual infection, for those who came under his influence.
+In each the spiritual world was seen "through a temperament," and so
+mediated to the disciples; who shared so far as they were able the
+master's special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Benedict's sane
+and generous outlook is crystallized in the Benedictine rule. St.
+Francis' deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave
+Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character. The heroisms of the
+early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St.
+Ignatius. The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance
+from St. Teresa's mystical experience. The great Orders in their purity
+were families, inheriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their
+patriarch; who gave, as a father to his children, life stamped with his
+own characteristics.
+
+Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of its founder, the group
+appears to lose its spontaneous and enthusiastic character. Zest fails.
+Unless a fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles down again
+towards the general level of the herd. Thence it can only be roused by
+means of "reforms" or "revivals," the arrival of new, vigorous leaders,
+and the formation of new enthusiastic groups: for the bulk of men as we
+know them cannot or will not make the costing effort needed for a
+first-hand participation in eternal life. They want a "crowd-compeller"
+to lift them above themselves. Thus the history of Christianity is the
+history of successive spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to
+survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed His little flock
+with the avowed aim of "bringing in the Kingdom of God"--transmuting the
+mentality of the race, and so giving it more abundant life.
+
+Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of
+their Master, the influence and infection of His spirit and atmosphere,
+as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life:
+and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain
+contact with the eternal world in prayer. The great speech of Serenus de
+Cressy in "John Inglesant" described once for all the highest type of
+Christian spirituality.[55] But in practice this link and this influence
+are too subtle for the mass of men. They must constantly be
+re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and by them be mediated
+to fresh groups, formed within or without the institutional frame. Thus
+in the thirteenth century St. Francis, and in the fourteenth the Friends
+of God, created a true spiritual society within the Church, by restoring
+in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian
+idea and Christian life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
+Fox and Wesley possessed by the same essential vision, broke away from
+the institution which was no longer supple enough to meet their needs,
+and formed their fresh groups outside the old herd.
+
+When such creative personalities appear and such groups are founded by
+them, the phenomena of the spiritual life reappear in their full vigour,
+and are disseminated. A new vitality, a fresh power of endurance, is
+seen in all who are drawn within the group and share its mind. This is
+what St. Paul seems to have meant, when he reminded his converts that
+they had the mind of Christ. The primitive friars, living under the
+influence of Francis, did practice the perfect poverty which is also
+perfect joy. The assured calm and willing sufferings of the early
+Christians were reproduced in the early Quakers, secure in their
+possession of the inner light. We know very well the essential
+characters of this fresh mentality; the power, the enthusiasm, the
+radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hardship it confers. But we
+can no more produce it from these raw materials than the chemist's
+crucible can produce life. The whole experience of St. Francis is
+implied in the Beatitudes. The secret of Elizabeth Fry is the secret of
+St. John. The doctrine of General Booth is fully stated by St. Paul. But
+it was not by referring inquirers to the pages of the New Testament that
+the first brought men fettered by things to experience the freedom of
+poverty; the second faced and tamed three hundred Newgate criminals, who
+seemed at her first visit "like wild beasts"; or the third created
+armies of the redeemed from the dregs of the London Slums. They did
+these things by direct personal contagion; and they will be done among
+us again when the triumphant power of Eternal Spirit is again exhibited,
+not in ideas but in human character.
+
+I think, then, that history justifies us in regarding the full living of
+the spiritual life as implying at least these three characters. First,
+single-mindedness: to mean only God. Second, the full integration of the
+contemplative and active sides of existence, lifted up, harmonized, and
+completely consecrated to those interests which the self recognizes as
+Divine. Third, the power of reproducing this life; incorporating it in a
+group. Before we go on, we will look at one concrete example which
+illustrates all these points. This example is that of St. Benedict and
+the Order which he founded; for in the rounded completeness of his life
+and system we see what should be the normal life of the Spirit, and its
+result.
+
+Benedict was born in times not unlike our own, when wars had shaken
+civilization, the arts of peace were unsettled, religion was at a low
+ebb. As a young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from the
+vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the hills, and lived in a
+cave for three years alone with his thoughts of God. It would be easy to
+regard him as an eccentric boy: but he was adjusting himself to the real
+centre of his life. Gradually others who longed for a more real
+existence joined him, and he divided them into groups of twelve, and
+settled them in small houses; giving them a time-table by which to live,
+which should make possible a full and balanced existence of body, mind
+and soul. Thanks to those years of retreat and preparation, he knew what
+he wanted and what he ought to do; and they ushered in a long life of
+intense mental and spiritual activity. His houses were schools, which
+taught the service of God and the perfecting of the soul as the aims of
+life. His rule, in which genial human tolerance, gentle courtesy, and a
+profound understanding of men are not less marked than lofty
+spirituality, is the classic statement of all that the Christian
+spiritual life implies and should be.[56]
+
+What, then, is the character of the life which St. Benedict proposed as
+a remedy for the human failure and disharmony that he saw around him? It
+was framed, of course, for a celibate community: but it has many
+permanent features which are unaffected by his limitation. It offers
+balanced opportunities of development to the body, the mind and the
+spirit; laying equal emphasis on hard work, study, and prayer. It aims
+at a robust completeness, not at the production of professional
+ascetics; indeed, its Rule says little about physical austerities,
+insists on sufficient food and rest, and countenances no extremes.
+According to Abbot Butler, St. Benedict's day was divided into three and
+a half hours for public worship, four and a half for reading and
+meditation, six and a half for manual work, eight and a half for sleep,
+and one hour for meals. So that in spite of the time devoted to
+spiritual and mental interests, the primitive Benedictine did a good
+day's work and had a good night's rest at the end of it. The work might
+be anything that wanted doing, so long as the hours of prayer were not
+infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, handicrafts and art have
+all been done perfectly by St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in
+quiet love. This is what one of the greatest constructive minds of
+Christendom regarded as a reasonable way of life; a frame within which
+the loftiest human faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieve that
+harmony with God which is its goal. Moreover, this life was to be
+social. It was in the beginning just the busy useful life of an Italian
+farm, lived in groups--in monastic families, under the rule and
+inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the
+spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility,
+obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the
+authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has
+something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried
+and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time
+for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those
+marks of the regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown to us
+as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action
+and contemplation, the creative power, and above all the principle of
+social solidarity and discipleship.
+
+We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the
+process by which the individual normally develops this life of the
+Spirit, the serial changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is of
+practical importance to us. The full inwardness of these changes will be
+considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life.
+Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the
+constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and
+small personalities under the various labels which have been given to
+it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence
+with the temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that
+union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This life we must
+believe in some form and degree to be possible for all; but we study it
+best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its
+fullest records survive.
+
+The first moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love
+with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it.
+Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his
+nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he
+has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict,
+disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis,
+abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle,
+turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life; in the restless
+misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking "something
+that could speak to his condition"; and also in two outstanding
+examples from modern India, those of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore
+and the Sadhu Sundar Singh. This dissatisfaction, sometimes associated
+with the negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with the
+positive longing for holiness and peace, is the mental preparation of
+conversion; which, though not a constant, is at least a characteristic
+feature of the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history. We
+might, indeed, expect some crucial change of attitude, some inner
+crisis, to mark the beginning of a new life which is to aim only at God.
+Here too we find one motive of that movement of world-abandonment which
+so commonly follows conversion, especially in heroic souls. Thus St.
+Paul hides himself in Arabia; St. Benedict retires for three years to
+the cave at Subiaco; St. Ignatius to Manresa. Gerard Groot, the
+brilliant and wealthy young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of the
+Common Life, began his new life by self-seclusion in a Carthusian cell.
+St. Catherine of Siena at first lived solitary in her own room. St.
+Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his whole past, even the
+clothing that was part of it. Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer
+converted to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to
+express his utter separation from the world. Others, it is true, have
+chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the
+cell of self-knowledge the solitude they required; but _some_ decisive
+break was imperative for all. History assures us that there is no easy
+sliding into the life of the Spirit.
+
+A secondary cause of such world refusal is the first awakening of the
+contemplative powers; the intuition of Eternity, hitherto dormant, and
+felt at this stage to be--in its overwhelming reality and appeal--in
+conflict with the unreal world and unsublimated active life. This is the
+controlling idea of the hermit and recluse. It is well seen in St.
+Teresa; whom her biographers describe as torn, for years, between the
+interests of human intercourse and the imperative inner voice urging her
+to solitary self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that in the
+beginning of the life of the Spirit, as history shows it to us, if
+disillusion marks the first moment, some measure of asceticism, of
+world-refusal and painful self-schooling, is likely to mark the second
+moment.
+
+What we are watching is the complete reconstruction of personality; a
+personality that has generally grown into the wrong shape. This is
+likely to be a hard and painful business; and indeed history assures us
+that it is, and further that the spiritual life is never achieved by
+taking the line of least resistance and basking in the divine light.
+With world-refusal, then, is intimately connected stern moral conflict;
+often lasting for years, and having as its object the conquest of
+selfhood in all its insidious forms. "Take one step out of yourself,"
+say the S[=u]fis, "and you will arrive at God."[57] This one step is the
+most difficult act of life; yet urged by love, man has taken it again
+and again. This phase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual
+biography, that I need not insist upon it. "In the field of this body,"
+says Kabir, "a great war goes forward, against passion, anger, pride and
+greed. It is in the Kingdom of Truth, Contentment and Purity that this
+battle is raging, and the sword that rings forth most loudly is the
+sword of His Name."[58] "Man," says Boehme, "must here be at war with
+himself if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen ... fighting must be the
+watchword, not with tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit; and not
+to give over."[59] The need of such a conflict, shown to us in history,
+is explained on human levels by psychology. On spiritual levels it is
+made plain to all whose hearts are touched by the love of God. By this
+way all must pass who achieve the life of the Spirit; subduing to its
+purposes their wayward wills, and sublimating in its power their
+conflicting animal impulses. This long effort brings, as its reward a
+unification of character, an inflow of power: from it we see the mature
+man or woman of the Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this
+conflict lasted for four years, after which the thought of sin ceased to
+rule her consciousness.[60] St. Teresa's intermittent struggles are
+said to have continued for thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply
+religious, did not attain the inner stability he calls assurance till he
+was thirty-five years old. Blake was for twenty years in mental
+conflict, shut off from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do
+great personalities come to their full stature, and subdue their
+vigorous impulses to the one ruling idea.
+
+The ending of this conflict, the self's unification and establishment in
+the new life, commonly means a return more or less complete to that
+world from which the convert had retreated; taking up of the fully
+energized and fully consecrated human existence, which must express
+itself in work no less than in prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity
+for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the "first
+return" of the Buddhist saint is "from the absolute world to the world
+of phenomena to save all sentient beings."[61] Thus St. Benedict's and
+St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for
+their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a
+disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as a
+busy and devoted hospital matron and inspired teacher of a group of
+disciples. St. Teresa's long interior struggles precede her vigorous
+career as founder and reformer; her creation of spiritual families, new
+centres of contemplative life. The vast activities of Fox and Wesley
+were the fruits first of inner conflict, then of assurance--the
+experience of God and of the self's relation to Him. And on the highest
+levels of the spiritual life as history shows them to us, this
+experience and realization, first of profound harmony with Eternity and
+its interests, next of a personal relation of love, last of an
+indwelling creative power, a givenness, an energizing grace, reaches
+that completeness to which has been given the name of union with God.
+
+The great man or woman of the Spirit who achieves this perfect
+development is, it is true, a special product: a genius, comparable with
+great creative personalities in other walks of life. But he neither
+invalidates the smaller talent nor the more general tendency in which
+his supreme gift takes its rise. Where he appears, that tendency is
+vigorously stimulated. Like other artists, he founds a school; the
+spiritual life flames up, and spreads to those within his circle of
+influence. Through him, ordinary men, whose aptitude for God might have
+remained latent, obtain a fresh start; an impetus to growth. There is a
+sense in which he might say with the Johannine Christ, "He that
+receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me"; for yielding to his magnetism,
+men really yield to the drawing of the Spirit itself. And when they do
+this, their lives are found to reproduce--though with less
+intensity--the life history of their leader. Therefore the main
+characters of that life history, that steady undivided process of
+sublimation; are normal human characters. We too may heal the discords
+of our moral nature, learn to judge existence in the universal light,
+bring into consciousness our latent transcendental sense, and keep
+ourselves so spiritually supple that alike in times of stress and hours
+of prayer and silence we are aware of the mysterious and energizing
+contact of God. Psychology suggests to us that the great spiritual
+personalities revealed in history are but supreme instances of a
+searching self-adjustment and of a way of life, always accessible to
+love and courage, which all men may in some sense undertake.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 42: Everard, "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 555]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Canor Dulcor, Canor;_ cf. Rolle: "The Fire of Love," Bk.
+1, Cap. 14]
+
+[Footnote 44: Rolle: "The Mending of Life," Cap. XII.]
+
+[Footnote 45: Benedetto Croce: "Theory and History of Historiography,"
+trans. by Douglas Ainslie, p. 25.]
+
+[Footnote 46: "Donne's Sermons," p. 236.]
+
+[Footnote 47: B.H. Streeter, in "The Spirit," p. 349 _seq_.]
+
+[Footnote 48: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
+23.]
+
+[Footnote 49: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. i.]
+
+[Footnote 50: Baron von Hügel In the "Hibbert Journal," July, 1921.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk.
+II, Cap. 39.]
+
+[Footnote 53: R. of St. Victor: "De Quatuor Gradibus Violentæ
+Charitatis" (Migne, Pat. Lat.) T. 196, Col. 1216.]
+
+[Footnote 54: "Summa Contra Gentiles," Bk. III, Cap. 21.]
+
+[Footnote 55: J.E. Shorthouse: "John Inglesant," Cap. 19.]
+
+[Footnote 56: Cf. Delatte: "The Rule of St. Benedict"; and C. Butler:
+"Benedictine Monachism."]
+
+[Footnote 57: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 58: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 44.]
+
+[Footnote 59: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 111.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Cf. Von Hügel: "The Mystical Element of Religion," Vol. I,
+Pt. II.]
+
+[Footnote 61: McGovern: "An Introduction to Mahãyãna Buddhism," p. 175.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+(I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND
+
+
+Having interrogated history in our attempt to discover the essential
+character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to
+see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of
+the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It
+is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out,
+would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in
+a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming
+available for it: but many of the principles involved are, even yet,
+obscure. Therefore any conclusions at which we may arrive can only be
+tentative; and the theories and schematic representations that we shall
+be obliged to use must be regarded as mere working diagrams--almost
+certainly of a temporary character--but useful to us, because they do
+give us an interpretation of inner experience with which we can deal. I
+need not emphasize the extent in which modern developments of psychology
+are affecting our conceptions of the spiritual life, and our reading of
+many religious phenomena on which our ancestors looked with awe. When we
+have eliminated the more heady exaggerations of the psycho-analysts, and
+the too-violent simplifications of the behaviourists, it remains true
+that many problems have lately been elucidated in an unexpected, and
+some in a helpful, sense. We are learning in particular to see in true
+proportion those abnormal states of trance and ecstasy which were once
+regarded as the essentials, but are now recognized as the by-products,
+of the mystical life. But a good deal that at first sight seems
+startling, and even disturbing to the religious mind, turns out on
+investigation to be no more than the re-labelling of old facts, which
+behind their new tickets remain unchanged. Perhaps no generation has
+ever been so much at the mercy of such labels as our own. Thus many
+people who are inclined to jibe at the doctrine of original sin welcome
+it with open arms when it is reintroduced as the uprush of primitive
+instinct. Opportunity of confession to a psychoanalyst is eagerly sought
+and gladly paid for, by troubled spirits who would never resort for the
+same purpose to a priest. The formulæ of auto-suggestion are freely used
+by those who repudiate vocal prayer and acts of faith with scorn. If,
+then, I use for the purpose of exposition some of those labels which are
+affected by the newest schools, I do so without any suggestion that they
+represent the only valid way of dealing with the psychic life of man.
+Indeed, I regard these labels as little more than exceedingly clever
+guesses at truth. But since they are now generally current and often
+suggestive, it is well that we should try to find a place for spiritual
+experience within the system which they represent; thus carrying through
+the principle on which we are working, that of interpreting the abiding
+facts of the spiritual life, so far as we can, in the language of the
+present day.
+
+First, then, I propose to consider the analysis of mind, and what It has
+to tell us about the nature of Sin, of Salvation, of Conversion; what
+light it casts on the process of purgation or self-purification which is
+demanded by all religions of the Spirit; what are the respective parts
+played by reason and instinct in the process of regeneration; and the
+importance for religious experience of the phenomena of apperception.
+
+We need not at this point consider again all that we mean by the life of
+the Spirit. We have already considered it as it appears in history--its
+inexhaustible variety, its power, nobility, and grace. We need only to
+remind ourselves that what we have got to find room for in our
+psychological scheme is literally, a changed and enhanced life; a life
+which, immersed in the stream of history, is yet poised on the eternal
+world. This life involves a complete re-direction of our desires and
+impulses, a transfiguration of character; and often, too, a sense of
+subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of impersonal strength,
+so overwhelming as to give many of its activities an inspirational or
+automatic character. We found that this life was marked by a rhythmic
+alternation between receptivity and activity, more complete and
+purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should
+condition, the healthy life of sense. This re-direction and
+transfiguration, this removal to a higher term of our mental rhythm, are
+of course psychic phenomena; using this word in a broad sense, without
+prejudice to the discrimination of any one aspect of it as spiritual.
+All that we mean at the moment is, that the change which brings in the
+spiritual life is a change in the mind and heart of man, working in the
+stuff of our common human nature, and involving all that the modern
+psychologist means by the word psyche.
+
+We begin therefore with the nature of the psyche as this modern,
+growing, changing psychology conceives it; for this is the raw material
+of regenerate man. If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological
+theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate
+minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche--by which of
+course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William
+James--was anticipated by Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Ennead,
+that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the
+body and of the higher for the purposes of the Spirit, and yet
+constitutes a unity; an unbroken series of ascending values and powers
+of response, from the levels of merely physical and mainly unconscious
+life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness.[62] We
+first discover psychic energy as undifferentiated directive power,
+controlling response and adaption to environment; and as it develops,
+ever increasing the complexity of its impulses and habits, yet never
+abandoning anything of its past. Instinct represents the correspondence
+of this life-force with mere nature, its effort as it were to keep its
+footing and accomplish its destiny in the world of time. Spirit
+represents this same life acting on highest levels, with most vivid
+purpose; seeking and achieving correspondence with the eternal world,
+and realities of the loftiest order yet discovered to be accessible to
+us. We are compelled to use words of this kind; and the proceeding is
+harmless enough so long as we remember that they are abstractions, and
+that we have no real reason to suppose breaks in the life process which
+extends from the infant's first craving for food and shelter to the
+saint's craving for the knowledge of God. This urgent, craving life is
+the dominant characteristic of the psyche. Thought is but the last come
+and least developed of its powers; one among its various responses to
+environment, and ways of laying hold on experience.
+
+This conception of the multiplicity in unity of the psyche, conscious
+and unconscious, is probably one of the most important results of
+recent psychological advance. It means that we cannot any longer in the
+good old way rule off bits or aspects of it, and call them intellect,
+soul, spirit, conscience and so forth; or, on the other hand, refer to
+our "lower" nature as if it were something separate from ourselves. I am
+spirit when I pray, if I pray rightly. I am my lower nature, when my
+thoughts and deeds are swayed by my primitive impulses and physical
+longings, declared or disguised. I am most wholly myself when that
+impulsive nature and that craving spirit are welded into one, subject to
+the same emotional stimulus, directed to one goal. When theologians and
+psychologists, ignoring this unity of the self, set up arbitrary
+divisions--and both classes are very fond of doing so--they are merely
+making diagrams for their own convenience. We ourselves shall probably
+be compelled to do this: and the proceeding is harmless enough, so long
+as we recollect that these diagrams are at best symbolic pictures of
+fact. Specially is it necessary to keep our heads, and refuse to be led
+away by the constant modern talk of the primitive, unconscious,
+foreconscious instinctive and other minds which are so prominent in
+modern psychological literature, or by the spatial suggestions of such
+terms as threshold, complex, channel of discharge: remembering always
+the central unity and non-material nature of that many-faced psychic
+life which is described under these various formulæ.
+
+If we accept this central unity with all its implications, it follows
+that we cannot take our superior and conscious faculties, set them
+apart, and call them "ourselves"; refusing responsibility for the more
+animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with
+such distressing ease and frequency from the deeps, by attributing these
+to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that
+the sophisticated surface-mind which alone we usually recognize is the
+smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least
+important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and
+desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate
+for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic
+unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying
+with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices,
+impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to
+us the extent in which the jungle and the Stone Age are still active in
+our games, our politics and our creeds; how many of our motives are
+still those of primitive man, and how many of our social institutions
+offer him a discreet opportunity of self-expression.
+
+Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of
+religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one
+another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely
+restating the fundamental Christian paradox, that man is truly one, a
+living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; and
+yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic
+natures--that duality which St. Paul calls the old Adam and the new
+Adam. The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the
+earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life
+of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are
+conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise.
+True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of
+the facts. That which one calls original sin, the other calls the
+instinctive mind: but the situation each puts before us is the same. "I
+find a law," says St. Paul, "that when I would do good evil is present
+with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man _but_ I
+see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind....
+With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law
+of sin." Without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said
+in my hearing, "If St. Paul had come to me, I feel I could have helped
+him," I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to
+this, and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more
+psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction; demonstrating
+that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the
+impulsive and the rational life, the many conflicts which sap his
+energy, arise from the persistence within us of the archaic and
+primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many
+stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one
+of us; though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly
+instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety
+and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried
+over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when
+we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive; with
+its outlook of wonder, self-interest and fear, developed under
+conditions of ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. The
+history of primitive man covers millions of years: the history of
+civilized man, a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not
+surprising that the primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the
+plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still the infantile
+foundation of our mental life. Finally, there is the rational life, so
+far as the rational is yet achieved by us; correcting, conflicting with,
+and seeking to refine and control the vigour of primitive impulse.
+
+But if it is to give an account of all the facts psychology must also
+point out, and find place for, the last-comer in the evolutionary
+series: the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual
+consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and
+pointing, not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human
+growth. But it cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as
+something separate from, and wholly unconditioned by, our racial past.
+We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the
+end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which
+St. Paul calls "growing up into the stature of Christ." Here psychology
+is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to
+recognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us. In the
+spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the
+religious consciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we
+perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of this deep germinal
+life. And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward
+the upgrowth of this spiritual life, we must take into account those
+earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue
+underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition
+and explain so many of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that the
+psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven; and that every one of us
+still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many
+of the characters of those stages of development through which the race
+has passed--characters which inevitably give their colour to our
+religious no less than to our social life.
+
+"I desire," says à Kempis, "to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take
+thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and
+unmortified passions depress me. I will in my mind be above all things
+but in despite of myself I am constrained to be beneath, so I unhappy
+man fight with myself and am made grievous to myself while the spirit
+seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath. O what I suffer
+within while I think on heavenly things in my mind; the company of
+fleshly things cometh against me when I pray."[63]
+
+"Oh Master," says the Scholar in Boehme's great dialogue, "the creatures
+that live in me so withhold me, that I cannot wholly yield and give
+myself up as I willingly would."[64]
+
+No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation
+than have these old specialists in the spiritual life.
+
+The bearing of all this on the study of organized religion is of course
+of great importance; and will be discussed in a subsequent section. All
+that I wish to point out now is that the beliefs, and the explanations
+of action, put forward by our rationalizing surface consciousness are
+often mere veils which drape the crudeness of our real desires and
+reactions to life; and that before life can be reintegrated about its
+highest centres, these real beliefs and motives must be tracked down,
+and their humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and the tiger, in
+fact, are not dead in any one of us. In polite persons they are caged,
+which Is a very different thing: and a careful introspection will teach
+us to recognize their snarls and chatterings, their urgent requests for
+more mutton chops or bananas, under the many disguises which they
+assume--disguises which are not infrequently borrowed from ethics or
+from religion. Thus a primitive desire for revenge often masquerades as
+justice, and an unedifying interest in personal safety can be discerned
+in at least some interpretations of atonement, and some aspirations
+towards immortality.[65]
+
+I now go on to a second point. It will already be clear that the modern
+conception of the many-levelled psyche gives us a fresh standpoint from
+which to consider the nature of Sin. It suggests to us, that the essence
+of much sin is conservatism, or atavism: that it is rooted in the
+tendency of the instinctive life to go on, in changed circumstances,
+acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence
+with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our
+best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct,
+the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess; and
+perpetually forces us to use on new and higher levels that machinery of
+habit-formation, that power of implanting tendencies in the plastic
+psyche, to which man owes his earthly dominance. When our unstable
+psychic life relaxes tension and sinks to lower levels than this, and
+it Is always tending so to do, we are relapsing to antique methods of
+response, suitable to an environment which is no longer there. Few
+people go through life without knowing what it is to feel a sudden, even
+murderous, impulse to destroy the obstacle in their path; or seize, at
+all costs, that which they desire. Our ancestors called these uprushes
+the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the Christian soul;
+and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our
+spiritual strength. It is true that every man has within him such a
+tempting spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the
+Zoological Gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell.
+"External Reason," says Boehme, "supposes that hell is far from us. But
+it is near us. Every one carries it in himself."[66] Many of our vices,
+in fact, are simply savage qualities--and some are even savage
+virtues--in their old age. Thus in an organized society the
+acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive
+dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and
+covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar,
+the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the
+great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted
+expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual
+could hardly survive.
+
+When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are
+outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's
+spiritualization, then--whatever they may be--they belong to the body of
+death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump--none
+other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67]
+Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as
+religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich
+declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.
+Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse
+satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The
+violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to
+wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature--the old Adam, in
+fact--leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength. He
+obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with
+the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality
+keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural
+instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures
+came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St.
+Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a
+spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport
+of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a
+certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of
+games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The
+sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent
+in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved:
+failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the
+moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this
+fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London
+provoke the immediate attention of the police.
+
+Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of
+conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its
+conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to
+look at the idea of Salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit
+have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation: on the
+conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if
+he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it, then, from which he
+must be saved?
+
+I think that the answer must be, from conflict: the conflict between the
+pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual
+destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul,
+each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may
+as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts
+and resistances: that the trite verse about "fightings and fears
+within, without" does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive
+mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its
+inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason need some
+reinforcement, some helping power, if they are to conquer and control
+his archaic impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from
+the wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive impulse in its many
+strange forms, is a prime business of religion; sometimes achieved in
+the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower
+process of education. The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of
+the Puritan and the extreme ascetic, where all animal impulse is
+regarded as "sin" and repressed: a proceeding which involves the risk of
+grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a
+bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by
+Jacob Boehme, when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man
+to "harness his fiery energies to the service of the light--" that is to
+say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction,
+harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration:
+this is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic
+conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The
+voice which St. Mechthild heard, saying "Come and be reconciled,"
+expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity.
+
+This need for the conversion or remaking of the instinctive life,
+rather than the achievement of mere beliefs, has always been appreciated
+by real spiritual teachers; who are usually some generations in advance
+of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the "root of evil," the
+heart of the "old man" and best promise of the "new." Here is the raw
+material both of vice and of virtue--namely, a mass of desires and
+cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural
+and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and desire," says William Law,
+"consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature."[70]
+The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set love in order, thou
+that lovest Me!" declared the one law of mental growth.[71] To use for a
+moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the
+first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the
+direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in
+which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast
+setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of
+the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and
+which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard,
+conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and
+higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true
+self-conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness,
+reality and worth.
+
+"Oh, Academicus," says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would
+endorse, "forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a
+plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that
+there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth
+of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives
+within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have
+in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and
+rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a
+wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a
+sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only
+restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall
+offer."[72] Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild
+beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find
+the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert
+turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to
+save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work
+of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been
+directed into a fresh channel of use.
+
+We may now look a little more closely at the character and
+potentialties of our instinctive life: for this life is plainly of the
+highest importance to us, since it will either energize or thwart all
+the efforts of the rational self. Current psychology, even more plainly
+than religion, encourages us to recognize in this powerful instinctive
+nature the real source of our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic
+personal demands, those impulses to action, which condition the full and
+successful life of the natural man. Instincts in the animal and the
+natural man are the methods by which the life force takes care of its
+own interests, insures its own full development, its unimpeded forward
+drive. In so far as we form part of the animal kingdom our own safety,
+property, food, dominance, and the reproduction of our own type, are
+inevitably the first objects of our instinctive care. Civilized life has
+disguised some of these crude demands and the behaviour which is
+inspired by them, but their essential character remains unchanged. Love
+and hate, fear and wonder, self-assertion and self-abasement, the
+gregarious, the acquisitive, the constructive tendencies, are all
+expressions of instinctive feeling; and can be traced back to our
+simplest animal needs.
+
+But instincts are not fixed tendencies: they are adaptable. This can be
+seen clearly in the case of animals whose environment Is artificially
+changed. In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of the pack
+has become loyalty to his master's household. In man, too, there has
+already been obvious modification and sublimation of many instincts.
+The hunting impulse begins in the jungle, and may end in the
+philosopher's exploration of the Infinite. It is the combative instinct
+which drives the reformer headlong against the evils of the world, as it
+once drove two cave men at each others' throats. Love, which begins in
+the mergence of two cells, ends in the saint's supreme discovery, "Thou
+art the Love wherewith the heart loves Thee."[73] The much advertized
+herd instinct may weld us into a mob at the mercy of unreasoning
+passions; but it can also make us living members of the Communion of
+Saints. The appeals of the prophet and the revivalist, the Psalmist's
+"Taste and see," the Baptist's "Change your hearts," are all invitations
+to an alteration in the direction of desire, which would turn our
+instinctive energies in a new direction and begin the domestication of
+the human soul for God.
+
+This, then, is the real business of conversion and of the character
+building that succeeds it; the harnessing of instinct to idea and its
+direction into new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting the
+turmoil of man's merely egoistic ambitions, anxieties and emotional
+desires into fresh forms of creative energy, and transferring their
+interest from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven
+deadly sins of Christian ethics--Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth,
+Gluttony, and Lust--represent not so much deliberate wrongfulness, as
+the outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self-regarding
+instincts; unbridled self-assertion, ruthless acquisitiveness, and
+undisciplined indulgence of sense. The traditional evangelical virtues
+of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience which sum up the demands of the
+spiritual life exactly oppose them. Over against the self-assertion of
+the proud and angry is set the ideal of humble obedience, with its wise
+suppleness and abnegation of self-will. Over against the acquisitiveness
+of the covetous and envious is set the ideal of inward poverty, with its
+liberation from the narrow self-interest of I, Me and Mine. Over against
+the sensual indulgence of the greedy, lustful and lazy is set the ideal
+of chastity, which finds all creatures pure to enjoy, since it sees them
+in God, and God in all creatures. Yet all this, rightly understood, is
+no mere policy of repression. It is rather a rational policy of release,
+freeing for higher activities instinctive force too often thrown away.
+It is giving the wild beast his work to do, training him. Since the
+instincts represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to achieve
+self-protection and self-realization, it is plain that the true
+regeneration of the psyche, its redirection from lower to higher levels,
+can never be accomplished without their help. We only rise to the top of
+our powers when the whole man acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or
+an instinctive need.
+
+Further, a complete and ungraduated response to stimulus--an
+"all-or-none reaction"--is characteristic of the instinctive life and of
+the instinctive life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give
+themselves wholly to it; and so display a power far beyond that of the
+critical and the controlled. Thus, fear or rage will often confer
+abnormal strength and agility. A really dominant instinct is a veritable
+source of psycho-physical energy, unifying and maintaining in vigour all
+the activities directed to its fulfilment.[74] A young man in love is
+stimulated not only to emotional ardour, but also to hard work in the
+interests of the future home. The explorer develops amazing powers of
+endurance; the inventor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital
+forces, and may carry on for long periods without sleep or food. If we
+apply this law to the great examples of the spiritual life, we see in
+the vigour and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests a
+mark of instinctive action; and in the power, the indifference to
+hardship which these selves develop, the result of unification, of an
+"all-or-none" response to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It
+helps us to understand the cheerful austerities of the true ascetic; the
+superhuman achievement of St. Paul, little hindered by the "thorn in the
+flesh"; the career of St. Joan of Arc; the way in which St. Teresa or
+St. Ignatius, tormented by ill-health, yet brought their great
+conceptions to birth; the powers of resistance displayed by George Fox
+and other Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slessor living and working
+bare-foot and bare-headed under the tropical sun, disdaining the use of
+mosquito nets, eating native food, and taking with impunity daily risks
+fatal to the average European.[75] It shows us, too, why the great
+heroes of the spiritual life so seldom think out their positions, or
+husband their powers. They act because they are impelled: often in
+defiance of all prudent considerations! yet commonly with an amazing
+success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by "the impulses
+and urgings of an undying ambition" to save souls. What was this impulse
+and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a
+sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced
+will determine its value for life; but its character is much the same in
+the convert at a revival, in the postulant's vivid sense of vocation and
+consequent break with the world? in the disinterested man of science
+consecrated to the search for truth, and in the apostle's self-giving to
+the service of God, with its answering gift of new strength and
+fruitfulness. Its secret, and indeed the secret of all transcendence is
+implied In the direction of the old English mystic: "Mean God all, all
+God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God,"[76]
+The over-belief, the religious formula in which this instinctive
+passion is expressed, is comparatively unimportant The revivalist,
+wholly possessed by concrete and anthropomorphic ideas of God which are
+impossible to a man of different--and, as we suppose,
+superior--education, can yet, because of the burning reality with which
+he lives towards the God so strangely conceived, infect those with whom
+he comes in contact with the spiritual life.
+
+We are now in a position to say that the first necessity of the life of
+the Spirit is the sublimation of the instinctive life, involving the
+transfer of our interest and energy to new objectives, the giving of our
+old vigour to new longings and new loves. It appears that the invitation
+of religion to a change of heart, rather than a change of belief, is
+founded on solid psychological laws. I need not dwell on the way in
+which Divine love, as the saints have understood it, answers to the
+complete sublimation of our strongest natural passion; or the extent in
+which the highest experiences of the religious life satisfy man's
+instinctive craving for self-realization within a greater Reality, how
+he feels himself to be fed with a mysterious food, quickened by a fresh
+dower of life, assured of his own safety within a friendly universe,
+given a new objective for his energy. It is notorious that one of the
+most striking things about a truly spiritual man is, that he has
+achieved a certain stability which others lack. In him, the central
+craving of the psyche for more life and more love has reached its
+bourne; instead of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire which
+may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it He loves the thing which he
+ought to love, wants to do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all
+aspects of his personality satisfied in one objective. Every one has
+really a forced option between the costly effort to achieve this
+sublimation of impulse, this unification of the self on spiritual
+levels, and the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation to
+the animal instincts and unordered cravings of our many-levelled being.
+We cannot stand still; and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in
+mind of all the backward-tending possibilities collectively to be
+thought of as sin, and explains to us why sloth, lack of spiritual
+energy, is held by religion to be one of the capital forms of human
+wrongness.
+
+I go on to another point, which I regard as of special importance.
+
+It must not be supposed that the life of the Spirit begins and with the
+sublimation of, the instinctive and emotional life; though this is
+indeed for it a central necessity. Nor must we take it for granted that
+the apparent redirection of impulse to spiritual objects is always and
+inevitably an advance. All who are or may be concerned with the
+spiritual training, help, and counselling of others ought clearly to
+recognize that there are elements in religious experience which
+represent, not a true sublimation, but either disguised primitive
+cravings and ideas, or uprushes from lower instinctive levels: for these
+experiences have their special dangers. As we shall see when we come to
+their more detailed study, devotional practices tend to produce that
+state which psychologists call mobility of the threshold of
+consciousness; and may easily permit the emergence of natural
+inclinations and desires, of which the self does not recognize the real
+character. As a matter of fact, a good deal of religious emotion is of
+this kind. Instances are the childish longing for mere protection, for a
+sort of supersensual petting, the excessive desire for shelter and rest,
+voiced in too many popular hymns; the subtle form of self-assertion
+which can be detected in some claims to intercourse with God--e.g. the
+celebrated conversation of Angela of Foligno with the Holy Ghost;[77]
+the thinly veiled human feelings which find expression in the personal
+raptures of a certain type of pious literature, and in what has been
+well described as the "divine duet" type of devotion. Many, though not
+all of the supernormal phenomena of mysticism are open to the same
+suspicion: and the Church's constant insistence on the need of
+submitting these to some critical test before, accepting them at face
+value, is based on a most wholesome scepticism. Though a sense of meek
+dependence on enfolding love and power is the very heart of religion,
+and no intense spiritual life is possible unless it contain a strong
+emotional element, it is of first importance to be sure that its
+affective side represents a true sublimation of human feelings and
+desires, and not merely an oblique indulgence of lower cravings.
+
+Again, we have to remember that the instinctive self, powerful though it
+be? does not represent the sum total of human possibility. The maximum
+of man's strength is not reached until all the self's powers, the
+instinctive and also the rational, are united and set on one objective;
+for then only is he safe from the insidious inner conflict between
+natural craving and conscious purpose which saps his energies, and is
+welded into a complete and harmonious instrument of life, "The source of
+power," says Dr. Hadfield in "The Spirit," "lies not in instinctive
+emotion alone, but in instinctive emotion expressed in a way with which
+the whole man can, for the time being at least, identify himself.
+Ultimately, this is impossible without the achievement of a harmony of
+all the instincts _and_ the approval of the reason."[78]
+
+Thus we see that any unresolved conflict or divorce between the
+religious instinct and the intellect will mar the full power of the
+spiritual life: and that an essential part of the self's readjustment to
+reality must consist in the uniting of these partners, as intellect and
+intuition are united in creative art. The noblest music, most satisfying
+poetry are neither the casual results of uncriticized inspiration nor
+the deliberate fabrications of the brain, but are born of the perfect
+fusion of feeling and of thought; for the greatest and most fruitful
+minds are those which are rich and active on both levels--which are
+perpetually raising blind impulse to the level of conscious purpose,
+uniting energy with skill, and thus obtaining the fiery energies of the
+instinctive life for the highest uses. So too the spiritual life is only
+seen in its full worth and splendour when the whole man is subdued to
+it, and one object satisfies the utmost desires of heart and mind. The
+spiritual impulse must not be allowed to become the centre of a group of
+specialized feelings, a devotional complex, in opposition to, or at
+least alienated from, the intellectual and economic life. It must on the
+contrary brim over, invading every department of the self. When the
+mind's loftiest and most ideal thought, its conscious vivid aspiration,
+has been united with the more robust qualities of the natural man; then,
+and only then, we have the material for the making of a possible saint.
+
+We must also remember that, important as our primitive and instinctive
+life may be--and we should neither despise nor neglect it--its religious
+impulses, taken alone, no more represent the full range of man's
+spiritual possibilities than the life of the hunting tribe or the
+African kraal represent his full social possibilities. We may, and
+should, acknowledge and learn from our psychic origins. We must never be
+content to rest in them. Though in many respects, mental as well as
+physical, we are animals still; yet we are animals with a possible
+future in the making, both corporate and individual, which we cannot yet
+define. All other levels of life assure us that the impulsive nature is
+peculiarly susceptible to education. Not only can the whole group of
+instincts which help self-fulfilment be directed to higher levels,
+united and subdued to a dominant emotional interest; but merely
+instinctive actions can, by repetition and control, be raised to the
+level of habit and be given improved precision and complexity. This, of
+course, is a primary function of devotional exercises; training the
+first blind instinct for God to the complex responses of the life of
+prayer. Instinct is at best a rough and ready tool of life: practice is
+required if it is to produce its best results. Observe, for instance,
+the poor efforts of the young bird to escape capture; and compare this
+with the finished performance of the parent.[79] Therefore in estimating
+man's capacity for spiritual response, we must reckon not only his
+innate instinct for God, but also his capacity for developing this
+instinct on the level of habit; educating and using its latent powers to
+the best advantage. Especially on the contemplative side of life,
+education does great things for us; or would do, if we gave it the
+chance. Here, then, the rational mind and conscious will must play their
+part in that great business of human transcendence, which is man's
+function within the universal plan.
+
+It is true that the deep-seated human tendency to God may best be
+understood as the highest form of that out-going instinctive craving of
+the psyche for more life and love which, on whatever level it be
+experienced, is always one. But some external stimulus seems to be
+needed, if this deep tendency is to be brought up into consciousness;
+and some education, if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus and
+this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition; that is to say,
+by religious belief and practice. Or they may come from the countless
+minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few
+of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or
+environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual
+order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied,
+the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule,
+this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of
+conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and
+reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. There is, however,
+nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself. It has its parallel
+in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a
+method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the
+union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.
+
+Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for
+the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the
+Divine. But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very
+little. Thus we see that the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" spoke as
+a true psychologist when he said that "a secret blind love pressing
+towards God" held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do;
+"for He may well be loved but not thought--by love He may be gotten and
+holden, but by thought never."[80] Nevertheless, if that consistency of
+deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by
+us, every man's conception of the God Whom he serves ought to be the
+very best of which he is capable. Because ideas which we recognize as
+partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of
+other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and
+seeking a Reality which fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and
+beauty, as well, as our instinct for good. It is easy, natural, and
+always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a
+little bit below its highest possible. On one hand to wallow in easy
+loves, rest in traditional formulæ, or enjoy a "moving type of devotion"
+which makes no intellectual demand. On the other, to accept without
+criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in
+the furrow of intelligent agnosticism.
+
+Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre
+levels; reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to
+the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for
+comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and
+satisfying its devotional inclinations by any "long psalter unmindfully
+mumbled in the teeth."[81] And a certain type of intelligent people have
+an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the
+traditional notions of the past. In so far as all this represents a
+slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin: at
+any rate, it lacks the true character of spiritual life. Such life
+involves growth, sublimation, the constant and difficult redirection of
+energy from lower to higher levels; a real effort to purge motive, see
+things more truly, face and resolve the conflict between the deep
+instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the
+nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do
+not do with them the very best that they possibly can: and the penalty
+of this sin must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The laws of
+apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to
+our sensual impressions: what we bring with us will condition what we
+obtain.
+
+"We behold that which we are!" said Ruysbroeck long ago.[82] The mind's
+content and its ruling feeling-tone, says psychology, all its memories
+and desires, mingle with all incoming impressions, colour them and
+condition those which our consciousness selects. This intervention of
+memory and emotion in our perceptions is entirely involuntary; and
+explains why the devotee of any specific creed always finds in the pure
+immediacy of religious experience the special marks of his own belief.
+In most acts of perception--and probably, too, in the intuitional
+awareness of religious experience--that which the mind brings is bulkier
+if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest
+analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this
+machinery of apperception--humbling though its realization must be to
+the eager idealist--does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel
+us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the
+contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological
+puzzles; whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual
+experiences we should otherwise miss, because it gives to us the means
+of interpreting them. Pure immediacy, as such, is almost ungraspable by
+us. As man, not as pure spirit, the High Priest entered the Holy of
+Holies: that is to say, he took to the encounter of the Infinite the
+finite machinery of sense. This limitation is ignored by us at our
+peril. The great mystics, who have sought to strip off all image and
+reach--as they say--the Bare Pure Truth, have merely become inarticulate
+in their effort to tell us what it was that they knew. "A light I cannot
+measure, goodness without form!" exclaims Jacopone da Todi.[83] "The
+Light of the _World_--the Good _Shepherd_," says St. John, bringing a
+richly furnished poetic consciousness to the vision of God; and at once
+gives us something on which to lay hold.
+
+Generally speaking, it is only in so far as we bring with us a plan of
+the universe that we can make anything of it; and only in so far as we
+bring with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire for Him, can we
+apprehend Him--so true is it that we do, indeed, behold that which we
+are, find that which we seek, receive that for which we ask. Feeling,
+thought, and tradition must all contribute to the full working out of
+religious experience. The empty soul facing an unconditioned Reality may
+achieve freedom but assuredly achieves nothing else: for though the
+self-giving of Spirit is abundant, we control our own powers of
+reception. This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind with the
+noblest possible thoughts about God, refusing unworthy and narrow
+conceptions, and keeping alight the fire of His love. We shall find that
+which we seek: hence a richly stored religious consciousness, the lofty
+conceptions of the truth seeker, the vision of the artist, the boundless
+charity and joy in life of the lover of his kind, really contribute to
+the fulness of the spiritual life; both on its active and on its
+contemplative side. As the self reaches the first degrees of the
+prayerful or recollected state, memory-elements, released from the
+competition of realistic experience, enter the foreconscious field.
+Among these will be the stored remembrances of past meditations,
+reading, and experiences, all giving an affective tone conducive to new
+and deeper apprehensions. The pure in heart see God, because they bring
+with them that radiant and undemanding purity: because the storehouse of
+ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter,
+is free from conflicting desires and images, perfectly controlled by
+this feeling-tone.
+
+It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports, from
+the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic
+overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral
+purgation, as the beginning of all personal spiritual life. Man does
+not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher
+levels of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard; complexes of
+which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces
+which they enchain. He must, then, examine without flinching his
+impulsive life, and know what is in his heart, before he is in a
+position to change it. "The light which shows us our sins," says George
+Fox, "is the light that heals us." All those repressed cravings, those
+quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust
+into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the
+surface and, in the language of psychology, "abreacted"; in the language
+of religion, confessed. The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges
+on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of
+repressing it. The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the
+hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their
+elements brought up into consciousness and faced: and only the self
+which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.
+It is a process of spiritual hygiene.
+
+Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the
+cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives,
+of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge. But
+the emotional colour of this process when it is undertaken in the full
+conviction of the power and holiness of that life-force which we have
+not used as well as we might, and with a humble and loving consciousness
+of our deficiency, our falling short, will be totally different from the
+feeling state of those who conceive themselves to be searching for the
+merely animal sources of their mental and spiritual life. "Meekness in
+itself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing," "is naught else but a true
+knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is. For surely whoso might
+verily see and feel himself as he is, he should verily be meek.
+Therefore swink and sweat all that thou canst and mayst for to get thee
+a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that
+soon after that thou shalt have a true knowing and feeling of God as he
+is."[84]
+
+The essence, then, of repentance and purification of character consists
+first in the identification, and next in the sublimation of our
+instinctive powers and tendencies; their detachment from egoistic
+desires and dedication to new purposes. We should not starve or repress
+the abounding life within us; but, relieving it of its concentration on
+the here-and-now, give its attention and its passion a wider circle of
+interest over which to range, a greater love to which it can consecrate
+its growing powers. We do not yet know what the limit of such
+sublimation may be. But we do know that it is the true path of life's
+advancement, that already we owe to it our purest loves, our loveliest
+visions, and our noblest deeds. When such feeling, such vision and such
+act are united and transfigured in God, and find in contact with His
+living Spirit the veritable sources of their power; then, man will have
+resolved his inner conflict, developed his true potentialities, and live
+a harmonious because a spiritual life.
+
+We end, therefore, upon this conception of the psyche as the living
+force within us; a storehouse of ancient memories and animal tendencies,
+yet plastic, adaptable, ever pressing on and ever craving for more life
+and more love. Only the life of reality, the life rooted in communion
+with God, will ever satisfy that hungry spirit, or provide an adequate
+objective for its persistent onward push.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 62: Ennead IV. 8. 5.]
+
+[Footnote 63: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 53.]
+
+[Footnote 64: Boehme, "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 65: Unamuno has not hesitated to base the whole of religion on
+the instinct of self-preservation: but this must I think be regarded as
+an exaggerated view. See "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in
+Peoples," Caps. 3 and 4.]
+
+[Footnote 66: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 98.]
+
+[Footnote 67: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 36.]
+
+[Footnote 68: E. Gardner: "St. Catherine of Siena," p. 20.]
+
+[Footnote 69: "Life of St. Teresa," by Herself, Cap. 30.]
+
+[Footnote 70: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law" p. 59.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Jacopone da Todi, Lauda 90.]
+
+[Footnote 72: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p. 123.]
+
+[Footnote 73:
+
+    "Amor tu se'quel ama
+     donde lo cor te ama."
+
+--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 81.]
+
+[Footnote 74: Cf. Watts: "Echo Personalities," for several illustrations
+of this law.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Livingstone: "Mary Slessor of Calabar," p. 131.]
+
+[Footnote 76: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap, 40.]
+
+[Footnote 77: "And very often did He say unto me, 'Bride and daughter,
+sweet art thou unto Me, I love thee better than any other who is in the
+valley of Spoleto.'" ("The Divine Consolations of Blessed Angela of
+Foligno," p. 160.)]
+
+[Footnote 78: "The Spirit," edited by B.H. Streeter, p. 93.]
+
+[Footnote 79: Cf. B. Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 80: Op. cit., Cap. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 81: "Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 37.]
+
+[Footnote 82: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 83: Lauda 91.]
+
+[Footnote 84: Op. cit., Cap. 13.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+(II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION
+
+
+In the last chapter we considered what the modern analysis of mind had
+to tell us about the nature of the spiritual life, the meaning of sin
+and of salvation. We now go on to another aspect of this subject:
+namely, the current conception of the unconscious mind as a dominant
+factor of our psychic life, and of the extent and the conditions in
+which its resources can be tapped, and its powers made amenable to the
+direction of the conscious mind. Two principal points must here be
+studied. The first is the mechanism of that which is called autistic
+thinking and its relation to religious experience: the second, the laws
+of suggestion and their bearing upon the spiritual life. Especially must
+we consider from this point of view the problems which are resumed under
+the headings of prayer, contemplation, and grace. We shall find
+ourselves compelled to examine the nature of meditation and
+recollection, as spiritual persons have always practised them; and, to
+give, if we can, a psychological account of many of their classic
+conceptions and activities. We shall therefore be much concerned with
+those experiences which are often called mystical, but which I prefer to
+call in general contemplative and intuitive; because they extend, as we
+shall find, without a break from the simplest type of mental prayer, the
+most general apprehensions of the Spirit, to the most fully developed
+examples of religious mono-ideism. To place all those intuitions and
+perceptions of which God or His Kingdom are the objects in a class apart
+from all other intuitions and perceptions, and call them "mystical," is
+really to beg the question from the start. The psychic mechanisms
+involved in them are seen in action in many other types of mental
+activity; and will not, in my opinion, be understood until they are
+removed from the category of the supernatural, and studied as the
+movements of the one spirit of life--here directed towards a
+transcendent objective. And further we must ever keep in mind, since we
+are now dealing with specific spiritual experiences, deeply exploring
+the contemplative soul, that though psychology can criticize these
+experiences, and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff--can tell
+us, too, a good deal about the machinery by which we lay hold of them,
+and the best way to use it--it cannot explain the experiences, pronounce
+upon their Object, or reduce that Object to its own terms.
+
+We may some day have a valid psychology of religion, though we are far
+from it yet: but when we do, it will only be true within its own system
+of reference. It will deal with the fact of the spiritual life from one
+side only. And as a discussion of the senses and their experience
+explains nothing about the universe by which these senses are impressed,
+so all discussion of spiritual faculty and experience remains within the
+human radius and neither invalidates nor accounts for the spiritual
+world. When the psychologist has finished telling us all that he knows
+about the rules which govern our mental life, and how to run it best, he
+is still left face to face with the mystery of that life, and of that
+human power of surrender to Spiritual Reality which is the very essence
+of religion. Humility remains, therefore, not only the most becoming but
+also the most scientific attitude for investigators in this field. We
+must, then, remember the inevitably symbolic nature of the language
+which we are compelled to use in our attempt to describe these
+experiences; and resist all temptation to confuse the handy series of
+labels with which psychology has furnished us, with the psychic unity to
+which they will be attached.
+
+Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent discoveries in the mental
+region will turn out to be that which is gradually revealing to us the
+extent and character of the unconscious mind; and the possibility of
+tapping its resources, bending its plastic shape to our own mould. It
+seems as though the laws of its being are at last beginning to be
+understood; giving a new content to the ancient command "Know thyself."
+We are learning that psycho-therapy, which made such immense strides
+during the war, is merely one of the directions in which this knowledge
+may be used, and this control exercised by us. That regnancy of spirit
+over matter towards which all idealists must look, is by way of coming
+at least to a partial fulfilment in this control of the conscious over
+the unconscious, and thus over the bodily life. Such control is indeed
+an aspect of our human freedom, of the creative power which has been put
+into our hands. In all this religion must be interested: because, once
+more, it is the business of religion to regenerate the whole man and win
+him for Reality.
+
+If we could get rid of the idea that the unconscious is a separate, and
+in some sort hostile or animal entity set over against the conscious
+mind; and realize that it is, simply, our whole personality, with the
+exception of the scrap that happens at any moment to be in
+consciousness--then, perhaps, we should more easily grasp the importance
+of exploring and mobilizing its powers. As it is, most of us behave like
+the owners of a well-furnished room, who ignore every aspect of it
+except the window looking out upon the street. This we keep polished,
+and drape with the best curtains that we can afford. But the room upon
+which we sedulously turn our backs contains all that we have inherited,
+all that we have accumulated, many tools which are rusting for want of
+use; machinery too which, left to itself, may function satisfactorily,
+or may get out of order and work to results that we neither desire nor
+dream. The room is twilit. Only by the window is a little patch of
+light. Beyond this there is a fringe of vague, fluctuating, sometimes
+prismatic radiance: an intermediate region, where the images and things
+which most interest us have their place, just within range, or the
+fringe of the field of consciousness. In the darkest corners the
+machinery that we do not understand, those possessions of which we are
+least proud, and those pictures we hate to look at, are hidden away.
+
+This little parable represents, more or less, that which psychology
+means by the conscious, foreconscious, and unconscious regions of the
+psyche. It must not be pressed, or too literally interpreted; but it
+helps us to remember the graded character of our consciousness, its
+fluctuating level, and the fact that, as well as the outward-looking
+mind which alone we usually recognize, there is also the psychic matrix
+from which it has been developed, the inward-looking mind, caring for a
+variety of interests of which we hardly, as we say, think at all. We
+know as yet little about this mysterious psychic whole: the inner nature
+of which is only very incompletely given to us in the fluctuating
+experiences of consciousness. But we do know that it, too, receives at
+least a measure of the light and the messages coming in by the window of
+our wits: that it is the home of memory instinct and habit, the source
+of conduct, and that its control and modification form the major part of
+the training of character. Further, it is sensitive, plastic, accessible
+to impressions, and unforgetting.
+
+Consider now that half-lit region which is called the foreconscious
+mind; for this is of special interest to the spiritual life. It is, in
+psychological language, the region of autistic as contrasted with
+realistic thought.[85] That is to say, it is the agent of reverie and
+meditation; it is at work in all our brooding states, from day-dream to
+artistic creation. Such autistic thought is dominated not by logic or
+will, but by feeling. It achieves its results by intuition, and has its
+reasons which the surface mind knows not of. Here, in this
+fringe-region--which alone seems fully able to experience adoration and
+wonder, or apprehend the values we call holiness, beauty or love--is the
+source of that intuition of the heart to which the mystic owes the love
+which is knowledge, and the knowledge which is love. Here is the true
+home of inspiration and invention. Here, by a process which is seldom
+fully conscious save in its final stages, the poet's creations are
+prepared, and thence presented in the form of inspiration to the reason;
+which--if he be a great artist--criticizes them, before they are given
+as poems to the world. Indeed, in all man's apprehensions of the
+transcendental these two states of the psyche must co-operate if he is
+to realize his full powers: and it is significant that to this
+foreconscious region religion, in its own special language, has always
+invited him to retreat, if he would know his own soul and thus commune
+with his God. Over and over again it assures him under various
+metaphors, that he must turn within, withdraw from the window, meet the
+inner guest; and such a withdrawal is the condition of all
+contemplation.
+
+Consider the opening of Jacob Boehme's great dialogue on the
+Supersensual Life.
+
+"The Scholar said to his Master: How may I come to the supersensual
+life, that I may see God and hear Him speak?
+
+"His Master said: When thou canst throw thyself for a moment into that
+where no creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh.
+
+"The Scholar said: Is that near at hand or far off?
+
+"The Master said: It is in thee, if thou canst for a while cease from
+all thinking and willing, thou shalt hear the unspeakable words of God.
+
+"The Scholar said: How can I hear when I stand still from thinking and
+willing?
+
+"The Master said: When thou standest still from the thinking and willing
+of self, then the eternal hearing, seeing and speaking will be revealed
+in thee."[86]
+
+In this passage we have a definite invitation to retreat from
+volitional to affective thought: from the window to the quiet place
+where "no creature dwelleth," and in Patmore's phrase "the night of
+thought becomes the light of perception."[87] This fringe-region or
+foreconscious is in fact the organ of contemplation, as the realistic
+outward looking mind is the organ of action. Most men go through life
+without conceiving, far less employing, the rich possibilities which are
+implicit in it. Yet here, among the many untapped resources of the self,
+lie our powers of response to our spiritual environment: powers which
+are kept by the tyrannical interests of everyday life below the
+threshold of full consciousness, and never given a chance to emerge.
+Here take place those searching experiences of the "inner life" which
+seem moonshine or morbidity to those who have not known them.
+
+The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious
+experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found
+to have expected this experience to be given to them without any
+deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. They have lived from
+childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have
+never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences
+with any other world than that of sense. Yet all normal men and women
+possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the
+transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty or love. In
+some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is
+latent and must be developed in the right way. In others again it may
+exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic outlook; gathering
+way until it claims its rights at last in a psychic storm. Its
+emergence, however achieved, is a part--and for our true life, by far
+the most important part--of that outcropping and overflowing into
+consciousness of the marginal faculties which is now being recognized as
+essential to all artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too,
+a large part in the regulation of mental and bodily health.
+
+All the great religions have implicitly understood--though without
+analysis--the vast importance of these spiritual intuitions and
+faculties lying below the surface of the everyday mind; and have
+perfected machinery tending to secure their release and their training.
+This is of two kinds: first, religious ceremonial, addressing itself to
+corporate feeling; next the discipline of meditation and prayer, which
+educates the individual to the same ends, gradually developing the
+powers of the foreconscious region, steadying them, and bringing them
+under the control of the purified will. Without some such education,
+widely as its details may vary, there can be no real living of the
+spiritual life.
+
+    "A going out into the life of sense
+     Prevented the exercise of earnest realization."[88]
+
+Psychologists sometimes divide men into the two extreme classes of
+extroverts and introverts. The extrovert is the typical active; always
+leaning out of the window and setting up contacts with the outside
+world. His thinking is mainly realistic. That is to say, it deals with
+the data of sense. The introvert is the typical contemplative,
+predominantly interested in the inner world. His thinking is mainly
+autistic, dealing with the results of intuition and feeling, working
+these up into new structures and extorting from them new experiences. He
+is at home in the foreconscious, has its peculiar powers under control;
+and instinctively obedient to the mystic command to sink into the ground
+of the soul, he leans towards those deep wells of his own being which
+plunge into the unconscious foundations of life. By this avoidance of
+total concentration on the sense world--though material obtained from it
+must as a matter of fact enter into all, even his most "spiritual"
+creations--he seems able to attend to the messages which intuition picks
+up from other levels of being. It is significant that nearly all
+spiritual writers use this very term of introversion, which psychology
+has now adopted as the most accurate that it can find, in a favourable,
+indeed laudatory, sense. By it they intend to describe the healthy
+expansion of the inner life, the development of the soul's power of
+attention to the spiritual, which is characteristic of those real men
+and women of prayer whom Ruysbroeck describes as:--
+
+    "Gazing inward with an eye uplifted and open to the Eternal Truth
+    Inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and in utter peace."[89]
+
+It is certain that no one who wholly lacks this power of retreat from
+the surface, and has failed thus to mobilize his foreconscious energies,
+can live a spiritual life. This is why silence and meditation play so
+large a part in all sane religious discipline. But the ideal state, a
+state answering to that rhythm of work and prayer which should be the
+norm of a mature spirituality, is one in which we have achieved that
+mental flexibility and control which puts us in full possession of our
+autistic _and_ our realistic powers; balancing and unifying the inner
+and the outer world.
+
+This being so, it is worth while to consider in more detail the
+character of foreconscious thought.
+
+Foreconscious thinking, as it commonly occurs in us, with its unchecked
+illogical stream of images and ideas, moving towards no assigned end,
+combined in no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call day-dream.
+But where a definite wish or purpose, an _end_, dominates this reverie
+and links up its images and ideas into a cycle, we get in combination
+all the valuable properties both of affective and of directed thinking;
+although the reverie or contemplation place in the fringe-region of our
+mental life, and in apparent freedom from the control of the conscious
+reason. The object of recollection and meditation, which are the first
+stages of mental prayer, is to set going such a series and to direct it
+towards an assigned end: and this first inward-turning act and
+self-orientation are voluntary, though the activities which they set up
+are not. "You must know, my daughters," says St. Teresa, "that this is
+no supernatural act but depends on our will; and that therefore we can
+do it, with that ordinary assistance of God which we need for all our
+acts and even for our good thoughts."[90]
+
+Consider for a moment what happens in prayer. I pass over the simple
+recitation of verbal prayers, which will better be dealt with when we
+come to consider the institutional framework of the spiritual life. We
+are now concerned with mental prayer or orison; the simplest of those
+degrees of contemplation which may pass gradually into mystical
+experience, and are at least in some form a necessity of any real and
+actualized spiritual life. Such prayer is well defined by the mystics,
+as "a devout intent directed to God."[91] What happens in it? All
+writers on the science of prayer observe, that the first necessity is
+Recollection; which, in a rough and ready way, we may render as
+concentration, or perhaps in the special language of psychology as
+"contention." The mind is called in from external interests and
+distractions, one by one the avenues of sense are closed, till the hunt
+of the world is hardly perceived by it. I need not labour this
+description, for it is a state of which we must all have experience: but
+those who wish to see it described with the precision of genius, need
+only turn to St. Teresa's "Way of Perfection." Having achieved this, we
+pass gradually into the condition of deep withdrawal variously called
+Simplicity or Quiet; a state in which the attention is quietly and
+without effort directed to God, and the whole self as it were held in
+His presence. This presence is given, dimly or clearly, in intuition.
+The actual prayer used will probably consist--again to use technical
+language--of "affective acts and aspirations"; short phrases repeated
+and held, perhaps expressing penitence, humility, adoration or love, and
+for the praying self charged with profound significance.
+
+"If we would intentively pray for getting of good," says "The Cloud of
+Unknowing," "let us cry either with word or with thought or with desire,
+nought else nor on more words but this word God.... Study thou not for
+no words, for so shouldst thou never come to thy purpose nor to this
+work, for it is never got by study, but all only by grace."[92]
+
+Now the question naturally arises, how does this recollected state, this
+alogical brooding on a spiritual theme, exceed in religions value the
+orderly saying of one's prayers? And the answer psychology suggests is,
+that more of us, not less, is engaged in such a spiritual act: that not
+only the conscious attention, but the foreconscious region too is then
+thrown open to the highest sources of life. We are at last learning to
+recognize the existence of delicate mental processes which entirely
+escape the crude methods of speech. Reverie as a genuine thought process
+is beginning to be studied with the attention it deserves, and new
+understanding of prayer must result. By its means powers of perception
+and response ordinarily latent are roused to action; and thus the whole
+life is enriched. That faculty in us which corresponds, not with the
+busy life of succession but with the eternal sources of power, gets its
+chance. "Though the soul," says Von Hügel, "cannot abidingly abstract
+itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself
+in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of direct
+preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and simplification
+to the soul."[93]
+
+True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet surrender to reality, "is
+rest to the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body;
+nourishment and refreshment."[94] Psychology endorses the constant
+statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one need hope to live
+a spiritual life who cannot find a little time each day for this retreat
+from the window, this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen "with
+the forces of the soul," as Ruysbroeck puts it, "gathered into unity of
+the Spirit."[95] Under these conditions, and these only, the intuitive,
+creative, artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the highest
+ends: and in these powers rather than the rational our best chance of
+apprehending eternal values abides, "Taste and _see_ that the Lord is
+sweet." "Be still! be still! and _know_ that I am God!"
+
+Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activities are of such
+paramount interest to the spiritual life, we may before we go on glance
+at one or two of its characteristics. And first we notice that the fact
+that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge in the mental and
+contemplative type of prayer explains why it is that even the most
+devout persons are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst
+engaged in it. Very often, they are utterly unable to keep their
+attention fixed; and the reason of this is, that conscious attention and
+thought are not the faculties primarily involved. What is involved, is
+reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to depart from its assigned
+end and drift into mere day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or
+some intruding image starts a new train of associations. The religious
+mind is distressed by this constant failure to look steadily at that
+which alone it wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that
+the machinery used is affective, and obedient to the rise and fall of
+feeling rather than the control of the will. "By love shall He be gotten
+and holden, by thought never."
+
+Next, consider for a moment the way in which the foreconscious does and
+must present its apprehensions to consciousness. Its cognitions of the
+spiritual are in the nature of pure immediacy, of uncriticized contacts:
+and the best and greatest of them seem to elude altogether that
+machinery of speech and image which has been developed through the life
+of sense. The well-known language of spiritual writers about the divine
+darkness or ignorance is an acknowledgment of this. God is "known
+darkly." Our experience of Eternity is "that of which nothing can be
+said." It is "beyond feeling" and "beyond knowledge," a certitude known
+in the ground of the soul, and so forth. It is indeed true that the
+spiritual world is for the human mind a transcendent world, does differ
+utterly in kind from the best that the world of succession is able to
+give us; as we know once for all when we establish a contact with it,
+however fleeting. But constantly the foreconscious--which, as we shall
+do well to remember, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of the
+poem, and the creative phantasy--works up its transcendent intuitions in
+symbolic form. For this purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of
+speech, sometimes that of image. As our ordinary reveries constantly
+proceed by way of an interior conversation or narrative, so the content
+of spiritual contemplation is often expressed in dialogue, in which
+memory and belief are fused with the fruit of perception. The "Dialogue
+of St. Catherine of Siena," the "Life of Suso," and the "Imitation of
+Christ," all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed
+illustrations of it might be found in every school and period of
+religious literature.
+
+Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spontaneous forms of autistic
+thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their
+consciousness of direct communion with God. I need not point out how
+easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and
+Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their
+characteristic experience. "Blessed is that soul," says à Kempis, "that
+heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of
+consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and
+take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the
+Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the
+most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such
+a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate
+presence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the
+contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as
+it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude
+thrown open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have
+already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.
+
+Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the
+experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather
+than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the
+material. Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it
+is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in
+those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of
+those experiences. But many minds are, as it were, their own religious
+artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to
+their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes
+be for them that--to revert again to our original simile--the self turns
+from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the
+time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the
+room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this
+happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious
+day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout
+people who tend to visualization have probably known. When the break
+with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in
+which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.
+The Bible is full of examples of this. Good historic instances are the
+visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first
+contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and
+emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the
+visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this
+type.[97]
+
+I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme
+types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is
+with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may
+live it. But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within
+limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is
+inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is
+neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as
+superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our
+neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic world of traditional
+piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial
+heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than
+the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy. We may be sure
+that both are more characteristic of the image-making and
+structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate
+and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value--or the value of
+any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived--abides wholly in
+the content: the quality of the material thus worked up. The rich
+nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will
+express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a
+veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life. Its psychic
+structures--however logic may seek to discredit them--will convey
+spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak
+of illumination. The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the
+religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored. It
+is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the
+field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a
+revelation. The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with
+amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than
+ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the
+Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life. But the
+crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in
+from those visions and contacts, that intercourse? Is transcendental
+feeling involved in them? "What fruits dost thou bring back from this
+thy vision?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real
+test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of
+contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and
+perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought. In the
+second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking
+is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and
+actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of
+the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many
+choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its
+true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully
+performed. It is to this region that poetry, art and music--and even, if
+I dare say so, philosophy--make their fundamental appeal. No life is
+whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.
+
+We must now go on--and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful
+experience must lead us on--to the subject of suggestion, and its
+relation to the inner life. By suggestion of course is here meant, in
+conformity with current psychological doctrine, the process by which an
+idea enters the deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there becomes
+fruitful. Its real nature, and in consequence something of its
+far-reaching importance, is now beginning to be understood by us: a fact
+of great moment for both the study and the practice of the spiritual
+life. Since the transforming work of the Spirit must be done through
+man's ordinary psychic machinery and in conformity with the laws which
+govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of that machinery must
+serve the interests of religion, and show its teachers the way to
+success. Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds. The first is
+hetero-suggestion, in which the self-realizing idea is received either
+wittingly or unwittingly from the outer world. During the whole of our
+conscious lives for good or evil we are at the mercy of such
+hetero-suggestions, which are being made to us at every moment by our
+environment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, a dominant
+factor in corporate religious exercises. The second type is
+auto-suggestion. In this, by means of the conscious mind, an idea is
+implanted in the unconscious and there left to mature. Thus do willingly
+accepted beliefs, religious, social, or scientific, gradually and
+silently permeate the whole being and show their results in character.
+
+A little reflection shows, however, that these two forms of suggestion
+shade into one another; and that no hetero-suggestion, however
+impressively given, becomes active in us until we have in some sort
+accepted it and transformed it into an auto-suggestion. Theology
+expresses this fact in its own special language, when it says that the
+will must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious. Thus the
+primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It stands, or should stand, at the
+door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and
+bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of
+the self.
+
+As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the incoming suggestions.
+They allow uncriticized beliefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred,
+anxiety or ill-health, free entrance. They fail to seize and affirm the
+ideas of power, renovation, joy. They would be more careful, did they
+grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted
+suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic
+deeps are plastic to ideas. Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily
+life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the
+suggestion of other peoples' feeling-states; and next under the conative
+form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their
+appearance, habits, deeds. All political creeds, panics, fashion and
+good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion. We are so
+accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the
+strangeness of the process: but it is now known to reach a degree
+previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.
+
+In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this
+psychic suggestibility have long been notorious. Obvious instances are
+those ecstatics--some of them true saints, some only religious
+invalids--whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced
+in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ. In less
+extreme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, together with that
+eager emotional desire to be united with the sufferings of the Redeemer
+which mediæval religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole life
+of the contemplative; shaping the plastic mind, and often the body too,
+to its own mould. A good historic example of this law of religious
+suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a young girl, Julian
+prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a
+closer knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the prayer: but it worked
+below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was
+thirty the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be recognized in
+her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of
+that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of
+the Passion to which we owe the "Revelations of Divine Love."[99]
+
+This is simply a striking instance of a process which is always taking
+place in every one of us, for good or evil. The deeper mind opens to all
+who knock; provided only that the new-comers be not the enemies of some
+stronger habit or impression already within. To suggestions which
+coincide with the self's desires or established beliefs it gives an easy
+welcome; and these, once within, always tend to self-realization. Thus
+the French Carmelite Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus, once convinced that she
+was destined to be a "victim of love," began that career of suffering
+which ended in her death at the age of twenty-four.[100] The lives of
+the Saints are full of incidents explicable on the same lines:
+exhibiting again and again the dramatic realization of traditional ideas
+or passionate desires. We see therefore that St. Paul's admonition
+"Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
+things be of good report, think on these things" is a piece of practical
+advice of which the importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it deals
+with the conditions under which man makes his own mentality.
+
+Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful agents either of
+self-destruction or of self-advancement which are within our grasp: and
+those who speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the certitudes of
+religious experience, as "mere suggestion" are unfortunate in their
+choice of an adjective. If then we wish to explore all those mental
+resources which can be turned to the purposes of the spiritual life,
+this is one which we must not neglect. The religious idea, rightly
+received into the mind and reinforced by the suggestion of regular
+devotional exercises, always tends to realize itself. "Receive His
+leaven," says William Penn, "and it will change thee, His medicine and
+it will cure thee. He is as infallible as free; without money and with
+certainty. Yield up the body, soul and spirit to Him that maketh all
+things new: new heaven and new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new
+works, a new life and conversation."[101] This is fine literature, but
+it is more important to us to realize that it is also good psychology:
+and that here we are given the key to those amazing regenerations of
+character which are the romance and glory of the religious life.
+Pascal's too celebrated saying, that if you will take holy water
+regularly you will presently believe, witnesses on another level to the
+same truth.
+
+Fears have been expressed that, by such an application of the laws of
+suggestion to religious experience, we shall reduce religion itself to a
+mere favourable subjectivism, and identify faith with suggestibility.
+But here the bearing of this series of facts on bodily health provides
+us with a useful analogy. Bodily health is no illusion. It does not
+consist in merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condition of
+well-being and of power; depending on the state of our tissues and
+correct balance and working of our physical and psychical life. And this
+correct and wholesome working will be furthered and steadied--or if
+broken may often be restored--by good suggestions; it may be disturbed
+by bad suggestions; because the controlling factor of life is mind, not
+chemistry, and mind is plastic to ideas. So too the life of the Spirit
+is a concrete fact; a real response to a real universe. But this
+concrete life of faith, with its growth and its experiences, its richly
+various working of one principle in every aspect of existence, its
+correspondences with the Eternal World, its definitely ontological
+references, is lived here and now; in and through the self's psychic
+life, and indeed his bodily life too--a truth which is embodied in
+sacramentalism. Therefore, sharing as it does life's plastic character,
+it too is amenable to suggestion and can be helped or hindered by it. It
+is indeed characteristic of those in whom this life is dominant, that
+they are capable of receiving and responding to the highest and most
+vivifying suggestions which the universe in its totality pours in on us.
+This movement of response, often quietly overlooked, is that which makes
+them not spiritual hedonists but men and women of prayer. Grace--to give
+these suggestions of Spirit their conventional name--is perpetually
+beating in on us. But if it is to be inwardly realized, the Divine
+suggestion must be transformed by man's will and love into an
+auto-suggestion; and this is what seems to happen in meditation and
+prayer.
+
+Everything indeed points to a very close connection between what might
+be called the mechanism of prayer and of suggestion. To say this, is in
+no way to minimize the transcendental character of prayer. In both
+states there is a spontaneous or deliberate throwing open of the deeper
+mind to influences which, fully accepted, tend to realize themselves.
+Look at the directions given by all great teachers of prayer and
+contemplation; and these two acts, rightly performed, fuse one with the
+other, they are two aspects of the single act of communion with God.
+Look at their insistence on a stilling and recollecting of the mind, on
+surrender, a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful: on the need
+of meek yielding to a greater inflowing power, and its regenerating
+suggestions. Then compare this with the method by which health-giving
+suggestions are made to the bodily life. "In the deeps of the soul His
+word is spoken." Is not this an exact description of the inward work of
+the self-realizing idea of holiness, received in the prayer of quiet
+into the unconscious mind, and there experienced as a transforming
+power? I think that we may go even further than this, and say that
+grace, is, in effect, the direct suggestion of the spiritual affecting
+our soul's life. As we are commonly docile to the countless
+hetero-suggestions, some of them helpful, some weakening, some actually
+perverting, which our environment is always making to us; so we can and
+should be so spiritually suggestible that we can receive those given to
+us by all-penetrating Divine life. What is generally called sin,
+especially in the forms of self-sufficiency, lack of charity and the
+indulgence of the senses, renders us recalcitrant to these living
+suggestions of the Spirit. The opposing qualities, humility, love and
+purity, make us as we say accessible to grace.
+
+"Son," says the inward voice to Thomas à Kempis, "My grace is precious,
+and suffereth not itself to be mingled with strange things nor earthly
+consolations. Wherefore it behoveth thee to cast away impediments to
+grace, if thou willest to receive the inpouring thereof. Ask for thyself
+a secret place, love to dwell alone with thyself, seek confabulation of
+none other ... put the readiness for God before all other things, for
+thou canst not both take heed to Me and delight in things transitory....
+This grace is a light supernatural and a special gift of God, and a
+proper sign of the chosen children of God, and the earnest of
+everlasting health; for God lifteth up man from earthly things to love
+heavenly things, and of him that is fleshly maketh a spiritual
+man."[102] Could we have a more vivid picture than this of the
+conditions of withdrawal and attention under which the psyche is most
+amenable to suggestion, or of the inward transfiguration worked by a
+great self-realizing idea? Such transfiguration has literally on the
+physical plane caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to
+speak: and it seems to me that it is to be observed operating on highest
+levels in the work of salvation. When further à Kempis prays "Increase
+in me more grace, that I may fulfil Thy word and make perfect mine own
+health" is he not describing the right balance to be sought between our
+surrender to the vivifying suggestions of grace and our appropriation
+and manly use of them? This is no limp acquiescence and merely infantile
+dependence, but another aspect of the vital balance between the
+indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of
+prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which,
+as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are "receptive of God."
+
+It is, then, worth our while from the point of view of the spiritual
+life to inquire into the conditions in which a suggestion is most likely
+to be received and realized by us. These conditions, as psychologists
+have so far defined them, can be resumed under the three heads of
+quiescence, attention and feeling: outstanding characteristics, as I
+need not point out, of the state of prayer, all of which can be
+illustrated from the teaching and experience of the mystics.
+
+First, let us take _Quiescence_. In order fully to lay open the
+unconscious to the influence of suggested ideas, the surface mind must
+be called in from its responses to the outer world, or in religious
+language recollected, till the hum of that world is hardly perceived by
+it. The body must be relaxed, making no demands on the machinery
+controlling the motor system; and the conditions in general must be
+those of complete mental and bodily rest. Here is the psychological
+equivalent of that which spiritual writers call the Quiet: a state
+defined by one of them as "a rest most busy." "Those who are in this
+prayer," says St. Teresa, "wish their bodies to remain motionless, for
+it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose their sweet
+peace."[103] Others say that in this state we "stop the wheel of
+imagination," leave all that we can think, sink into our nothingness or
+our ground. In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are "inwardly abiding in
+simplicity and stillness and utter peace";[104] and this is man's state
+of maximum receptivity. "The best and noblest way in which thou mayst
+come into this work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "is by keeping
+silence and letting God work and speak ... when we simply keep ourselves
+receptive we are more perfect than when at work."[105]
+
+But this preparatory state of surrendered quiet must at once be
+qualified by the second point: _Attention_. It is based upon the right
+use of the will, and is not a limp yielding to anything or nothing. It
+has an ordained deliberate aim, is a behaviour-cycle directed to an end;
+and this it is that marks out the real and fruitful quiet of the
+contemplative from the non-directed surrender of mere quietism.
+"Nothing," says St. Teresa, "is learnt without a little pains. For the
+love of God, sisters, account that care well employed that ye shall
+bestow on this thing."[106]
+
+The quieted mind must receive and hold, yet without discursive thought,
+the idea which it desires to realize; and this idea must interest and be
+real for it, so that attention is concentrated on it spontaneously. The
+more completely the idea absorbs us, the greater its transforming power:
+when interest wavers, the suggestion begins to lose ground. In spite of
+her subsequent relapse into quietism Madame Guyon accurately described
+true quiet when she said, "Our activity should consist in endeavouring
+to acquire and maintain such a state as may be most susceptible of
+divine impressions, most flexible to all the operations of the Eternal
+Word."[107] Such concentration can be improved by practice; hence the
+value of regular meditation and contemplation to those who are in
+earnest about the spiritual life, the quiet and steady holding in the
+mind of the thought which it is desired to realize.
+
+Psycho-therapists tell us that, having achieved quiescence, we should
+rapidly and rythmically, but with intention, repeat the suggestion that
+we wish to realize; and that the shorter, simpler and more general this
+verbal formula, the more effective it will be.[108] The spiritual aspect
+of this law was well understood by the mediæval mystics. Thus the author
+of "The Cloud of Unknowing" says to his disciple, "Fill thy spirit with
+ghostly meaning of this word Sin, and without any special beholding unto
+any kind of sin, whether it be venial or deadly. And cry thus ghostly
+ever upon one: Sin! Sin! Sin! out! out! out! This ghostly cry is better
+learned of God by the proof than of any man by word. For it is best when
+it is in pure spirit, without special thought or any pronouncing of
+word. On the same manner shalt thou do with this little word God: and
+mean God all, and all God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy
+will but only God."[109] Here the directions are exact, and such as any
+psychologist of the present day might give. So too, religious teachers
+informed by experience have always ascribed a special efficacy to "short
+acts" of prayer and aspiration: phrases repeated or held in the mind,
+which sum up and express the self's penitence, love, faith or adoration,
+and are really brief, articulate suggestions parallel in type to those
+which Baudouin recommends to us as conducive to bodily well-being.[110]
+The repeated affirmation of Julian of Norwich "All shall be well! all
+shall be well! all shall be well!"[111] fills all her revelations with
+its suggestion of joyous faith; and countless generations of Christians
+have thus applied to their soul's health those very methods by which we
+are now enthusiastically curing indigestion and cold in the head. The
+articulate repetition of such phrases increases their suggestive power;
+for the unconscious is most easily reached by way of the ear. This fact
+throws light on the immemorial insistence of all great religions on the
+peculiar value of vocal prayer, whether this be the _mantra_ of the
+Hindu or the _dikr_ of the Moslem; and explains the instinct which
+causes the Catholic Church to require from her priests the verbal
+repetition, not merely the silent reading of their daily office. Hence,
+too, there is real educative value, in such devotions as the rosary; and
+the Protestant Churches showed little psychological insight when they
+abandoned it. Such "vain" repetitions, however much the rational mind
+may dislike, discredit or denounce them, have power to penetrate and
+modify the deeper psychic levels; always provided that they conflict
+with no accepted belief, are weighted with meaning and desire, with the
+intent stretched towards God, and are not allowed to become merely
+mechanical--the standing danger alike of all verbal suggestion and all
+vocal prayer.
+
+Here we touch the third character of effective suggestion: _Feeling_.
+When the idea is charged with emotion, it is far more likely to be
+realized. War neuroses have taught us the dreadful potency of the
+emotional stimulus of fear; but this power of feeling over the
+unconscious has its good side too. Here we find psychology justifying
+the often criticized emotional element of religion. Its function is to
+increase the energy of the idea. The cool, judicious type of belief will
+never possess the life-changing power of a more fervid, though perhaps
+less rational faith. Thus the state of corporate suggestibility
+generated in a revival and on which the success of that revival depends,
+is closely related to the emotional character of the appeal which is
+made. And, on higher levels, we see that the transfigured lives and
+heroic energies of the great figures of Christian history all represent
+the realization of an idea of which the heart was an impassioned love of
+God, subduing to its purposes all the impulses and powers of the inner
+man, "If you would truly know how these things come to pass," said St.
+Bonaventura, "ask it of desire not of intellect; of the ardours of
+prayer, not of the teaching of the schools."[112] More and more
+psychology tends to endorse the truth of these words.
+
+Quiescence, attention, and emotional interest are then the conditions of
+successful suggestion. We have further to notice two characteristics
+which have been described by the Nancy school of psychologists; and
+which are of some importance for those who wish to understand the
+mechanism of religious experience. These have been called the law of
+Unconscious Teleology, and the law of Reversed Effort.
+
+The law of unconscious teleology means that when an end has been
+effectively suggested to it, the unconscious mind will always tend to
+work towards its realization. Thus in psycho-therapeutics it is found
+that a general suggestion of good health made to the sick person is
+often enough. The doctor may not himself know enough about the malady to
+suggest stage by stage the process of cure. But he suggests that cure;
+and the necessary changes and adjustments required for its realization
+are made unconsciously, under the influence of the dynamic idea. Here
+the direction of "The Cloud of Unknowing," "Look that nothing live in
+thy working mind but a naked intent directed to God"[113]--suggesting
+as it does to the psyche the ontological Object of faith--strikingly
+anticipates the last conclusions of science. Further, a fervent belief
+in the end proposed, a conviction of success, is by no means essential.
+Far more important is a humble willingness to try the method, give it a
+chance. That which reason may not grasp, the deeper mind may seize upon
+and realize; always provided that the intellect does not set up
+resistances. This is found to be true in medical practice, and religious
+teachers have always declared it to be true in the spiritual sphere;
+holding obedience, humility, and a measure of resignation, not spiritual
+vision, to be the true requisites for the reception of grace, the
+healing and renovation of the soul. Thus acquiescence in belief, and
+loyal and steady co-operation in the corporate religious life are often
+seen to work for good in those who submit to them; though these may
+lack, as they frequently say, the "spiritual sense." And this happens,
+not by magic, but in conformity with psychological law.
+
+This tendency of the unconscious self to realize without criticism a
+suggested end lays on religious teachers the obligation of forming a
+clear and vital conception of the spiritual ideals which they wish to
+suggest, whether to themselves in their meditations or to others by
+their teaching: to be sure that they are wholesome, and really tend to
+fullness of life. It should also compel each of us to scrutinize those
+religious thoughts and images which we receive and on which we allow
+our minds to dwell: excluding those that are merely sentimental, weak or
+otherwise unworthy, and holding fast the noblest and most beautiful that
+we can find. For these ideas, however generalized, will set up profound
+changes in the mind that receives them. Thus the wrong conception of
+self-immolation will be faithfully worked out by the unconscious--and
+has been too often in the past--in terms of misery, weakness, or
+disease. We remember how the idea of herself as a victim of love worked
+physical destruction in Thérèse de L'Enfant Jésus: and we shall never
+perhaps know all the havoc wrought by the once fashionable doctrines of
+predestination and of the total depravity of human nature. All this
+shows how necessary it is to put hopeful, manly, constructive
+conceptions before those whom we try to help or instruct; constantly
+suggesting to them not the weak and sinful things that they are, but the
+living and radiant things which they can become.
+
+Further, this tendency of the received suggestion to work out its whole
+content for good or evil within the unconscious mind, shows the
+importance which we ought to attach to the tone of a religions service,
+and how close too many of our popular hymns are to what one might call
+psychological sin; stressing as they do a childish weakness love of
+shelter and petting, a neurotic shrinking from full human life, a morbid
+preoccupation with failure and guilt. Such hymns make devitalizing
+suggestions, adverse to the health and energy of the spiritual life;
+and are all the more powerful because they are sung collectively and in
+rhythm, and are cast in an emotional mould.[114] There was some truth in
+the accusation of the Indian teacher Ramakrishna, that the books of the
+Christians insisted too exclusively on sin. He said, "He who repeats
+again and again 'I am bound! I am bound!' remains in bondage. He who
+repeats day and night 'I am a sinner! I am a sinner!' becomes a sinner
+indeed."[115]
+
+I go on to the law of Reversed Effort; a psychological discovery which
+seems to be of extreme importance for the spiritual life. Briefly this
+means, that when any suggestion has entered the unconscious mind and
+there become active, all our conscious and anxious resistances to it are
+not merely useless but actually tend to intensify it. If it is to be
+dislodged, this will not be accomplished by mere struggle but by the
+persuasive power of another and superior auto-suggestion. Further, in
+respect of any habit that we seek to establish, the more desperate our
+struggle and sense of effort, the smaller will be our success. In small
+matters we have all experienced the working of this law: in frustrated
+struggles to attend to that which does not interest us, to check a
+tiresome cough, to keep our balance when learning to ride a bicycle. But
+it has also more important applications. Thus it indicates that a
+deliberate struggle to believe, to overcome some moral weakness, to keep
+attention fixed in prayer, will tend to frustration: for this anxious
+effort gives body to our imaginative difficulties and sense of
+helplessness, fixing attention on the conflict, not on the desired end.
+True, if this end is to be achieved the will must be directed to it, but
+only in the sense of giving steadfast direction to the desires and acts
+of the self, keeping attention orientated towards the goal. The pull of
+imaginative desire, not the push of desperate effort, serves us best.
+St. Teresa well appreciated this law and applied it to her doctrine of
+prayer. "If your thought," she says to her daughters, "runs after all
+the fooleries of the world, laugh at it and leave it for a fool and
+continue in your quiet ... if you seek by force of arms to bring it to
+you, you lose the strength which you have against it."[116]
+
+This same principle is implicitly recognized by those theologians who
+declare that man can "do nothing of himself," that mere voluntary
+struggle is useless, and regeneration comes by surrender to grace: by
+yielding, that is, to the inner urge, to those sources of power which
+flow in, but are not dragged in. Indications of its truth meet us
+everywhere in spiritual literature. Thus Jacob Boehme says, "Because
+thou strivest against that out of which thou art come, thou breakest
+thyself off with thy own willing from God's willing."[117] So too the
+constant invitations to let God work and speak, to surrender, are all
+invitations to cease anxious strife and effort and give the Divine
+suggestions their chance. The law of reversed effort, in fact, is valid
+on every level of life; and warns us against the error of making
+religion too grim and strenuous an affair. Certainly in all life of the
+Spirit the will is active, and must retain its conscious and steadfast
+orientation to God. Heroic activity and moral effort must form an
+integral part of full human experience. Yet it is clearly possible to
+make too much of the process of wrestling evil. An attention chiefly and
+anxiously concentrated on the struggle with sins and weaknesses, instead
+of on the eternal sources of happiness and power, will offer the
+unconscious harmful suggestions of impotence and hence tend to
+frustration. The early ascetics, who made elaborate preparations for
+dealing with temptations, got as an inevitable result plenty of
+temptations with which to deal. A sounder method is taught by the
+mystics. "When thoughts of sin press on thee," says "The Cloud of
+Unknowing," "look over their shoulders seeking another thing, the which
+thing is God."[118]
+
+These laws of suggestion, taken together, all seem to point, one way.
+They exhibit the human self as living, plastic, changeful; perpetually
+modified by the suggestions pouring in on it, the experiences and
+intuitions to which it reacts. Every thought, prayer, enthusiasm, fear,
+is of importance to it. Nothing leaves it as it was before. The soul,
+said Boehme, stands both in heaven and in hell. Keep it perpetually busy
+at the window of the senses, feed it with unlovely and materialistic
+ideas, and those ideas will realize themselves. Give the contemplative
+faculty its chance, let it breathe at least for a few moments of each
+day the spiritual atmosphere of faith, hope and love, and the spiritual
+life will at least in some measure be realized by it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 85: On all this, cf. J. Varendonck, "The Psychology of
+Day-dreams."]
+
+[Footnote 86: Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 87: Patmore: "The Rod, the Root and the Flower: Aurea Dicta,"
+13.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Ruysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 89: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 90: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 91: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 39.]
+
+[Footnote 92: _Ibid_.]
+
+[Footnote 93: "Eternal Life," p. 396.]
+
+[Footnote 94: Penn: "No Cross, No Crown."]
+
+[Footnote 95: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap, 7.]
+
+[Footnote 96: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. I]
+
+[Footnote 97: Streeter and Appasamy: "The Sadhu, a Study in Mysticism
+and Practical Religion," Pt. V.]
+
+[Footnote 98:
+
+    Que frutti reducene de esta tua visione?
+    Vita ordinata en onne nazione.
+
+--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 79.]
+
+[Footnote 99: Julian of Norwich: "Revelations of Divine Love," Caps. 2,
+3, 4.]
+
+[Footnote 100: "Soeur Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus," Cap. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 101: William Penn: "No Cross, No Crown."]
+
+[Footnote 102: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 58.]
+
+[Footnote 103: "Way of Perfection," Cap. 33.]
+
+[Footnote 104: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 105: Meister Eckhart, Pred. I.]
+
+[Footnote 106: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 107: "A Short and Easy Method of Prayer," Cap. 21.]
+
+[Footnote 108: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Pt. II, Cap
+6.]
+
+[Footnote 109: Op. cit. Cap. 40.]
+
+[Footnote 110: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," loc. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 111: "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 112: "De Itinerario Mentis in Deo," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 113: Op. cit., Cap. 43.]
+
+[Footnote 114: Hymns of the Weary Willie type: e.g.
+
+    "O Paradise, O Paradise
+    Who does not sigh for rest?"
+
+should never be sung in congregations where the average age is less than
+sixty. Equally unsuited to general use are those expressing
+disillusionment, anxiety, or impotence. Any popular hymnal will provide
+an abundance of examples.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Quoted by Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 116: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 117: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 118: Op. cit., Cap. 32.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+So far, in considering what psychology had to tell us about the
+conditions in which our spiritual life can develop, and the mental
+machinery it can use, we have been, deliberately, looking at men one by
+one. We have left on one side all those questions which relate to the
+corporate aspect of the spiritual life, and its expression in religious
+institutions; that is to say, in churches and cults. We have looked upon
+it as a personal growth and response; a personal reception of, and
+self-orientation to, Reality. But we cannot get away from the fact that
+this regenerate life does most frequently appear in history associated
+with, or creating for itself, a special kind of institution. Although it
+is impossible to look upon it as the appearance of a favourable
+variation within the species, it is also just as possible to look upon
+it as the formation of a new herd or tribe. Where the variation appears,
+and in its sense of newness, youth and vigour breaks away from the
+institution within which it has arisen, it generally becomes the nucleus
+about which a new group is formed. So that individualism and
+gregariousness are both represented in the full life of the Spirit; and
+however personal its achievement may seem to us, it has also a
+definitely corporate and institutional aspect.
+
+I now propose to take up this side of the subject, and try to suggest
+one or two lines of thought which may help us to discover the meaning
+and worth of such societies and institutions. For after all, some
+explanation is needed of these often strange symbolic systems, and often
+rigid mechanizations, imposed on the free responses to Eternal Reality
+which we found to constitute the essence of religious experience. Any
+one who has known even such direct communion with the Spirit as is
+possible to normal human nature must, if he thinks out the implications
+of his own experience, feel it to be inconsistent that this most
+universal of all acts should be associated by men with the most
+exclusive of all types of institution. It is only because we are so
+accustomed to this--taking churches for granted, even when we reject
+them--that we do not see how odd they really are: how curious it is that
+men do not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full of rules and
+regulations to enjoy the light of the sun in particular times and
+fashions, but do persistently set up such exclusives clubs full of rules
+and regulations, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God.
+
+When we look into history we see the life of the Spirit, even from its
+crudest beginnings, closely associated with two movements. First with
+the tendency to organize it in communities or churches, living under
+special sanctions and rules. Next, with the tendency of its greatest,
+most arresting personalities either to revolt from these organisms or to
+reform, rekindle them from within. So that the institutional life of
+religion persists through or in spite of its own constant tendency to
+stiffen and lose fervour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals
+which are occasioned by its greatest sons. Thus our Lord protested
+against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best
+of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against
+one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.
+This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional
+authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of
+all great historical faiths. In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in
+our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and
+denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led
+reforms within Islam. That which we are now concerned to discover is the
+necessity underlying this conflict: the extent in which the institution
+on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or
+opposes its free development. It is a truism that all such institutions
+tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize. Are they
+then, in spite of these adverse characters, to be looked on as
+essential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions of the spiritual
+life in man; or can this spiritual life flourish in pure freedom?
+
+This question, often put in the crucial form, "Did Jesus Christ intend
+to form a Church?" is well worth asking. Indeed, it is of great pressing
+importance to those who now have the spiritual reconstruction of society
+at heart. It means, in practice: can men best be saved, regenerated, one
+by one, by their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, is
+the life of the Spirit best found and actualized through submission to
+tradition and contacts with other men--that is, in a group or church?
+And if in a group or church, what should the character of this society
+be? But we shall make no real movement towards solving this problem,
+unless we abandon both the standpoint of authority, and that of naïve
+religious individualism; and consent to look at it as a part of the
+general problem of human society, in the light of history, of
+psychology, and of ethics.
+
+I think we may say without exaggeration that the general modern
+judgment--not, of course, the clerical or orthodox judgment--is adverse
+to institutionalism; at least as it now exists. In spite of the enormous
+improvement which would certainly be visible, were we to compare the
+average ecclesiastical attitude and average Church service in this
+country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense that religion
+involves submission to the rules and discipline of a closed
+society--that definite spiritual gains are attached to spiritual
+incorporation--that church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a
+normal and necessary part of the routine of a good life: all this has
+certainly ceased to be general amongst us. If we include the whole
+population, and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true both of
+so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries. Professor Pratt
+has lately described 80 per cent. of the population of the United States
+as being "unchurched"; and all who worked among our soldiers at the
+front were struck by the paradox of the immense amount of natural
+religion existing among them, combined with almost total alienation from
+religious institutions. Those, too, who study and care for the spiritual
+life seem most often to conceive it in the terms of William James's
+well-known definition of religion as "the feelings, acts and experiences
+of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves
+to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the Divine."[119]
+
+Such a life of the Spirit--and the majority of educated men would
+probably accept this description of it--seems little if at all
+conditioned by Church membership. It speaks in secret to its Father in
+secret; and private devotion and self-discipline seem to be all it
+needs. Yet looking at history, we see that this conception, this
+completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, this one-by-one
+achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the
+past. Where it seems so to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each
+great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul
+achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and
+contemporaries.[120] All great spiritual achievement, like all great
+artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however
+much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the
+racial past. If fulfills rather than destroys; and unless its free
+movement towards novelty, fresh levels of pure experience, be thus
+balanced by the stability which is given us by our hoarded traditions
+and formed habits, it will degenerate into eccentricity and fail of its
+full effect. Although nothing but first-hand discovery of and response
+to spiritual values is in the end of any use to us, that discovery and
+that response are never quite such a single-handed affair as we like to
+suppose. Memory and environment, natural and cultural, play their part.
+And the next most natural and fruitful movement after such a personal
+discovery of abiding Reality, such a transfiguration of life, is always
+back towards our fellow-men; to learn more from them, to unite with
+them, to help them,--anyhow to reaffirm our solidarity with them. The
+great men and women of the Spirit, then, either use their new power and
+joy to restore existing institutions to fuller vitality, as did the
+successive regenerators of the monastic life, such as St. Bernard and
+St. Teresa and many Sufi saints; or they form new groups, new organisms
+which they can animate, as did St. Paul, St. Francis, Kabir, Fox,
+Wesley, Booth. One and all, they feel that the full robust life of the
+Spirit demands some incarnation, some place in history and social
+outlet, and also some fixed discipline and tradition.
+
+In fact, not only the history of the soul, but that of all full human
+achievement, as studied in great creative personalities, shows us that
+such achievement has always two sides. (1) There is the solitary vision
+or revelation, and personal work in accordance with that vision. The
+religious man's direct experience of God and his effort to correspond
+with it; the artist's lonely and intense apprehension of beauty, and
+hard translation of it; the poet's dream and its difficult expression in
+speech; the philosopher's intuition of reality, hammered into thought.
+These are personal immediate experiences, and no human soul will reach
+its full stature unless it can have the measure of freedom and
+withdrawal which they demand. But (2) there are the social and
+historical contacts which are made by all these creative types with the
+past and with the present; all the big rich thick stream of human
+history and effort, giving them, however little they may recognize it,
+the very initial concepts with which they go to their special contact
+with reality, and which colour it; supporting them and demanding from
+them again their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the
+present too. Thus the artist, as, well as his solitary hours of
+contemplation and effort, ought to have his times alike of humble study
+of the past and of intercourse with other living artists; and great and
+enduring art forms more often arise within a school, than in complete
+independence of tradition. It seems, then, that the advocates of
+corporate and personal religion are both, in a measure, right: and that
+once again a middle path, avoiding both extremes of simplification,
+keeps nearest to the facts of life. We have no reason for supposing that
+these principles, which history shows us, have ceased to be operative:
+or that we can secure the best kind of spiritual progress for the race
+by breaking with the past and the institutions in which it is conserved.
+Institutions are in some sort needful if life's balance between
+stability and novelty, and our links with history and our fellow-men,
+are to be preserved; and if we are to achieve such a fullness both of
+individual and of corporate life on highest levels as history and
+psychology recommend to us.
+
+The question of this institutional side of religion and what we should
+demand from it falls into two parts, which will best be treated
+separately. First, that which concerns the character and usefulness of
+the group-organization or society: the Church. Secondly, that which
+relates to its peculiar practices: the Cult. We must enquire under each
+head what are their necessary characters, their essential gifts to the
+soul, and what their dangers and limitations.
+
+First, then, the Church. What does a Church really do for the
+God-desiring individual; the soul that wants to live a full, complete
+and real life, which has "felt in its solitude" the presence and
+compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other of the forms of
+religious experience?
+
+I think we can say that the Church or institution gives to its loyal
+members:--
+
+  (1) Group-consciousness.
+
+  (2) Religious union, not only with its contemporaries
+      but with the race, that is with
+      history. This we may regard as an extension
+      into the past--and so an enrichment--of
+      that group-consciousness.
+
+  (3) Discipline; and with discipline a sort of
+      spiritual grit, which carries our fluctuating
+      souls past and over the inevitably recurring
+      periods of slackness, and corrects subjectivism.
+
+  (4) It gives Culture, handing on the discoveries
+      of the saints.
+
+In so far as the free-lance gets any of these four things, he gets them
+ultimately, though indirectly, from some institutional source.
+
+On the other hand the institution, since it represents the element of
+stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give,
+direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty,
+freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its
+dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such
+freshness of discovery; the tendency to exalt the corporate and stable
+and discount the mobile and individual. Its natural instinct will be for
+exclusivism, the club-idea, conservatism and cosiness; it will, if left
+to itself, revel in the middle-aged atmosphere and exhibit the
+middle-aged point of view.
+
+We can now consider these points in greater detail: and first that of
+the religious group-consciousness which a church should give its
+members. This is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that
+group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life. History
+showed us the tendency of all spiritual movements to embody themselves,
+if not in churches at least in some group-form; the paradox of each
+successive revolt from a narrow or decadent institutionalism forming a
+group in its turn, or perishing when its first fervour died. But this
+social impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of master and
+disciples, valuable though they may be, do not fully exhibit all that is
+meant or done by a church. True, the Church is or should be at each
+moment of its career such a living spiritual society or household of
+faith. It is, essentially, a community of persons, who have or should
+have a common sentiment--belief in, and reverence for, their God--and a
+common defined aim, the furtherance of the spiritual life under the
+special religious sanctions which they accept. But every sect, every
+religious order or guild, every class-meeting, might claim this much;
+yet none of these can claim to be a church.
+
+A church is far more than this. In so far as it is truly alive, it is a
+real organism, as distinguished from a crowd or collection of persons
+with a common purpose. It exhibits on the religious plane the ruling
+characters of such organized life: that is to say, the development of
+tradition and complex habits, the differentiation of function, the
+docility to leadership, the conservation of values, or carrying forward
+of the past into the present. It is, like the State, embodied history;
+and as such lives with its own life, a life transcending and embracing
+that of the individual souls of which it is built. And here, in its
+combined social and historic character, lie the sources alike of its
+enormous importance for human life and of its inevitable defects.
+
+Professor McDougall, in his discussion of national groups,[121] has laid
+down the conditions which are necessary to the development of such a
+true organic group life as is seen in a living church. These are: first,
+continuity of existence, involving the development of a body of
+traditions, customs and practices--that is, for religion, a Cultus.
+Next, an authoritative organization through which custom and belief can
+be transmitted--that is, a Hierarchy, order of ministers, or its
+equivalent. Third, a conscious common interest, belief, or idea--Creed.
+Last, the existence of antagonistic groups or conditions, developing
+loyalty or keenness. These characters--continuity, authority, common
+belief and loyalty--which are shown, as he says, in their completeness
+in a patriot army, are I think no less marked features of a living
+spiritual society. Plain examples are the primitive Christian
+communities, the great religious orders in their flourishing time, the
+Society of Friends. They are on the whole more fully evident in the
+Catholic than in the Protestant type of church. But I think that we may
+look upon them, in some form or another, as essential to any
+institutional framework which shall really help the spiritual life in
+man.
+
+We find ourselves, then, committed to the picture of a church or
+spiritual institution which is in essence Liturgic, Ecclesiastical,
+Dogmatic, and Militant, as best fulfilling the requirements of group
+psychology. Four decidedly indigestible morsels for the modern mind.
+Yet, group-feeling demands common expression if it is to be lifted from
+notion to fact. Discipline requires some authority, and some devotion to
+it. Culture involves a tradition handed on. And these, we said, were the
+chief gifts which the institution had to give to its members. We may
+therefore keep them in mind, as representing actual values, and warning
+us that neither history nor psychology encourages the belief that an
+amiable fluidity serves the highest purposes of life. Some common
+practice and custom, keeping the individual in line with the main
+tendencies of the group, providing rails on which the instinctive life
+can run and machinery by which fruitful suggestions can be spread. Some
+real discipline and humbling submission to rule. Some traditional and
+theological standard. Some missionary effort and enthusiasm. For these
+four things we must find place in any incorporation of the spiritual
+life which is to have its full effect upon the souls of men. And as a
+matter of fact, the periodical revolts against churches and
+ecclesiasticism, are never against societies in which all these
+characteristics are still alive; but against those which retain and
+exaggerate formal tradition and authority, whilst they have lost zest
+and identity of aim.
+
+A real Church has therefore something to give to, and something to
+demand from each of its members, and there is a genuine loss for man in
+being unchurched. Because it endures through a perpetual process of
+discarding and renewal, those members will share the richness and
+experience of a spiritual life far exceeding their own time-span; a
+truth which is enshrined in the beautiful conception of the Communion of
+Saints. They enter a group consciousness which reinforces their own in
+the extent to which they surrender to it; which surrounds them with
+favourable suggestions and gives the precision of habit to their
+instinct for Eternity. The special atmosphere, the hoarded beauty, the
+evocative yet often archaic symbolism, of a Gothic Cathedral, with its
+constant reminiscences of past civilizations and old levels of culture,
+its broken fragments and abandoned altars, its conservation of eternal
+truths--the intimate union in it of the sublime and homely, the
+successive and abiding aspects of reality--make it the most fitting of
+all images of the Church, regarded as the spiritual institution of
+humanity. And the perhaps undue conservatism commonly associated with
+Cathedral circles represents too the chief reproach which can be brought
+against churches--their tendency to preserve stability at the expense of
+novelty, to crystallize, to cling to habits and customs which no longer
+serve a useful end. In this a church is like a home; where old bits of
+furniture have a way of hanging on, and old habits, sometimes absurd,
+endure. Yet both the home and the church can give something which is
+nowhere else obtainable by us, and represent values which it is perilous
+to ignore. When once the historical character of reality is fully
+grasped by us, we see that some such organization through which achieved
+values are conserved and carried forward, useful habits are learned and
+practised, the direct intuitions of genius, the prophet's revelation of
+reality are interpreted and handed on, is essential to the spiritual
+continuity of the race; and that definite churchmanship of some sort, or
+its equivalent, must be a factor in the spiritual reconstruction of
+society. As, other things being equal, a baby benefits enormously by
+being born within the social framework rather than in the illusory
+freedom of "pure" nature; so the growth of the soul is, or should be,
+helped and not hindered by the nurture it receives from the religious
+society in which it is born. Only indeed by attachment, open or virtual,
+through life or through literature, to some such group can the new soul
+link itself with history, and so participate in the hoarded spiritual
+values of humanity. Thus even a general survey of life inclines us at
+least to some appreciation of the principle laid down by Baron von Hügel
+in "Eternal Life"--namely, that "souls who live an heroic spiritual life
+_within_ great religious traditions and institutions, attain to a rare
+volume and vividness of religious insight, conviction and
+reality"[122]--seldom within reach of the contemplative, however ardent,
+who walks by himself.
+
+History has given one reason for this; psychology gives another. These
+souls, living it is true with intensity their own life towards God,
+share and are bathed in the group consciousness of their church; as
+members of a family, distinct in temperament, share and are modified by
+the group consciousness of the home. The mental process of the
+individual is profoundly affected when he thus thinks and acts as a
+member of a group. Suggestibility is then enormously increased; and we
+know how much suggestion means to us. Moreover, suggestions emanating
+from the group always take priority of those of the outside world: for
+man is a gregarious animal, intensely sensitive to the mentality of the
+herd.[123] The Mind of the Church is therefore a real thing. The
+individual easily takes colour from it and the tradition it embodies,
+tends to imitate his fellow-members: and each such deed and thought is a
+step taken in the formation of habit, and leaves him other than he was
+before.
+
+To say this is not to discredit church-membership as placing us at the
+mercy of emotional suggestion, reducing spontaneity to custom, and
+lessening the energy and responsibility of the individual soul towards
+God. On the contrary, right group suggestion reinforces, stimulates,
+does not stultify such individual action. If the prayerful attitude of
+my fellow worshippers helps me to pray better, surely it is a very mean
+kind of conceit on my part which would prompt me to despise their help,
+and refuse to acknowledge Creative Spirit acting on me through other
+men? It is one of the most beautiful features of a real and living
+corporate religion, that within it ordinary people at all levels help
+each other to be a little more supernatural than would have been alone.
+I do not now speak of individuals possessing special zeal and special
+aptitude; though, as the lives of the Saints assure us, even the best of
+these fluctuate, and need social support at times. Anyhow such persons
+of special spiritual aptitude, as life is now, are as rare as persons of
+special aptitude in other walks of life. But that which we seek for the
+life of to-day and of the future, is such a planning of it as shall give
+all men their spiritual chance. And it is abundantly clear upon all
+levels of life, that men are chiefly formed and changed by the power of
+suggestion, sympathy and imitation; and only reach full development when
+assembled in groups, giving full opportunity for the benevolent action
+of these forces. So too in the life of the Spirit, incorporation plays a
+part which nothing can replace. Goodness and devotion are more easily
+caught than taught; by association in groups, holy and strong
+souls--both living and dead--make their full gift to society, weak,
+undeveloped, and arrogant souls receive that of which they are in need.
+On this point we may agree with a great ecclesiastical scholar of our
+own day that "the more the educated and intellectual partake with
+sympathy of heart in the ordinary devotions and pious practices of the
+poor, the higher will they rise in the religion of the Spirit."[124]
+
+Yet this family life of the ideal religious institution, with its
+reasonable and bracing discipline, its gift of shelter, its care for
+tradition, its habit-formation and group consciousness--all this is
+given, as we may as well acknowledge, at the price which is exacted by
+all family life; namely, mutual accommodation and sacrifice, place made
+for the childish, the dull, the slow, and the aged, a toning-down of the
+somewhat imperious demands of the entirely efficient and clear-minded, a
+tolerance of imperfection. Thus for these efficient and clear-minded
+members there is always, in the church as in the family, a perpetual
+opportunity of humility, self-effacement, gentle acceptance; of exerting
+that love which must be joined to power and a sound mind if the full
+life of the Spirit is to be lived. In the realm of the supernatural this
+is a solid gain; though not a gain which we are very quick to appreciate
+in our vigorous youth. Did we look upon the religious institution not as
+an end in itself, but simply as fulfilling the function of a
+home--giving shelter and nurture, opportunity of loyalty and mutual
+service on one hand, conserving stability and good custom on the
+other--then, we should better appreciate its gifts to us, and be more
+merciful to its necessary defects. We should be tolerant to its
+inevitable conservatism, its tendency to encourage dependence and
+obedience to distrust individual initiative. We should no longer expect
+it to provide or specially to approve novelty and freedom, to be in the
+van of life's forward thrust. For this we must go not to the
+institution, which is the vehicle of history; but to the adventurous,
+forward moving soul, which is the vehicle of progress--to the prophet,
+not to the priest. These two great figures, the Keeper and the Revealer,
+which are prominent in every historical religion, represent the two
+halves of the fully-lived spiritual life. The progress of man depends
+both on conserving and on exploring: and any full incorporation of that
+life which will serve man's spiritual interests now, must find place for
+both.
+
+Such an application of the institutional idea to present needs is
+required, in fact, to fulfil at least four primary conditions:--
+
+(1) It must give a social life that shall develop group consciousness in
+respect of our eternal interests and responsibilities: using for this
+real discipline, and the influences of liturgy and creed.
+
+(2) Yet it must not so standardize and socialize this life as to leave
+no room for personal freedom in the realm of Spirit: for those
+"experiences of men in their solitude" which form the very heart of
+religion.
+
+(3) It must not be so ring-fenced, so exclusive, so wholly conditioned
+by the past, that the voice of the future, that is of the prophet giving
+fresh expression to eternal truths, cannot clearly be heard in it; not
+only from within its own borders but also from outside. But
+
+(4) On the other hand, it must not be so contemptuous of the past and
+its priceless symbols that it breaks with tradition, and so loses that
+very element of stability which it is its special province to preserve.
+
+I go on now to the second aspect of institutional religion: Cultus.
+
+We at once make the transition from Church to Cultus, when we ask
+ourselves: how does, how can, the Church as an organized and enduring
+society do its special work of creating an atmosphere and imparting a
+secret? How is the traditional deposit of spiritual experience handed
+on, the individual drawn into the stream of spiritual history and held
+there? Remember, the Church exists to foster and hand on, not merely the
+moral life, the life of this-world perfection; but the spiritual life in
+all its mystery and splendour--the life of more than this-world
+perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this,
+not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct
+contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of
+men, who _do_ need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that
+it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and
+imitation.
+
+All organized churches find themselves committed sooner or later to an
+organized cultus. It may be rudimentary. It may reach a high pitch of
+æsthetic and symbolic perfection. But even the successive rebels against
+dead ceremony are found as a rule to invent some ceremony in their turn.
+They learn by experience the truth that men most easily form religious
+habits and tend, to have religious experiences when they are assembled
+in groups, and caused to perform the same acts. This is so because as we
+have already seen, the human psyche is plastic to the suggestions made
+to it; and this suggestibility is greatly increased when it is living a
+gregarious life as a member of a united congregation or flock, and is
+engaged in performing corporate acts. The soldiers' drill is essential
+to the solidarity of the army, and the religious service in some form
+is--apart from all other considerations--essential to the solidarity of
+the Church.
+
+We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the
+psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious
+ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man: or that one
+of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the
+threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind. As
+the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her
+sleeping child[125] so the Church takes her children at their moment of
+least resistance, and suggests to them all that she desires them to be.
+It is interesting to note how perfectly adapted the rituals of historic
+Christianity are to this end, of provoking the emergence of the
+intuitive mind and securing a state of maximum suggestibility. The more
+complex and solemn the ritual, the more archaic and universal the
+symbols it employs, so much the more powerful--for those natures able to
+yield to it--the suggestion becomes. Music, rhythmic chanting, symbolic
+gesture, the solemn periods of recited prayer, are all contributory to
+this, effect In churches of the Catholic type every object that meets
+the eye, every scent, every attitude that we are encouraged to assume,
+gives us a push in the same direction if we let it do its rightful work.
+For other temperaments the collective, deliberate, and really ceremonial
+silence of the Quakers--the hush of the waiting mind, the unforced
+attitude of expectation, the abstraction from visual image--works to the
+same end. In either case, the aim is the production of a special
+group-consciousness; the reinforcing of languid or undeveloped
+individual feeling and aptitude by the suggestion of the crowd. This,
+and its result, is seen of course in its crudest form in revivalism: and
+on higher levels, in such elaborate dramatic ceremonies as those which
+are a feature of the Catholic celebrations of Holy Week. But the nice
+warm devotional feeling with which what is called a good congregation
+finishes the singing of a favourite hymn belongs to the same order of
+phenomena. The rhythmic phrases--not as a rule very full of meaning or
+intellectual appeal--exercise a slightly hypnotic effect on the
+analyzing surface-mind; and induce a condition of suggestibility open to
+all the influences of the place and of our fellow worshippers. The
+authorized translation of Ephesians v. 19: "_speaking to yourselves_ in
+psalms and hymns and spiritual songs," whatever we may think of its
+accuracy does as it stands describe one of the chief functions of
+religious services of the "hearty congregational" sort. We do speak to
+ourselves--our deeper, and more plastic selves--in our psalms and hymns;
+so too in the common recitation, especially the chanting, of a creed. We
+administer through these rhythmic affirmations, so long as we sing them
+with intention, a powerful suggestion to ourselves and every one else
+within reach. We gather up in them--or should do--the whole tendency of
+our worship and aspiration, and in the very form in which it can most
+easily sink in. This lays a considerable responsibility on those who
+choose psalms and hymns for congregational singing; for these can as
+easily be the instruments of fanatical melancholy and devitalizing, as
+of charitable life-giving and constructive ideas.
+
+In saying all this I do not seek to discredit religious ceremony; either
+of the naïve or of the sophisticated type. On the contrary, I think that
+in effecting this change in our mental tone and colour, in prompting
+this emergence of a mood which, in the mass of men, is commonly
+suppressed, these ceremonies do their true work. They should stimulate
+and give social expression to that mood of adoration which is the very
+heart of religion; helping those who cannot be devotional alone to
+participate in the common devotional feeling. If, then, we desire to
+receive the gifts which corporate worship can most certainly make to us,
+we ought to yield ourselves without resistance or criticism to its
+influence; as we yield ourselves to the influence of a great work of
+art. That influence is able to tune us up, at least to a fleeting
+awareness of spiritual reality; and each such emergence of
+transcendental feeling is to the good. It is true that the objects which
+immediately evoke this feeling will only be symbolic; but after all, our
+very best conceptions of God are bound to be that. We do not, or should
+not, demand scientific truth of them. Their business is rather to give
+us poetry, a concrete artistic intuition of reality, and to place us in
+the mood of poetry. The great thing is, that by these corporate liturgic
+practices and surrenders, we can prevent that terrible freezing up of
+the deep wells of our being which so easily comes to those who must lead
+an exacting material or intellectual life. We keep ourselves supple; the
+spiritual faculties are within reach, and susceptible to education.
+
+Organized ceremonial religion insists upon it, that at least for a
+certain time each day or week we shall attend to the things of the
+Spirit. It offers us its suggestions, and shuts off as well as it can
+conflicting suggestions: though, human as we are, the mere appearance of
+our neighbours is often enough to bring these in. Nothing is more
+certain than this: first that we shall never know the spiritual world
+unless we give ourselves the chance of attending to it, clear a space
+for it in our busy lives; and next, that it will not produce its real
+effect in us, unless it penetrates below the conscious surface into the
+deeps of the instinctive mind, and moulds this in accordance with the
+regnant idea. If we are to receive the gifts of the cultus, we on our
+part must bring to it at the very least what we bring to all great works
+of art that speak to us: that is to say, attention, surrender,
+sympathetic emotion. Otherwise, like all other works of art, it will
+remain external to us. Much of the perfectly sincere denunciation and
+dislike of religious ceremony which now finds frequent utterance comes
+from those who have failed thus to do their share. They are like the
+hasty critics who dismiss some great work of art because it is not
+representative, or historically accurate; and so entirely miss the
+æsthetic values which it was created to impart.
+
+Consider a picture of the Madonna. Minds at different levels may find in
+this pure representation, Bible history, theology, æsthetic
+satisfaction, spiritual truth. The peasant may see in it the portrait of
+the Mother of God, the critic a phase in artistic evolution; whilst the
+mystic may pass through it to new contacts with the Spirit of life. We
+shall receive according to the measure of what we bring. Now consider
+the parallel case of some great dramatic liturgy, rich with the meanings
+which history has poured into it. Take, as an example which every one
+can examine for themselves, the Roman Mass. Different levels of mind
+will find here magic, theology, deep mystery, the commemoration under
+archaic symbols of an event. But above and beyond all these, they can
+find the solemn incorporated emotion, of the Christian Church, and a
+liturgic recapitulation of the movement of the human soul towards
+fullness of life: through confession and reconciliation to adoration and
+intercession--that is, to charity--and thence to direct communion with
+and feeding on the Divine World.
+
+To the mind which refuses to yield to it, to move with its movement, but
+remains in critical isolation, the Mass like all other ceremonies will
+seem external, dead, unreal; lacking in religious content. But if we do
+give ourselves completely and unselfconsciously to the movement of such
+a ceremony, at the end of it we may not have learnt anything, but we
+have lived something. And when we remember that no experience of our
+devotional life is lost, surely we may regard it as worth while to
+submit ourselves to an experience by which, if only for a few minutes,
+we are thus lifted to richer levels of life and brought into touch with
+higher values? We have indeed only to observe the enrichment of life so
+often produced in those who thus dwell meekly and without inner conflict
+in the symbolic world of ceremonial religion, and accept its discipline
+and its gifts, to be led at least to a humble suspension of judgment as
+to its value. A whole world of spiritual experience separates the humble
+little church mouse rising at six every morning to attend a service
+which she believes to be pleasing to a personal God, from the
+philosopher who meditates on the Absolute in a comfortable armchair;
+and no one will feel much doubt as to which side the advantage lies.
+
+Here we approach the next point. The cultus, with its liturgy and its
+discipline, exists for and promotes the repetition of acts which are
+primarily the expression of man's instinct for God; and by these--or any
+other repeated acts--our ductile instinctive life is given a definite
+trend. We know from Semon's researches[126] that the performance of any
+given act by a living creature influences all future performances of
+similar acts. That is to say, memory combines with each fresh stimulus
+to control our reaction to it. "In the case of living organisms," says
+Bertrand Russell, "practically everything that is distinctive both of
+their physical and mental behaviour is bound up with this persistent
+influence of the past": and most actions and responses "can only be
+brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the history
+of the organism as part of the causes of the present response."[127] The
+phenomena of apperception, in fact, form only one aspect of a general
+law. As that which we have perceived conditions what we can now
+perceive, so that which we have done conditions what we shall do. It
+therefore appears that in spite of angry youthful revolts or mature
+sophistications, early religious training, and especially repeated
+religious _acts_, are likely to influence the whole of our future
+lives. Though all they meant to us seems dead or unreal, they have
+retreated to the dark background of consciousness and there live on. The
+tendency which they have given persists; we never get away from them. A
+church may often seem to lose her children, as human parents do; but in
+spite of themselves they retain her invisible seal, and are her children
+still. In nearly all conversions in middle life, or dramatic returns
+from scepticism to traditional belief, a large, part is undoubtedly
+played by forgotten childish memories and early religious discipline,
+surging up and contributing their part to the self's new apprehensions
+of Reality.
+
+If, then, the cultus did nothing else, it would do these two highly
+important things. It would influence our whole present attitude by its
+suggestions, and our whole future attitude through unconscious memory of
+the acts which it demands. But it does more than this. It has as perhaps
+its greatest function the providing of a concrete artistic expression
+for our spiritual perceptions, adorations and desires. It links the
+visible with the invisible, by translating transcendent fact into
+symbolic and even sensuous terms. And for this reason men, having bodies
+no less surely than spirits, can never afford wholly to dispense with
+it. Hasty transcendentalists often forget this; and set us spiritual
+standards to which the race, so long as it is anchored to this planet
+and to the physical order, cannot conform.
+
+A convert from agnosticism with whom I was acquainted, was once
+receiving religious instruction from a devout and simple-minded nun.
+They were discussing the story of the Annunciation, which presented some
+difficulties to her. At last she said to the nun, "Well, anyhow, I
+suppose that one is not obliged to believe that the Blessed Virgin was
+visited by a solid angel, dressed in a white robe?" To this the nun
+replied doubtfully, "No, dear, perhaps not. But still, you know, he
+would have to wear _something_."
+
+Now here, as it seems to me, we have a great theological truth in a few
+words. The elusive contacts and subtle realities of the world of spirit
+have got to wear something, if we are to grasp them at all. Moreover, if
+the mass of men are to grasp them ever so little, they must wear
+something which is easily recognized by the human eye and human heart;
+more, by the primitive, half-conscious folk-soul existing in each one of
+us, stirring in the depths and reaching out in its own way towards God.
+It is a delicate matter to discuss religious symbols. They are like our
+intimate friends: though at the bottom of our hearts we may know that
+they are only human, we hate other people to tell us so. And, even as
+the love of human beings in its most perfect state passes beyond its
+immediate object, is transfigured, and merged in the nature of all
+love; so too, the devotion which a purely symbolic figure calls forth
+from the ardently religious nature--whether this figure be the divine
+Krishna of Hinduism, the Buddhist's Mother of Mercy, the S[=u]fi's
+Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian piety which are
+familiar to all of us--this devotion too passes beyond its immediate
+goal and the relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized. It is
+characteristic of the primitive mind that it finds a difficulty about
+universals, and is most at home with particulars. The success of
+Christianity as a world-religion largely abides in the way in which it
+meets this need. It is notorious that the person of Jesus, rather than
+the Absolute God, is the object of average Protestant devotion. So too
+the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach God through and in
+his special saint, or even a special local form of the Madonna. This is
+the inevitable corollary of the psychic level at which he lives; and to
+speak contemptuously of his "superstition" is wholly beside the point.
+Other great faiths have been compelled by experience to meet need of a
+particular object on which the primitive religious consciousness can
+fasten itself: conspicuous examples being the development within
+Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and within pore Brahminism of
+Krishna worship. Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that the
+life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently from our simplest human
+impulses and needs. Yet, since the Universal, the Idea, is manifested in
+each such particular, we need not refuse to allow that the mass of men
+do thus enjoy--in a way that their psychic level makes natural to
+them--their own measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of God;
+and already live according to their measure a spiritual life.
+
+These objects of religious cultus, then, and the whole symbolic
+faith-world which is built up of them, with its angels and demons, its
+sharply defined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications which
+embody certain attributes of God for us, the purity and gentleness of
+the Mother, the simplicity and infinite possibility of the Child, the
+divine self-giving of the Cross;--more, the Lamb, the Blood and the Fire
+of the revivalists, the oil and water, bread and wine, of a finished
+Sacramentalism--all these may be regarded as the vestures placed by man,
+at one stage or another of his progress, on the freely-given but
+ineffable spiritual fact. Like other clothes, they have now become
+closely identified with that which wears them. And we strip them off at
+our own peril: for this proceeding, grateful as it may be to our
+intellects, may leave us face to face with a mystery which we dare not
+look at, and cannot grasp.
+
+So, cultus has done a mighty thing for humanity, in evolving and
+conserving the system of symbols through which the Infinite and Eternal
+can be in some measure expressed. The history of these symbols goes
+back, as we now know, to the infancy of the race, and forward to the
+last productions of the religious imagination; all of which bear the
+image of our past They are like coins, varying in beauty, and often of
+slight intrinsic value; but of enormous importance for our spiritual
+currency, because accepted as the representatives of a real wealth. In
+its symbols, the cultus preserves all the past levels of religious
+response achieved by the race; weaving them into the fabric of religion,
+and carrying them forward into the present. All the instinctive
+movements of the primitive mind; its fear of the invisible, its
+self-subjection, its trust in ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices,
+its tendency to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy off
+the unknown, to set up magicians and mediators, are represented in it.
+Its function is racial more than individual. It is the art-work of the
+folk-soul in the religious sphere. Here man's inveterate creative
+faculty seizes on the raw material given him by religious-intuition, and
+constructs from it significant shapes. We misunderstand, then, the whole
+character of religious symbolism if we either demand rationality from
+it, or try to adapt its imagery to the lucid and probably mistaken
+conclusions of the sophisticated, modern mind.
+
+We are learning to recognize these primitive and racial elements in
+popular religion, and to endure their presence with tolerance; because
+they are necessary, and match a level of mental life which is still
+active in the race. This more primitive life emerges to dominate all
+crowds--where the collective mental level is inevitably lower than that
+of the best individuals immersed in it--and still conditions many of our
+beliefs and deeds. There is the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine
+powers; which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, insists on
+regarding as somehow hostile to us and wanting to be bought off. There
+is the whole idea and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more than
+the big apples and vegetable marrows of the harvest festival be involved
+in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be
+persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by
+famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases
+can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further
+the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical
+efficacy which some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites,
+shrines, liturgic formulæ and religious objects; others, to the texts of
+their scriptures.[128] These things, and others like them, are not only
+significant survivals from the past. They also represent the religious
+side of something that continues active in us at present. Since, then,
+it should clearly be the object of all spiritual endeavor to win the
+whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in
+language that they understand, we should not too hurriedly despise or
+denounce these things. Far better that our primitive emotions, with
+their vast store of potential energy, should be won for spiritual
+interests on the only terms which they can grasp, than that they should
+be left to spend themselves on lower objects.
+
+If therefore the spiritual or the regenerate life is not likely to
+prosper without some incorporation in institutions, some definite link
+with the past, it seems also likely to need for its full working-out and
+propaganda the symbols and liturgy of a cultus. Here again, the right
+path will be that of fulfilment, not of destruction; a deeper
+investigation of the full meaning of cultus, the values it conserves and
+the needs it must meet, a clearer and humbler understanding of our human
+limitations. We must also clearly realize as makers of the future, that
+as the Church has its special dangers of conservatism, cosiness,
+intolerance, a checking of initiative, the domestic tendency to enclose
+itself and shirk reality; so the cultus has also its special dangers, of
+which the chief are perhaps formalism, magic, and spiritual sloth.
+Receiving and conserving as it does all the successive deposits of
+racial experience, it is the very home of magic: of the archaic tendency
+to attribute words and deeds, special power to a priestly caste, and to
+make of itself the essential mediator between Creative Spirit and the
+soul. Further, using perpetually as it does and must symbols of the most
+archaic sort, directly appealing to the latent primitive in each of us,
+it offers us a perpetual temptation to fall back into something below
+our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always
+at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to
+traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back
+into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the
+way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty
+congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting owner to the
+revivalists' penitent-bench.
+
+But on the other hand, Creative Spirit is not merely conservative. The
+Lord and Giver of Life presses forward, and perpetually brings novelty
+to birth; and in so far as we are dedicated to Him, we must not make an
+unconditional surrender to psychic indolence, or to the pull-back of the
+religious past. We may not, as Christians, accept easy emotions in the
+place of heroic and difficult actualizations: make external religion an
+excuse for dodging reality, immerse ourselves in an exquisite dream, or
+tolerate any real conflict between old cultus and actual living faith. A
+most delicate discrimination is therefore demanded from us; the striking
+of a balance between the rightful conservatism of the cultus and the
+rightful independence of the soul. Yet, this is not to justify even in
+the most advanced a wholesale iconoclasm. Time after time, experience
+has proved that the attempt to approach God "without means," though it
+may seem to describe the rare and sacred moments of the personal life of
+the Spirit, is beyond the power of the mass of men; and even those who
+do achieve it are, as it were, most often supported from behind by
+religious history and the religious culture of their day. I do not think
+it can be doubted that the right use of cultus does-increase religious
+sensitiveness. Therefore here the difficult task of the future must be
+to preserve and carry forward its essential elements, all the symbolic
+significance, all the incorporated emotion, which make it one of man's
+greatest works of art; whilst eliminating those features which are, in
+the bad sense, conventional and no longer answer to experience or
+communicate life.
+
+Were we truly reasonable human beings, we should perhaps provide openly
+and as a matter of course within the Christian frame widely different
+types of ceremonial religion, suited to different levels of mind and
+different developments of the religious consciousness. To some extent
+this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism,
+revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. But these varying
+types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the
+complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in
+the relative though none in the absolute sense. Did we more openly
+acknowledge the character of that life, the historic Churches would no
+longer invite the sophisticated to play down to their own primitive
+fantasies; to sing meaningless hymns and recite vindictive psalms, or
+lull themselves by the recitation of litany or rosary which, admirable
+as the instruments of suggestion, are inadequate expressions of the
+awakened spiritual life. On the one hand, they would not require the
+simple to express their corporate religious feeling in Elizabethan
+English or Patristic Latin; on the other, expect the educated to accept
+at face-value symbols of which the unreal character is patent to them.
+Nor would they represent these activities as possessing absolute value
+in themselves.
+
+To join in simplicity and without criticism in the common worship,
+humbly receiving its good influences, is one thing. This is like the
+drill of the loyal soldier; welding him to his neighbours, giving him
+the corporate spirit and forming in him the habits he needs. But to stop
+short at that drill, and tell the individual that drill is the essence
+of his life and all his duty, is another thing altogether. It confuses
+means and end; destroys the balance between liberty and law. If the
+religious institution is to do its real work in furthering the life of
+the Spirit, it must introduce a more rich variety into its methods; and
+thus educate souls of every type not only to be members of the group but
+also to grow up to the full richness of the personal life. It must
+offer them--as indeed Catholicism does to some extent already--both easy
+emotion and difficult mystery; both dramatic ceremony and ceremonial
+silence. It must also give to them all its hoarded knowledge of the
+inner life of prayer and contemplation, of the remaking of the moral
+nature on supernatural levels: all the gold that there is in the deposit
+of faith. And it must not be afraid to impart that knowledge in modern
+terms which all can understand. All this it can and will do if its
+members sufficiently desire it: which means, if those who care intensely
+for the life of the Spirit accept their corporate responsibilities. In
+the last resort, criticism of the Church, of Christian institutionalism,
+is really criticism of ourselves. Were we more spiritually alive, our
+spiritual homes would be the real nesting places of new life. That which
+the Church is to us is the result of all that we bring to, and ask from,
+history: the impact of our present and its past.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 119: William James: "The Varieties of Religious Experience,"
+p. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 120: On this point compare Von Hügel: "Essays and Addresses on
+the Philosophy of Religion," pp. 230 et seq.]
+
+[Footnote 121: W. McDougall: "The Group Mind," Cap. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 122: Von Hügel "Eternal Life," p. 377.]
+
+[Footnote 123: Cf. Trotter: "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War."]
+
+[Footnote 124: Dom Cuthbert Butler in the "Hibbert Journal," 1906, p.
+502.]
+
+[Footnote 125: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Cap. VII.]
+
+[Footnote 126: Cf. R. Semon: "Die Mneme."]
+
+[Footnote 127: Bertrand Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," p. 78.]
+
+[Footnote 128: A quaint example of this occurred in a recent revival,
+where the exclamation "We believe in the Word of God from cover to
+cover, Alleluia!" received the fervent reply, "And the covers too!"]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL
+
+
+In the last three chapters we have been concerned, almost exclusively,
+with those facts of psychic life and growth, those instruments and
+mechanizations, which bear upon or condition our spiritual life. But
+these wanderings in the soul's workshops, and these analyses of the
+forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of
+that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life. I wish
+now to come out of the workshop, and try to see this spiritual life as
+the individual man may and should achieve it, from another angle of
+approach.
+
+What are we to regard as the heart of spirituality? When we have
+eliminated the accidental characters with which varying traditions have
+endowed it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its
+possessor from the best, most moral citizen or devoted altruist? Why do
+the Christian saint, Indian _rishi,_ Buddhist _arhat,_ Moslem _S[=u]fi,_
+all seem to us at bottom men of one race, living under different
+sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact? This life, which they show
+in its various perfections, includes it is true the ethical life, but
+cannot be equated with it. Wherein do its differentia consist? We are
+dealing with the most subtle of realities and have only the help of
+crude words, developed for other purposes than this. But surely we come
+near to the truth, as history and experience show it to us, when we say
+again that the spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest
+beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life that means God in all
+His richness, immanent and transcendent: the whole response to the
+Eternal and Abiding of which any one man is capable, expressed in and
+through his this-world life. It requires then an objective vision or
+certitude, something to aim at; and also a total integration of the
+self, its dedication to that aim. Both terms, vision and response, are
+essential to it.
+
+This definition may seem at first sight rather dull. It suggests little
+of that poignant and unearthly beauty, that heroism, that immense
+attraction, which really belong to the spiritual life. Here indeed we
+are dealing with poetry in action: and we need not words but music to
+describe it as it really is. Yet all the forms, all the various beauties
+and achievements of this life of the Spirit, can be resumed as the
+reactions of different temperaments to the one abiding and inexhaustibly
+satisfying Object of their love. It is the answer made by the whole
+supple, plastic self, rational and instinctive, active and
+contemplative, to any or all of those objective experiences of religion
+which we considered in the first chapter; whether of an encompassing
+and transcendent Reality, of a Divine Companionship or of Immanent
+Spirit. Such a response we must believe to be itself divinely actuated.
+Fully made, it is found on the one hand to call forth the most heroic,
+most beautiful, most tender qualities in human nature; all that we call
+holiness, the transfiguration of mere ethics by a supernatural
+loveliness, breathing another air, satisfying another standard, than
+those of the temporal world. And on the other hand, this response of the
+self is repaid by a new sensitiveness and receptivity, a new influx of
+power. To use theological language, will is answered by grace: and as
+the will's dedication rises towards completeness the more fully does new
+life flow in. Therefore it is plain that the smallest and humblest
+beginning of such a life in ourselves--and this inquiry is useless
+unless it be made to speak to our own condition--will entail not merely
+an addition to life, but for us too a change in our whole scale of
+values, a self-dedication. For that which we are here shown as a
+possible human achievement is not a life of comfortable piety, or the
+enjoyment of the delicious sensations of the armchair mystic. We are
+offered, it is true, a new dower of life; access to the full
+possibilities of human nature. But only upon terms, and these terms
+include new obligations in respect of that life; compelling us, as it
+appears, to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual refusal to
+sink back into the next-best, to slide along a gentle incline. The
+spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe
+distance from the Fire of Love. It demands, indeed, very often things so
+hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman: immensely
+generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant
+purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means a complete conquest of life's
+perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance
+of hardship and pain. And if we ask how this can be, what it is that
+makes possible such enhancement of human will and of human courage, the
+only answer seems to be that of the Johannine Christ: that it does
+consist in a more abundant life.
+
+In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding
+of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its
+general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely
+physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral
+conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full
+integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in
+fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and
+for the new ideals. There was something of the penitent, something of
+the contemplative, and something of the apostle in every man or woman
+who thus grew to their full stature and realized all their latent
+possibilities. But above all there was a fortitude, an all-round power
+of tackling existence, which comes from complete indifference to
+personal suffering or personal success. And further, psychology showed
+us, that those workings and readjustments which we saw preparing this
+life of the Spirit, were in line with those which prepare us for
+fullness of life on other levels: that is to say the harnessing of the
+impulsive nature to the purposes chosen by consciousness, the resolving
+of conflicts, the unification of the whole personality about one's
+dominant interest. These readjustments were helped by the deliberate
+acceptance of the useful suggestions of religion, the education of the
+foreconscious, the formation of habits of charity and prayer.
+
+The greatest and most real of living writers on this subject, Baron von
+Hügel, has given us another definition of the personal spiritual life
+which may fruitfully be compared with this. It must and shall, he says,
+exhibit rightful contact with and renunciation of the Particular and
+Fleeting; and with this ever seeks and finds the Eternal--deepening and
+incarnating within its own experience this "transcendent
+Otherness."[129] Nothing which we are likely to achieve can go beyond
+this profound saying. We see how many rich elements are contained in it:
+effort and growth, a temper both social and ascetic, a demand for and a
+receiving of power. True, to some extent it restates the position at
+which we arrived in the first chapter: but we now wish to examine more
+thoroughly into that position and discover its practical applications.
+Let us then begin by unpacking it, and examining its chief characters
+one by one.
+
+If we do this, we find that it demands of us:--(1) Rightful contact with
+the Particular and Fleeting. That is, a willing acceptance of all
+this-world tasks, obligations, relations, and joys; in fact, the Active
+Life of Becoming in its completeness.
+
+(2) But also, a certain renunciation of that Particular and Fleeting. A
+refusal to get everything out of it that we can for ourselves, to be
+possessive, or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a sense of
+detachment or asceticism; of further destiny and obligation for the soul
+than complete earthly happiness or here-and-now success.
+
+(3) And with this ever--not merely in hours of devotion--to seek and
+find the Eternal; penetrating our wholesome this-world action through
+and through with the very spirit of contemplation.
+
+(4) Thus deepening and incarnating--bringing in, giving body to, and in
+some sense exhibiting by means of our own growing and changing
+experience--that transcendent Otherness, the fact of the Life of the
+Spirit in the here-and-now.
+
+The full life of the Spirit, then, is once more declared to be active,
+contemplative, ascetic and apostolic; though nowadays we express these
+abiding human dispositions in other and less formidable terms. If we
+translate them as work, prayer, self-discipline and social service they
+do not look quite so bad. But even so, what a tremendous programme to
+put before the ordinary human creature, and how difficult it looks when
+thus arranged! That balance to be discovered and held between due
+contact with this present living world of time, and due renunciation of
+it. That continual penetration of the time-world with the spirit of
+Eternity.
+
+But now, in accordance with the ruling idea which has occupied us in
+this book, let us arrange these four demands in different order. Let us
+put number three first: "ever seeking and finding the Eternal."
+Conceive, at least, that we do this really, and in a practical way. Then
+we discover that, placed as we certainly are in a world of succession,
+most of the seeking and finding has got to be done there; that the times
+of pure abstraction in which we touch the non-successive and
+supersensual must be few. Hence it follows that the first and second
+demands are at once fully met; for, if we are indeed faithfully seeking
+and finding the Eternal whilst living--as all sane men and women must
+do--in closest contact with the Particular and Fleeting, our acceptances
+and our renunciations will be governed by this higher term of
+experience. And further, the transcendent Otherness, perpetually
+envisaged by us as alone giving the world of sense its beauty, reality
+and value, will be incarnated and expressed by us in this sense-life,
+and thus ever more completely tasted and known. It will be drawn by us,
+as best we can, and often at the cost of bitter struggle, into the
+limitations of humanity; entincturing our attitude and our actions. And
+in the degree in which we thus appropriate it, it will be given out by
+us again to other men.
+
+All this, of course, says again that which men have been constantly told
+by those who sought to redeem them from their confusions, and show them
+the way to fullness of life. "Seek first the Kingdom of God," said
+Jesus, "and all the rest shall be added to you." "Love," said St.
+Augustine, "and _do_ what you like"; "Let nothing," says Thomas à
+Kempis, "be great or high or acceptable to thee but purely God";[130]
+and Kabir, "Open your eyes of love, and see Him who pervades this world!
+consider it well, and know that this is your own country."[131] "Our
+whole teaching," says Boehme, "is nothing else than how man should
+kindle in himself God's light-world."[132] I do not say that such a
+presentation of it makes the personal spiritual life any easier: nothing
+does that. But it does make its central implicit rather clearer, shows
+us at once its difficulty and its simplicity; since it depends on the
+consistent subordination of every impulse and every action to one
+regnant aim and interest--in other words, the unification of the whole
+self round one centre, the highest conceivable by man. Each of man's
+behaviour-cycles is always directed towards some end, of which he may
+or may not be vividly conscious. But in that perfect unification of the
+self which is characteristic of the life of Spirit, all his behaviour is
+brought into one stream of purpose, and directed towards one
+transcendent end. And this simplification alone means for him a release
+from conflicting wishes, and so a tremendous increase of power.
+
+If then we admit this formula, "ever seeking and finding the
+Eternal"--which is of course another rendering of Ruysbroeck's "aiming
+at God"--as the prime character of a spiritual life, the secret of human
+transcendence; what are the agents by which it is done?
+
+Here, men and women of all times and all religions, who have achieved
+this fullness of life, agree in their answer: and by this answer we are
+at once taken away from dry philosophic conceptions and introduced into
+the very heart of human experience. It is done, they say, on man's part
+by Love and Prayer: and these, properly understood in their
+inexhaustible richness, joy, pain, dedication and noble simplicity,
+cover the whole field of the spiritual life. Without them, that life is
+impossible; with them, if the self be true to their implications, some
+measure of it cannot be escaped. I said, Love and Prayer properly
+understood: not as two movements of emotional piety, but as fundamental
+human dispositions, as the typical attitude and action which control
+man's growth into greater reality. Since then they are of such primary
+importance to us, it will be worth while at this stage to look into them
+a little more closely.
+
+First, Love: that over-worked and ill-used word, often confused on the
+one hand with passion and on the other with amiability. If we ask the
+most fashionable sort of psychologist what love is, he says that it is
+the impulse urging us towards that end which is the fulfilment of any
+series of deeds or "behaviour-cycle"; the psychic thread, on which all
+the apparently separate actions making up that cycle are strung and
+united. In this sense love need not be fully conscious, reach the level
+of feeling; but it _must_ be an imperative, inward urge. And if we ask
+those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say
+that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul
+towards its Source;[133] which impels every living thing to pursue the
+most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of
+self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God. Love is
+for them much more than its emotional manifestations. It is "the
+ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things"--no less.
+This definition, which I take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas
+Aquinas,[134] would be agreeable to the most modern psychologist; he
+might give the hidden steersman of the psyche in its perpetual movement
+towards novelty a less beautiful and significant name. "This indwelling
+Love," says Plotinus, "is no other than the Spirit which, as we are
+told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several
+nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular soul,
+strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Love, the
+guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its being."[135]
+
+Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at whatever level it be
+experienced, the psychic craving, the urgent spirit within us pressing
+out to life, is always _one;_ and that the sublimation of this vital
+craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regeneration? There, in
+our instinctive nature--which, as we know, makes us the kind of animal
+we are--abides that power of loving which is, really, the power of
+living; the cause of our actions, the controlling factor in our
+perceptions, the force pressing us into any given type of experience,
+turning aside for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater
+vigour. Each level of the universe makes solicitations to this power:
+the worlds of sense, of thought, of beauty, and of action. According to
+the degree of our development, the trend of the conscious will, is our
+response; and according to that response will be our life. "The world to
+which a man turns himself," says Boehme, "and in which he produces
+fruit, the same is lord in him, and this world becomes manifest in
+him."[136]
+
+From all this it becomes clear what the love of God is; and what St.
+Augustine meant when he said that all virtue--and virtue after all means
+power not goodness--lay in the right ordering of love, the conscious
+orientation of desire. Christians, on the authority of their Master,
+declare that such love of God requires all that they have, not only of
+feeling, but also of intellect and of power; since He is to be loved
+with heart and mind and strength. Thought and action on highest levels
+are involved in it, for it means, not religious emotionalism, but the
+unflickering orientation of the whole self towards Him, ever seeking and
+finding the Eternal; the linking up of all behaviour on that string, so
+that the apparently hard and always heroic choices which are demanded,
+are made at last because they are inevitable. It is true that this
+dominant interest will give to our lives a special emotional colour and
+a special kind of happiness; but in this, as in the best, deepest,
+richest human love, such feeling-tone and such happiness--though in some
+natures of great beauty and intensity--are only to be looked upon as
+secondary characters, and never to be aimed at.
+
+When St. Teresa said that the real object of the spiritual marriage was
+"the incessant production of work, work,"[137] I have no doubt that many
+of her nuns were disconcerted; especially the type of ease-loving
+conservatives whom she and her intimates were accustomed to refer to as
+the pussy-cats. But in this direct application to religious experience
+of St. Thomas' doctrine of love, she set up an ideal of the spiritual
+life which is as valid at the present day in the entanglements of our
+social order, as it was in the enclosed convents of sixteenth-century
+Spain. Love, we said, is the cause of action. It urges and directs our
+behaviour, conscious and involuntary, towards an end. The mother is
+irresistibly impelled to act towards her child's welfare, the ambitious
+man towards success, the artist towards expression of his vision. All
+these are examples of behaviour, love-driven towards ends. And religious
+experience discloses to us a greater more inclusive end, and this vital
+power of love as capable of being used on the highest levels,
+regenerated, directed to eternal interests; subordinating behaviour,
+inspiring suffering, unifying the whole self and its activities,
+mobilizing them for this transcendental achievement. This generous love,
+to go back to the quotation from Baron von Hügel which opened our
+inquiry, will indeed cause the behaviour it controls to exhibit both
+rightful contact with and renunciation of the particular and fleeting;
+because in and through this series of linked deeds it is uniting with
+itself all human activities, and in and through them is seeking and
+finding its eternal end. So, in that rightful bringing-in of novelty
+which is the business of the fully living soul, the most powerful agent
+is love, understood as the controlling factor of behaviour, the
+sublimation and union of will and desire. "Let love," says Boehme, "be
+the life of thy nature. It killeth thee not, but quickeneth thee
+according to its life, and then thou livest, yet not to thy own will but
+to its will: for thy will becometh its will, and then thou art dead to
+thyself but alive to God."[138] There is the true, solid and for us most
+fruitful doctrine of divine union, unconnected with any rapture, trance,
+ecstasy or abnormal state of mind: a union organic, conscious, and
+dynamic with the Creative Spirit of Life.
+
+If we now go on to ask how, specially, we shall achieve this union in
+such degree as is possible to each one of us; the answer must be, that
+it will be done by Prayer. If the seeking of the Eternal is actuated by
+love, the finding of it is achieved through prayer. Prayer, in
+fact--understood as a life or state, not an act or an asking--is the
+beginning, middle and end of all that we are now considering. As the
+social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the
+spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual
+world. And such humble yet ardent contact with the spiritual
+world--opening up to its suggestions our impulses, our reveries, our
+feelings, our most secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts-is
+the essence of prayer, understood in its widest sense. No more than
+surrender or love can prayer be reduced to "one act." Those who seek to
+sublimate it into "pure" contemplation are as limited at one end of the
+scale, as those who reduce it to articulate petition are at the other.
+It contains in itself a rich variety of human reactions and experiences.
+It opens the door upon an unwalled world, in which the self truly lives
+and therefore makes widely various responses to its infinitely varying
+stimuli. Into that world the self takes, or should take, its special
+needs, aptitudes and longings, and matches them against its apprehension
+of Eternal Truth. In this meeting of the human heart with all that it
+can apprehend of Reality, not adoration alone but unbounded contrition,
+not humble dependence alone but joy, peace and power, not rapture alone
+but mysterious darkness, must be woven into the fabric of love. In this
+world the soul may sometimes wander as if in pastures, sometimes is
+poised breathless and intent. Sometimes it is fed by beauty, sometimes
+by most difficult truth, and experiences the extremes of riches and
+destitution, darkness and light. "It is not," says Plotinus, "by
+crushing the Divine into a unity but by displaying its exuberance, as
+the Supreme Himself has displayed it, that we show knowledge of the
+might of God."[139]
+
+Thus, by that instinctive and warmly devoted direction of its behaviour
+which is love, and that willed attention to and communion with the
+spiritual world which is prayer, all the powers of the self are united
+and turned towards the seeking and finding of the Eternal. It is by
+complete obedience to this exacting love, doing difficult and unselfish
+things, giving up easy and comfortable things--in fact by living, living
+hard on the highest levels--that men more and more deeply feel,
+experience, and enter into their spiritual life. This is a fact which
+must seem rather awkward to those who put forward pathological
+explanations of it. And on the other hand it is only by constant
+contacts with and recourse to the energizing life of Spirit, that this
+hard vocation can be fulfilled. Such a power of reference to Reality, of
+transcending the world of succession and its values, can be cultivated
+by us; and this education of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of
+the discipline of prayer. True, it is only in times of recollection or
+of great emotion that this profound contact is fully present to
+consciousness. Yet, once fully achieved and its obligations accepted by
+us, it continues as a grave melody within our busy outward acts: and we
+must by right direction of our deepest instincts so find and feel the
+Eternal all the time, if indeed we are to actualize and incarnate it all
+the time. From this truth of experience, religion has deduced the
+doctrine of grace, and the general conception of man as able to do
+nothing of himself. This need hardly surprise us. For equally on the
+physical plane man can do nothing of himself, if he be cut off from his
+physical sources of power: from food to eat, and air to breathe.
+Therefore the fact that his spiritual life too is dependent upon the
+life-giving atmosphere that penetrates him, and the heavenly food which
+he receives, makes no fracture in his experience. Thus we are brought
+back by another path to the fundamental need for him, in some form, of
+the balanced active and contemplative life.
+
+In spite of this, many people seem to take it for granted that if a man
+believes in and desires to live a spiritual life, he can live it in
+utter independence of spiritual food. He believes in God, loves his
+neighbour, wants to do good, and just goes ahead. The result of this is
+that the life of the God-fearing citizen or the Social Christian, as now
+conceived and practised, is generally the starved life. It leaves no
+time for the silence, the withdrawal, the quiet attention to the
+spiritual, which is essential if it is to develop all its powers. Yet
+the literature of the Spirit is full of warnings on this subject.
+_Taste_ and see that the Lord is sweet. They that wait upon the Lord
+shall renew their _strength_. In quietness and confidence shall be your
+_strength_. These are practical statements; addressed, not to
+specialists but to ordinary men and women, with a normal psycho-physical
+make-up. They are literally true now, or can be if we choose. They do
+not involve any peculiar training, or unnatural effort. A sliding scale
+goes from the simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to that
+complete self-loss and complete self-finding, which is called the
+transforming union of the saint; and somewhere in this series, every
+human soul can find a place.
+
+If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to receive what St.
+Augustine called the food of the full-grown, to find and feel the
+Eternal, we must give time and place to it in our lives. I emphasize
+this, because its realization seems to me to be a desperate modern need;
+a need exhibited supremely in our languid and ineffectual spirituality,
+but also felt in the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of
+the artist, the reformer and the teacher. St. John of the Cross says in
+one of his letters: "What is wanting is not writing or talking--there is
+more than enough of that--but, silence and action. For silence joined to
+action produces recollection, and gives the spirit a marvellous
+strength." Such recollection, such a gathering up of our interior forces
+and retreat of consciousness to its "ground," is the preparation of all
+great endeavour, whatever its apparent object may be. Until we realize
+that it is better, more useful, more productive of strength, to spend,
+let us say, the odd ten minutes in the morning in feeling and finding
+the Eternal than in flicking the newspaper--that this will send us off
+to the day's work properly orientated, gathered together, recollected,
+and really endowed with new power of dealing with circumstance--we have
+not begun to live the life of the Spirit, or grasped the practical
+connection between such a daily discipline and the power of doing our
+best work, whatever it may be.
+
+I will illustrate this from a living example: that of the Sadhu Sundar
+Singh. No one, I suppose, who came into personal contact with the Sadhu,
+doubted that they were in the presence of a person who was living, in
+the full sense, the spiritual life. Even those who could not accept the
+symbols in which he described his experience and asked others to share
+it, acknowledged that there had been worked in him a great
+transformation; that the sense of the abiding and eternal went with him
+everywhere, and flowed out from him, to calm and to correct our feverish
+lives. He fully satisfies in his own person the demands of Baron von
+Hügel's definition: both contact with and renunciation of the Particular
+and Fleeting, seeking and finding of the Eternal, incarnating within his
+own experience that transcendent Otherness. Now the Sadhu has discovered
+for himself and practises as the condition of his extraordinary
+activity, power and endurance, just that balance of life which St.
+Benedict's rule ordained. He is a wandering missionary, constantly
+undertaking great journeys, enduring hardship and danger, and practising
+the absolute poverty of St. Francis. He is perfectly healthy, strong,
+extraordinarily attractive, full of power. But this power he is careful
+to nourish. His irreducible minimum is two hours spent in meditation and
+wordless communication with God at the beginning of each day. He prefers
+three or four hours when work permits; and a long period of prayer and
+meditation always precedes his public address. If forced to curtail or
+hurry these hours of prayer, he feels restless and unhappy, and his
+efficiency is reduced. "Prayer," he says, "is as important as breathing;
+and we never say we have no time to breathe."[140]
+
+All this has been explained away by critics of the muscular Christian
+sort, who say that the Sadhu's Christianity is of a typically Eastern
+kind. But this is simply not true. It were much better to acknowledge
+that we, more and more, are tending to develop a typically Western kind
+of Christianity, marked by the Western emphasis on doing and Western
+contempt for being; and that if we go sufficiently far on this path we
+shall find ourselves cut off from our source. The Sadhu's Christianity
+is fully Christian; that is to say, it is whole and complete. The power
+in which he does his works is that in which St. Paul carried through his
+heroic missionary career, St. Benedict formed a spiritual family that
+transformed European culture, Wesley made the world his parish,
+Elizabeth Fry faced the Newgate criminals. It is idle to talk of the
+revival of a personal spiritual life among ourselves, or of a spiritual
+regeneration of society--for this can only come through the individual
+remaking of each of its members--unless we are willing, at the sacrifice
+of some personal convenience, to make a place and time for these acts of
+recollection; this willing and loving--and even more fruitful, the more
+willing and loving--communion with, response to Reality, to God. It is
+true that a fully lived spiritual life involves far more than this. But
+this is the only condition on which it will exist at all.
+
+Love then, which is a willed tendency to God; prayer, which is willed
+communion with and experience of Him; are the two prime essentials in
+the personal life of the Spirit. They represent, of course, only our
+side of it and our obligation. This love is the outflowing response to
+another inflowing love, and this prayer the appropriation of a
+transcendental energy and grace. As the "German Theology" reminds us, "I
+cannot do the work without God, and God may not or will not without
+me."[141] And by these acts alone, faithfully carried through, all their
+costly demands fulfilled, all their gifts and applications accepted
+without resistance and applied to each aspect of life, human nature can
+grow up to its full stature, and obtain access to all its sources of
+power.
+
+Yet this personal inward life of love and prayer shall not be too
+solitary. As it needs links with cultus and so with the lives of its
+fellows, it also needs links with history and so with the living past.
+These links are chiefly made by the individual through his reading; and
+such reading--such access to humanity's hoarded culture and
+experience--has always been declared alike by Christian and
+non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper helps of the spiritual
+life. Though Höffding perhaps exaggerates when he reminds us that
+mediæval art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in their
+books, and suggests that such brooding study directly induces
+contemplative states,[142] yet it is true that the soul gains greatly
+from such communion with, and meek learning from, its cultural
+background. Ever more and more as it advances, it will discover within
+that background the records of those very experiences which it must now
+so poignantly relive; and which seem to it, as his own experience seems
+to every lover, unique. There it can find, without any betrayal of its
+secret, the wholesome assurance of its own normality; standards of
+comparison; companionship, alike in its hours of penitence, of light,
+and of deprivation. Yet such fruitful communion with the past is not the
+privilege of an aristocratic culture. It is seen in its perfection in
+many simple Christians who have found in the Bible all the spiritual
+food they need. The great literature of the Spirit tells its secrets to
+those alone who thus meet it on its own ground. Not only the works of
+Thomas à Kempis, of Ruysbroeck, or of St. Teresa, but also the Biblical
+writers--and especially, perhaps, the Psalms and the Gospels--are read
+wholly anew by us at each stage of our advance. Comparative study of
+Hindu and Moslem writers proves that this is equally true of the great
+literatures of other faiths.[143] Beginners may find in all these
+infinite stimulus, interest, and beauty. But to the mature soul they
+become road-books, of which experience proves the astonishing
+exactitude; giving it descriptions which it can recognize and directions
+that it needs, and constituting a steady check upon individualism.
+
+Now let us look at the emergence of this life which we have been
+considering, and at the typical path which it will or may follow, in an
+ordinary man or woman of our own day. Not a saint or genius, reaching
+heroic levels; but a member of that solid wholesome spiritual population
+which ought to fill the streets of the City of God. We noticed when we
+were studying its appearance in history, that often this life begins in
+a sort of restlessness, a feeling that there is something more in
+existence, some absolute meaning, some more searching obligation, that
+we have not reached. This dissatisfaction, this uncertainty and hunger,
+may show itself in many different forms. It may speak first to the
+intellect, to the moral nature, to the social conscience, even to the
+artistic faculty; or, directly, to the heart. Anyhow, its abiding
+quality is a sense of contraction, of limitation; a feeling of something
+more that we could stretch out to, and achieve, and be. Its impulsion is
+always in one direction; to a finding of some wider and more enduring
+reality, some objective for the self's life and love. It is a seeking of
+the Eternal, in some form. I allow that thanks to the fog in which we
+live muffled, such a first seeking, and above all such a finding of the
+Eternal is not for us a very easy thing. The sense of quest, of
+disillusion, of something lacking, is more common among modern men than
+its resolution in discovery. Nevertheless the quest does mean that there
+is a solution: and that those who are persevering must find it in the
+end. The world into which our desire is truly turned, is somehow
+revealed to us. The revelation, always partial and relative, is of
+course conditioned by our capacity, the character of our longing and the
+experiences of our past. In spiritual matters we behold that which we
+are: here following, on higher levels, the laws which govern æsthetic
+apprehension.
+
+So, dissatisfied with its world-view and realizing that it is
+incomplete, the self seeks at first hand, though not always with clear
+consciousness of its nature, the Reality which is the object of
+religion. When it finds this Reality, the discovery, however partial, is
+for it the overwhelming revelation of an objective Fact; and it is swept
+by a love and awe which it did not know itself to possess. And now it
+sees; dimly, yet in a sufficiently disconcerting way, the Pattern in the
+Mount; the rich complex of existence as it were transmuted, full of
+charity and beauty, governed by another series of adjustments. Life
+looks different to it. As Fox said, "Creation gives out another smell
+than before."[144] There is only one thing more disconcerting than this,
+and that is seeing the pattern actualized in a fellow human being:
+living face to face with human sanctity, in its great simplicity and
+supernatural love, joy, peace. For, when we glimpse Eternal Beauty in
+the universe, we can say with the hero of "Callista," "It is beyond me!"
+But, when we see it transfiguring human character, we know that it is
+not beyond the power of the race. It is here, to be had. Its existence
+as a form of life creates a standard, and lays an obligation on us all.
+
+Suppose then that the self, urged by this new pressure, accepts the
+obligation and measures itself by the standard. It then becomes apparent
+that this Fact which it sought for and has seen is not merely added to
+its old universe, as in mediæval pictures Paradise with its circles
+over-arches the earth. This Reality is all-penetrating and has
+transfigured each aspect of the self's old world. It now has a new and
+most exacting scale of values, which demand from it a new series of
+adjustments; ask it--and with authority--to change its life.
+
+What next? The next thing, probably, is that the self finds itself in
+rather a tight place. It is wedged into a physical order that makes
+innumerable calls on it, and innumerable suggestions to it: which has
+for years monopolized its field of consciousness and set up habits of
+response to its claims. It has to make some kind of a break with this
+order, or at least with its many attachments thereto; and stretch to the
+wider span demanded by the new and larger world. And further, it is in
+possession of a complex psychic life, containing many insubordinate
+elements, many awkward bequests from a primitive past. That psychic life
+has just received the powerful and direct suggestion of the Spirit; and
+for the moment, it is subdued to that suggestion. But soon it begins to
+experience the inevitable conflict between old habits, and new
+demands--between a life lived in the particular and in the universal
+spirit--and only through complete resolution of that conflict will it
+develop its full power. So the self quickly realizes that the
+theologian's war between Nature and Grace is a picturesque way of
+stating a real situation; and further that the demand of all religions
+for a change of heart--that is, of the deep instinctive nature--is the
+first condition of a spiritual life. And hence, that its hands are
+fairly full. It is true that an immense joy and hope come with it to
+this business of tackling imperfection, of adjusting itself to the newly
+found centre of life. It knows that it is committed to the forward
+movement of a Power, which may be slow but which nothing can gainsay.
+Nevertheless the first thing that power demands from it is courage; and
+the next an unremitting vigorous effort. It will never again be able to
+sink back cosily into its racial past. Consciousness of disharmony and
+incompleteness now brings the obligation to mend the disharmony and
+achieve a fresh synthesis.
+
+This is felt with a special sharpness in the moral life, where the
+irreconcilable demands of natural self-interest and of Spirit assume
+their most intractable shape. Old habits and paths of discharge which
+have almost become automatic must now, it seems, be abandoned. New
+paths, in spite of resistances, must be made. Thus it is that
+temptation, hard conflict, and bewildering perplexities usher in the
+life of the Spirit. These are largely the results of our biological past
+continuing into our fluctuating half-made present; and they point
+towards a psychic stability, an inner unity we have not yet attained.
+
+This realization of ourselves as we truly are--emerging with difficulty
+from our animal origin, tinctured through and through with the
+self-regarding tendencies and habits it has imprinted on us--this
+realization or self-knowledge, is Humility; the only soil in which the
+spiritual life can germinate. And modern man with his great horizons,
+his ever clearer vision of his own close kinship with life's origin, his
+small place in the time-stream, in the universe, in God's hand, the
+relative character of his best knowledge and achievement, is surely
+everywhere being persuaded to this royal virtue. Recognition of this his
+true creaturely status, with its obligations--the only process of pain
+and struggle needed if the demands of generous love are ever to be
+fulfilled in him and his many-levelled nature is to be purified and
+harmonized and develop all its powers--this is Repentance. He shows not
+only his sincerity, but his manliness and courage by his acceptance of
+all that such repentance entails on him; for the healthy soul, like the
+healthy body, welcomes some trial and roughness and is well able to bear
+the pains of education. Psychologists regard such an education,
+harmonizing the rational or ideal with the instinctive life--the change
+of heart which leaves the whole self working together without inner
+conflict towards one objective--as the very condition of a full and
+healthy life. But it can only be achieved in its perfection by the
+complete surrender of heart and mind to a third term, transcending alike
+the impulsive and the rational. The life of the Spirit in its supreme
+authority, and its identification with the highest interests of the
+race, does this: harnessing man's fiery energies to the service of the
+Light.
+
+Therefore, in the rich, new life on which the self enters, one strand
+must be that of repentance, catharsis, self-conquest; a complete
+contrition which is the earnest of complete generosity, uncalculated
+response. And, dealing as we are now with average human nature, we can
+safely say that the need for such ever-renewed self-scrutiny and
+self-purgation will never in this life be left behind. For sin is a
+fact, though a fact which we do not understand; and now it appears and
+must evermore remain an offence against love, hostile to this intense
+new attraction, and marring the self's willed tendency towards it.
+
+The next strand we may perhaps call that of Recollection: for the
+recognizing and the cure of imperfection depends on the compensating
+search for the Perfect and its enthronement as the supreme object of our
+thought and love. The self, then, soon begins to feel a strong impulsion
+to some type of inward withdrawal and concentration, some kind of
+prayer; though it may not use this name or recognize the character of
+its mood. As it yields to this strange new drawing, such recollection
+grows easier. It finds that there is a veritable inner world, not merely
+of phantasy, but of profound heart-searching experience; where the soul
+is in touch with another order of realities and knows itself to be an
+inheritor of Eternal Life. Here unique things happen. A power is at
+work, and new apprehensions are born. And now for the first time the
+self discovers itself to be striking a balance between this inner and
+the outer life, and in its own small way--but still, most
+fruitfully--enriching action with the fruits of contemplation. If it
+will give to the learning of this new art--to the disciplining and
+refining of this affective thought--even a fraction of the diligence
+which it gives to the learning of a new game, it will find itself repaid
+by a progressive purity of vision, a progressive sense of assurance, an
+ever-increasing delicacy of moral discrimination and demand.
+Psychologists, as we have seen, divide men into introverts and
+extroverts; but as a matter of fact we must regard both these extreme
+types as defective. A whole man should be supple in his reactions both
+to the inner and to the outer world.
+
+The third strand in the life of the Spirit, for this normal self which
+we are considering; must be the disposition of complete Surrender. More
+and more advancing in this inner life, it will feel the imperative
+attraction of Reality, of God; and it must respond to this attraction
+with all the courage and generosity of which it is capable. I am trying
+to use the simplest and the most general language, and to avoid
+emotional imagery: though it is here, in telling of this perpetually
+renewed act of self-giving and dedication, that spiritual writers most
+often have recourse to the language of the heart. It is indeed in a
+spirit of intensest and humble adoration that generous souls yield
+themselves to the drawing of that mysterious Beauty and unchanging Love,
+with all that it entails. But the form which the impulse to surrender
+takes will vary with the psychic make-up of the individual. To some it
+will come as a sense of vocation, a making-over of the will to the
+purposes of the Kingdom; a type of consecration which may not be overtly
+religious, but may be concerned with the self-forgetting quest of
+social excellence, of beauty, or of truth. By some it will be felt as an
+illumination of the mind, which now discerns once for all true values,
+and accepting these, must uphold and strive for them in the teeth of all
+opportunism. By some--and these are the most blessed--as a breaking and
+re-making of the heart. Whatever the form it takes, the extent in which
+the self experiences the peace, joy and power of living at the level of
+Spirit will depend on the completeness and singlemindedness of this, its
+supreme act of self-simplification. Any reserves, anything in its
+make-up which sets up resistances--and this means generally any form of
+egotism--will mar the harmony of the process. And on the other hand,
+such a real simplification of the self's life as is here
+demanded--uniting on one object, the intellect, will and feeling too
+often split among contradictory attractions--is itself productive of
+inner harmony and increased power: productive too of that noble
+endurance which counts no pain too much in the service of Reality.
+
+Here then we come to the fact, valid for every level of spiritual life,
+which lies behind all the declarations concerning surrender, self-loss,
+dying to live, dedication, made by writers on this theme. All involve a
+relaxing of tension, letting ourselves go without reluctance in the
+direction in which we are most profoundly drawn; a cessation of our
+struggles with the tide, our kicks against the pricks that spur us on.
+The inward aim of the self is towards unification with a larger life; a
+mergence with Reality which it may describe under various contradictory
+symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but which it feels to be
+the fulfilment of existence. It has learnt--though this knowledge may
+not have passed beyond the stage of feeling--that the universe is one
+simple texture, in which all things have their explanation and their
+place. Combing out the confusions which enmesh it, losing its sham and
+separate life and finding its true life there, it will know what to love
+and how to act. The goal of this process, which has been called entrance
+into the freedom of the Will of God, is the state described by the
+writer of the "German Theology" when he said "I would fain be to the
+Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man."[145] For such a
+declaration not only means a willed and skilful working for God, a
+practical siding with Perfection, becoming its living tool, but also
+close union with, and sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual
+order: a feeding on and using of its power, its very life blood;
+complete docility to its inward direction, abolition of separate desire.
+The surrender is therefore made not in order that we may become limp
+pietists, but in order that we may receive more energy and do better
+work: by a humble self-subjection more perfectly helping forward the
+thrust of the Spirit and the primal human business of incarnating the
+Eternal here and now. Its justification is in the arduous but untiring,
+various but harmonious, activities that flow from it: the enhancement of
+life which it entails. It gives us access to our real sources of power;
+that we may take from them and, spending generously, be energized anew.
+
+So the cord on which those events which make up the personal life of the
+Spirit are to be strung is completed, and we see that it consists of
+four strands. Two are dispositions of the self; Penitence and Surrender.
+Two are activities; inward Recollection and outward Work. All four make
+stern demands on its fortitude and goodwill. And each gives strength to
+the rest: for they are not to be regarded as separate and successive
+states, a discrete series through which we must pass one by one, leaving
+penitence behind us when we reach surrendered love; but as the variable
+yet enduring and inseparable aspects of one rich life, phases in one
+complete and vital effort to respond more and more closely to Reality.
+
+Nothing, perhaps, is less monotonous than the personal life of the
+Spirit. In its humility and joyous love, its adoration and its industry,
+it may find self-expression in any one of the countless activities of
+the world of time. It is both romantic and austere, both adventurous and
+holy. Full of fluctuation and unearthly colour, it yet has its dark
+patches as well as its light. Since perfect proof of the supersensual is
+beyond the span of human consciousness, the element of risk can never
+be eliminated: we are obliged in the end to trust the universe and live
+by faith. Therefore the awakened soul must often suffer perplexity,
+share to the utmost the stress and anguish of the physical order; and,
+chained as it is to a consciousness accustomed to respond to that order,
+must still be content with flashes of understanding and willing to bear
+long periods of destitution when the light is veiled.
+
+The further it advances the more bitter will these periods of
+destitution seem to it. It is not from the real men and women of the
+Spirit that we hear soft things about the comfort of faith. For the true
+life of faith gives everything worth having and takes everything worth
+offering: with unrelenting blows it welds the self into the stuff of the
+universe, subduing it to the universal purpose, doing away with the
+flame of separation. Though joy and inward peace even in desolation are
+dominant marks of those who have grown up into it, still it offers to
+none a succession of supersensual delights. The life of the Spirit
+involves the sublimation of that pleasure-pain rhythm which is
+characteristic of normal consciousness, and if for it pleasure becomes
+joy, pain becomes the Cross. Toil, abnegation, sacrifice, are therefore
+of its essence; but these are not felt as a heavy burden, because they
+are the expression of love. It entails a willed tension and choice, a
+noble power of refusal, which are not entirely covered by being "in tune
+with the Infinite." As our life comes to maturity we discover to our
+confusion that human ears can pick up from the Infinite many
+incompatible tunes, but cannot hear the whole symphony. And the melody
+confided to our care, the one which we alone perhaps can contribute and
+which taxes our powers to the full, has in it not only the notes of
+triumph but the notes of pain. The distinctive mark therefore is not
+happiness but vocation: work demanded and power given, but given only on
+condition that we spend it and ourselves on others without stint. These
+propositions, of course, are easily illustrated from history: but we can
+also illustrate them in our own persons if we choose.
+
+Should we choose this, and should life of the Spirit be achieved by
+us--and it will only be done through daily discipline and attention to
+the Spiritual, a sacrifice of comfort to its interests, following up the
+intuition which sets us on the path--what benefits may we as ordinary
+men expect it to bring to us and to the community that we serve? It will
+certainly bring into life new zest and new meaning; a widening of the
+horizon and consciousness of security; a fresh sense of joys to be had
+and of work to be done. The real spiritual consciousness is positive and
+constructive in type: it does not look back on the past sins and
+mistakes of the individual or of the community, but in its other-world
+faith and this-world charity is inspired by a forward-moving spirit of
+hope. Seeking alone the honour of Eternal Beauty, and because of its
+invulnerable sense of security, it is adventurous. The spiritual man and
+woman can afford to take desperate chances, and live dangerously in the
+interests of their ideals; being delivered from the many unreal fears
+and anxieties which commonly torment us, and knowing the unimportance of
+possessions and of so-called success. The joy which waits on
+disinterested love and the confidence which follows surrender, cannot
+fail them. Moreover, the inward harmony and assurance, the consciousness
+of access to that Spirit who is in a literal sense "health's eternal
+spring" means a healing of nervous miseries, and invigoration of the
+usually ill-treated mind and body, and so an all-round increase in
+happiness and power.
+
+"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering,
+gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." This, said St. Paul,
+who knew by experience the worlds of grace and of nature, is what a
+complete man ought to be like. Compare this picture of an equable and
+fully harmonized personality with that of a characteristic neurasthenic,
+a bored sensualist, or an embittered worker, concentrated on the
+struggle for a material advantage: and consider that the central
+difference between these types of human success and human failure abides
+in the presence or absence of a spiritual conception of life. We do not
+yet know the limits of the upgrowth into power and happiness which
+complete and practical surrender to this conception can work in us; or
+what its general triumph might do for the transformation of the world.
+And it may even be that beyond the joy and renewal which come from
+self-conquest and unification, a level of spiritual life most certainly
+open to all who will really work for it; and beyond that deeper insight,
+more widespreading love, and perfection of adjustment to the
+here-and-now which we recognize and reverence as the privilege of the
+pure in heart--beyond all these, it may be that life still reserves for
+man another secret and another level of consciousness; a closer
+identification with Reality, such as eye hath not seen, or ear heard.
+
+And note, that this spiritual life which we have here considered is not
+an aristocratic life. It is a life of which the fundamentals are given
+by the simplest kinds of traditional piety, and have been exhibited over
+and over again by the simplest souls. An unconditional self-surrender to
+the Divine Will, under whatever symbols it may be thought of; for we
+know that the very crudest of symbols is often strong enough to make a
+bridge between the heart and the Eternal, and so be a vehicle of the
+Spirit of Life. A little silence and leisure. A great deal of
+faithfulness, kindness, and courage. All this is within the reach of
+anyone who cares enough for it to pay the price.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 129: This doctrine is fully worked out in the last two
+sections of "Eternal Life."]
+
+[Footnote 130: De Imit. Christi, Bk. II, Cap. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 131: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75.]
+
+[Footnote 132: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 78.]
+
+[Footnote 133: Cl. Ruysbroeck: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap.
+VIII]
+
+[Footnote 134: "In Librum B. Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus
+commentaria."]
+
+[Footnote 135: Ennead III. 5, 4.]
+
+[Footnote 136: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75.]
+
+[Footnote 137: "The Interior Castle"; Seventh Habitation, Cap. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 138: Boehme; "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 139: Ennead II. 9. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 140: "Streeter and Appasamy: The Sadhu," pp. 98, 100 et seq.,
+213.]
+
+[Footnote 141: "Theologia Germanica," Cap. III.]
+
+[Footnote 142: Höffding, "The Philosophy of Religion," III, B.]
+
+[Footnote 143: There are, for instance, several striking instances in
+the Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore.]
+
+[Footnote 144: "Fox's Journal," Vol. I, Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 145: "Theologia Germanica," Cap. 10.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION
+
+
+In the past six chapters we have been considering in the main our own
+position, and how, here in the present, we as adults may actualize and
+help on the spiritual life in ourselves. But our best hope of giving
+Spirit its rightful, full expression within the time-world lies in the
+future. It is towards that, that those who really care must work.
+Anything which we can do towards persuading into better shape our own
+deformed characters, compelling our recalcitrant energy into fresh
+channels, is little in comparison with what might be achieved in the
+plastic growing psychic life of children did we appreciate our full
+opportunity and the importance of using it. This is why I propose now to
+consider one or two points in the relation of education to the spiritual
+life.
+
+Since it is always well, in a discussion of this kind, to be quite clear
+about the content of the words with which we deal, I will say at once,
+that by Education I mean that deliberate adjustment of the whole
+environment of a growing creature, which surrounds it with the most
+favourable influences and educes all its powers; giving it the most
+helpful conditions for its full growth and development. Education
+should be the complete preparation of the young thing for fullness of
+life; involving the evolution and the balanced training of all its
+faculties, bodily, mental and spiritual. It should train and refine
+senses, instincts, intellect, will and feeling; giving a world-view
+based on real facts and real values and encouraging active
+correspondence therewith. Thus the educationist, if he be convinced, as
+I think most of us must be, that all isn't quite right with the world of
+mankind, has the priceless opportunity of beginning the remaking of
+humanity from the right end. In the child he has a little, supple thing,
+which can be made into a vital, spiritual thing; and nothing again will
+count so much for it as what happens in these its earliest years. To
+start life straight is the secret of inward happiness: and to a great
+extent, the secret of health and power.
+
+That conception of man upon which we have been working, and which
+regards his psychic life on all its levels as the manifold expressions
+of one single energy or urge in the depths of his being, a life-force
+seeking fulfilment, has obvious and important applications in the
+educational sphere. It indicates that the fundamental business of
+education is to deal with this urgent and untempered craving, discipline
+it, and direct it towards interests of permanent value: helping it to
+establish useful habits, removing obstacles in its path, blocking the
+side channels down which it might run. Especially is it the task of such
+education, gradually to disclose to the growing psyche those spiritual
+correspondences for which the religious man and the idealist must hold
+that man's spirit was made. Such an education as this has little in
+common with the mere crude imparting of facts. It represents rather the
+careful and loving induction of the growing human creature into the rich
+world of experience; the help we give it in the great business of
+adjusting itself to reality. It operates by means of the moulding
+influences of environment, the creation of habit. Suggestion, not
+statement, is its most potent instrument; and such suggestion begins for
+good or ill at the very dawn of consciousness. Therefore the child whose
+infancy is not surrounded by persons of true outlook is handicapped from
+the start; and the training in this respect of the parents of the future
+is one of the greatest services we can render to the race.
+
+We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile
+impressions: how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop
+underground, and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poisoning the
+body and the mind of the adult. But here good is at least as potent as
+ill. What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil;
+a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for
+good. Moreover, we can bury good seed in the unconscious minds of
+children and reasonably look forward to the fruit. Babyish prayers,
+simple hymns, trace whilst the mind is ductile the paths in which
+feelings shall afterwards tend to flow; and it is only in maturity that
+we realize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps afterwards
+abandoned beliefs and deeds. So the veritable education of the Spirit
+begins at once, in the cradle, and its chief means will be the
+surroundings within which that childish spirit first develops its little
+awareness of the universe; the appeals which are made to its instincts,
+the stimulations of its life of sense. The first factor of this
+education is the family: the second the society within which that family
+is formed.
+
+Though we no longer suppose it to possess innate ideas, the baby has
+most surely innate powers, inclinations and curiosities, and is reaching
+out in every direction towards life. It is brimming with will power,
+ready to push hard into experience. The environment in which it is
+placed and the responses which the outer world makes to it--and these
+surroundings and responses in the long run are largely of our choosing
+and making--represent either the helping or thwarting of its tendencies,
+and the sum total of the directions in which its powers can be exercised
+and its demands satisfied: the possibilities, in fact, which life puts
+before it. We, as individuals and as a community, control and form part
+of this environment. Under the first head, we play by influence or
+demeanour a certain part in the education of every child whom we meet.
+Under the second head, by acquiescence in the social order, we accept
+responsibility for the state of life in which it is born. The child's
+first intimations of the spiritual must and can only come to it through
+the incarnation of Spirit in its home and the world that it knows. What,
+then, are we doing about this? It means that the influences which shape
+the men and women of the future will be as wholesome and as spiritual as
+we ourselves are: no more, no less. Tone, atmosphere are the things
+which really matter; and these are provided by the group-mind, and
+reflect its spiritual state.
+
+The child's whole educational opportunity is contained in two factors;
+the personality it brings and the environment it gets. Generations of
+educationists have disputed their relative importance: but neither party
+can deny that the most fortunate nature, given wrongful or insufficient
+nurture, will hardly emerge unharmed. Even great inborn powers atrophy
+if left unused, and exceptional ability in any direction may easily
+remain undeveloped if the environment be sufficiently unfavourable: a
+result too often achieved in the domain of the spiritual life. We must
+have opportunity and encouragement to try our powers and inclinations,
+be helped to understand their nature and the way to use them, unless we
+are to begin again, each one of us, in the Stone Age of the soul. So
+too, even small powers may be developed to an astonishing degree by
+suitable surroundings and wise education--witness the results obtained
+by the expert training of defective children--and all this is as
+applicable to the spiritual as to the mental and bodily life. That life
+is quick to respond to the demands made on it: to take every opportunity
+of expression that comes its way. If you make the right appeal to any
+human faculty, that faculty will respond, and begin to grow. Thus it is
+that the slow quiet pressure of tradition, first in the home and then in
+the school, shapes the child during his most malleable years. We,
+therefore, are surely bound to watch and criticize the environment, the
+tradition, the customs we are instrumental in providing for the infant
+future: to ask ourselves whether we are _sure_ the tradition is right,
+the conventions we hand on useful, the ideal we hold up complete. The
+child, whatever his powers, cannot react to something which is not
+there; he can't digest food that is not given to him, use faculties for
+which no objective is provided. Hence the great responsibility of our
+generation, as to providing a complete, balanced environment _now_, a
+fully-rounded opportunity of response to life physical, mental and
+spiritual, for the generation preparing to succeed us. Such education as
+this has been called a preparation for citizenship. But this conception
+is too narrow, unless the citizenship be that of the City of God; and
+the adjustments involved be those of the spirit, as well as of the body
+and the mind.
+
+Herbert Spencer, whom one would hardly accuse of being a spiritual
+philosopher, was accustomed to group the essentials of a right
+education under four heads:[146]
+
+First, he said, we must teach self-preservation in all senses: how to
+keep the body and the mind healthy and efficient, how to be
+self-supporting, how to protect oneself against external dangers and
+encroachments.
+
+Next, we must train the growing creature in its duties towards the life
+of the future: parenthood and its responsibilities, understood in the
+widest sense.
+
+Thirdly; we must prepare it to take its place in the present as a member
+of the social order into which it is born.
+
+Last: we must hand on to it all those refinements of life which the past
+has given to us--the hoarded culture of the race.
+
+Only if we do these four things thoroughly can we dare to call ourselves
+educators in the full sense of the word.
+
+Now, turning to the spiritual interests of the child:--and unless we are
+crass materialists we must believe these interests to exist, and to be
+paramount--what are we doing to further them in these four fundamental
+directions? First, does the average good education train our young
+people in spiritual self-preservation? Does it send them out equipped
+with the means of living a full and efficient spiritual life? Does it
+furnish them with a health-giving type of religion; that is, a solid
+hold on eternal realities, a view of the universe capable of
+withstanding hostile criticism, of supporting them in times of
+difficulty and of stress? Secondly, does it give them a spiritual
+outlook in respect of their racial duties, fit them in due time to be
+parents of other souls? Does it train them to regard humanity, and their
+own place in the human life-stream, from this point of view? This point
+is of special importance, in view of the fact that racial and biological
+knowledge on lower levels is now so generally in the possession of boys
+and girls; and is bound to produce a distorted conception of life,
+unless the spirit be studied by them with at least the same respectful
+attention that is given to the flesh. Thirdly, what does our education
+do towards preparing them to solve the problems of social and economic
+life in a spiritual sense--our only reasonable chance of extracting the
+next generation from the social muddle in which we are plunged to-day?
+Last, to what extent do we try to introduce our pupils into a full
+enjoyment of their spiritual inheritance, the culture and tradition of
+the past?
+
+I do not deny that there are educators--chiefly perhaps educators of
+girls--who can give favourable answers to all these questions. But they
+are exceptional, the proportion of the child population whom they
+influence is small, and frequently their proceedings are looked
+upon--not without some justice--as eccentric. If then in all these
+departments our standard type of education stops short of the spiritual
+level, are not we self-convicted as at best theoretical believers in the
+worth and destiny of the human soul?
+
+Consider the facts. Outside the walls of definitely religious
+institutions--where methods are not always adjusted to the common stuff
+and needs of contemporary human life--it does not seem to occur to many
+educationists to give the education of the child's soul the same expert
+delicate attention so lavishly bestowed on the body and the intellect.
+By expert delicate attention I do not mean persistent religious
+instruction; but a skilled and loving care for the growing spirit,
+inspired by deep conviction and helped by all the psychological
+knowledge we possess. If we look at the efforts of organized religion we
+are bound to admit that in thousands of rural parishes, and in many
+towns too, it is still possible to grow from infancy to old age as a
+member of church or chapel without once receiving any first-hand
+teaching on the powers and needs of the soul or the technique of prayer;
+or obtaining any more help in the great religious difficulties of
+adolescence than a general invitation to believe, and trust God.
+Morality--that is to say correctness of response to our neighbour and
+our temporal surroundings--is often well taught.
+Spirituality--correctness of response to God and our eternal
+surroundings--is most often ignored. A peculiar British bashfulness
+seems to stand in the way of it. It is felt that we show better taste
+in leaving the essentials of the soul's development to chance, even that
+such development is not wholly desirable or manly: that the atrophy of
+one aspect of "man's made-trinity" is best. I have heard one eminent
+ecclesiastic maintain that regular and punctual attendance at morning
+service in a mood of non-comprehending loyalty was the best sort of
+spiritual experience for the average Englishman. Is not that a statement
+which should make the Christian teachers who are responsible for the
+average Englishman, feel a little bit uncomfortable about the type which
+they have produced? I do not suggest that education should encourage a
+feverish religiosity; but that it ought to produce balanced men and
+women, whose faculties are fully alert and responsive to all levels of
+life. As it is, we train Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in the principles of
+honour and chivalry. Our Bible-classes minister to the hungry spirit
+much information about the journeys of St. Paul (with maps). But the
+pupils are seldom invited or assisted to _taste_, and see that the Lord
+is sweet.
+
+Now this indifference means, of course, that we do not as educators, as
+controllers of the racial future, really believe in the spiritual
+foundations of our personality as thoroughly and practically we believe
+in its mental and physical manifestations. Whatever the philosophy or
+religion we profess may be, it remains for us in the realm of idea, not
+in the realm of fact. In practice, we do not aim at the achievement of
+a spiritual type of consciousness as the crown of human culture. The
+best that most education does for our children is only what the devil
+did for Christ. It takes them up to the top of a high mountain and shows
+them all the kingdoms of this world; the kingdom of history, the kingdom
+of letters, the kingdom of beauty, the kingdom of science. It is a
+splendid vision, but unfortunately fugitive: and since the spirit is not
+fugitive, it demands an objective that is permanent. If we do not give
+it such an objective, one of two things must happen to it. Either it
+will be restless and dissatisfied, and throw the whole life out of key;
+or it will become dormant for lack of use, and so the whole life will be
+impoverished, its best promise unfulfilled. One line leads to the
+neurotic, the other to the average sensual man, and I think it will be
+agreed that modern life produces a good crop of both these kind of
+defectives.
+
+But if we believe that the permanent objective of the spirit is God--if
+He be indeed for us the Fountain of Life and the sum of Reality--can we
+acquiesce in these forms of loss? Surely it ought to be our first aim,
+to make the sense of His universal presence and transcendent worth, and
+of the self's responsibility to Him, dominant for the plastic youthful
+consciousness confided to our care: to introduce that consciousness into
+a world which is really a theocracy and encourage its aptitude for
+generous love? If educationists do not view such a proposal with
+favour, this shows how miserable and distorted our common conception of
+God has become; and how small a part it really plays in our practical
+life. Most of us scramble through that practical life, and are prepared
+to let our children scramble too, without any clear notions of that
+hygiene of the soul which has been studied for centuries by experts; and
+few look upon this branch of self-knowledge as something that all men
+may possess who will submit to education and work for its achievement.
+Thus we have degenerated from the mediæval standpoint; for then at least
+the necessity of spiritual education was understood and accepted, and
+the current psychology was in harmony with it. But now there is little
+attempt to deepen and enlarge the spiritual faculties, none to encourage
+their free and natural development in the young, or their application to
+any richer world of experience than the circle of pious images with
+which "religious education" generally deals. The result of this is seen
+in the rawness, shallowness and ignorance which characterize the
+attitude of many young adults to religion. Their beliefs and their
+scepticism alike are often the acceptance or rejection of the obsolete.
+If they be agnostics, the dogmas which they reject are frequently
+theological caricatures. If they be believers, both their religious
+conceptions and their prayers are found on investigation still to be of
+an infantile kind, totally unrelated to the interests and outlook of
+modern men.
+
+Two facts emerge from the experience of all educationists. The first is,
+that children are naturally receptive and responsive; the second, that
+adolescents are naturally idealistic. In both stages, the young human
+creature is full of interests and curiosities asking to be satisfied, of
+energies demanding expression; and here, in their budding, thrusting
+life--for which we, by our choice of surroundings and influence, may
+provide the objective--is the raw material out of which the spiritual
+humanity of the future might be made. The child has already within it
+the living seed wherein all human possibilities are contained; our part
+is to give the right soil, the shelter, and the watering-can. Spiritual
+education therefore does not consist in putting into the child something
+which it has not; but in educing and sublimating that which it has--in
+establishing habits, fostering a trend of growth which shall serve it
+well in later years. Already, all the dynamic instincts are present, at
+least in germ; asking for an outlet. The will and the emotions, ductile
+as they will never be again, are ready to make full and ungraduated
+response to any genuine appeal to enthusiasm. The imagination will
+accept the food we give, if we give it in the right way. What an
+opportunity! Nowhere else do we come into such direct contact with the
+plastic stuff of life; never again shall we have at our disposal such a
+fund of emotional energy.
+
+In the child's dreams and fantasies, in its eager hero-worship--later,
+in the adolescent's fervid friendships or devoted loyalty to an adored
+leader--we see the search of the living growing creature for more life
+and love, for an enduring object of devotion. Do we always manage or
+even try to give it that enduring object, in a form it can accept? Yet
+the responsibility of providing such a presentation of belief as shall
+evoke the spontaneous reactions of faith and love--for no compulsory
+idealism ever succeeds--is definitely laid on the parent and the
+teacher. It is in the enthusiastic imitation of a beloved leader that
+the child or adolescent learns best. Were the spiritual life the most
+real of facts to us, did we believe in it as we variously believe in
+athletics, physical science or the arts, surely we should spare no
+effort to turn to its purposes these priceless qualities of youth? Were
+the mind's communion with the Spirit of God generally regarded as its
+natural privilege and therefore the first condition of its happiness and
+health, the general method and tone of modern education would inevitably
+differ considerably from that which we usually see: and if the life of
+the Spirit is to come to fruition, here is one of the points at which
+reformation must begin. When we look at the ordinary practice of modern
+"civilized" Europe, we cannot claim that any noticeable proportion of
+our young people are taught during their docile and impressionable years
+the nature and discipline of their spiritual faculties, in the open and
+common-sense way in which they are taught languages, science, music or
+gymnastics. Yet it is surely a central duty of the educator to deepen
+and enrich to the fullest extent possible his pupil's apprehension of
+the universe; and must not all such apprehension move towards the
+discovery of that universe as a spiritual fact?
+
+Again, in how many schools is the period of religious and idealistic
+enthusiasm which so commonly occurs in adolescence wisely used,
+skilfully trained, and made the foundation of an enduring spiritual
+life? Here is the period in which the relation of master and pupil is or
+may be most intimate and most fruitful; and can be made to serve the
+highest interests of life. Yet, no great proportion of those set apart
+to teach young people seem to realize and use this privilege.
+
+I am aware that much which I am going to advocate will sound fantastic;
+and that the changes involved may seem at first sight impossible to
+accomplish. It is true that if these changes are to be useful, they must
+be gradual. The policy of the "clean sweep" is one which both history
+and psychology condemn. But it does seem to me a good thing to envisage
+clearly, if we can, the ideal towards which our changes should lead. A
+garden city is not Utopia. Still, it is an advance upon the Victorian
+type of suburb and slum; and we should not have got it if some men had
+not believed in Utopia, and tried to make a beginning here and now.
+Already in education some few have tried to make such a beginning and
+have proved that it is possible if we believe in it enough: for faith
+can move even that mountainous thing, the British parental mind.
+
+Our task--and I believe our most real hope for the future--is, as we
+have already allowed, to make the idea of God dominant for the plastic
+youthful consciousness: and not only this, but to harmonize that
+conception, first with our teachings about the physical and mental sides
+of life, and next with the child's own social activities, training body,
+mind and spirit together that they may take each their part in the
+development of a whole man, fully responsive to a universe which is at
+bottom a spiritual fact. Such training to be complete must, as we have
+seen, begin in the nursery and be given by the atmosphere and
+opportunities of the home. It will include the instilling of childish
+habits of prayer and the fostering of simple expressions of reverence,
+admiration and love. The subconscious knowledge implicit in such
+practice must form the foundation, and only where it is present will
+doctrine and principle have any real meaning for the child. Prayer must
+come before theology, and kindness, tenderness and helpfulness before
+ethics.
+
+But we have now to consider the child of school age, coming--too often
+without this, the only adequate preparation--into the teacher's hands.
+How is he to be dealt with, and the opportunities which he presents used
+best?
+
+"When I see a right man," said Jacob Boehme, "there I see three worlds
+standing." Since our aim should be to make "right men" and evoke in them
+not merely a departmental piety but a robust and intelligent
+spirituality, we ought to explain in simple ways to these older children
+something at least of that view of human nature on which our training is
+based. The religious instruction given in most schools is divided, in
+varying proportions, between historical or doctrinal teaching and
+ethical teaching. Now a solid hold both on history and on morals is a
+great need; but these are only realized in their full importance and
+enter completely into life when they are seen within the spiritual
+atmosphere, and already even in childhood, and supremely in youth, this
+atmosphere can be evoked. It does not seem to occur to most teachers
+that religion contains anything beyond or within the two departments of
+historical creed and of morals: that, for instance, the greatest
+utterances of St. John and St. Paul deal with neither, but with
+attainable levels of human life, in which a new and fuller kind of
+experience was offered to mankind. Yet surely they ought at least to
+attempt to tell their pupils about this. I do not see how Christians at
+any rate can escape the obligation, or shuffle out of it by saying that
+they do not know how it can be done. Indeed, all who are not
+thorough-going materialists must regard the study of the spiritual life
+as in the truest sense a department of biology; and any account of man
+which fails to describe it, as incomplete. Where the science of the body
+is studied, the science of the soul should be studied too. Therefore, in
+the upper forms at least, the psychology of religious experience in its
+widest sense, as a normal part of all full human existence, and the
+connection of that experience with practical life, as it is seen in
+history, should be taught. If it is done properly it will hold the
+pupil's interest, for it can be made to appeal to those same mental
+qualities of wonder, curiosity and exploration which draw so many boys
+and girls to physical science. But there should be no encouragement of
+introspection, none of the false mystery or so-called reverence with
+which these subjects are sometimes surrounded, and above all no spirit
+of exclusivism.
+
+The pupil should be led to see his own religion as a part of the
+universal tendency of life to God. This need not involve any reduction
+of the claims made on him by his own church or creed; but the emphasis
+should always be on the likeness rather than the differences of the
+great religions of the world. Moreover, higher education cannot be
+regarded as complete unless the mind be furnished with some _rationale_
+of its own deepest experiences, and a harmony be established between
+impulse and thought. Advanced pupils should, then, be given a simple and
+general philosophy of religion, plainly stated in language which
+relates it with the current philosophy of life. This is no counsel of
+perfection. It has been done, and can be done again. It is said of
+Edward Caird, that he placed his pupils "from the beginning at a point
+of view whence the life of mankind could be contemplated as one
+movement, single though infinitely varied, unerring though wandering,
+significant yet mysterious, secure and self-enriching although tragical.
+There was a general sense of the spiritual nature of reality and of the
+rule of mind, though what was meant by spirit or mind was hardly asked.
+There was a hope and faith that outstripped all save the vaguest
+understanding but which evoked a glad response that somehow God was
+immanent in the world and in the history of all mankind, making it
+sane." And the effect of this teaching on the students was that "they
+received the doctrine with enthusiasm, and forgot themselves in the
+sense of their partnership in a universal enterprise."[1] Such teaching
+as this is a real preparation for citizenship, an introduction to the
+enduring values of the world.
+
+[1 Jones and Muirhead: "Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird," pp. 64,
+65.]
+
+Every human being, as we know, inevitably tends to emphasize some
+aspects of that world, and to ignore others: to build up for himself a
+relative universe. The choices which determine the universe of maturity
+are often made in youth; then the foundations are laid of that
+apperceiving mass which is to condition all the man's contacts with
+reality. We ought, therefore, to show the universe to our young people
+from such an angle and in such a light, that they tend quite simply and
+without any objectionable intensity to select, emphasize and be
+interested in its spiritual aspect. For this purpose we must never try
+to force our own reading of that universe upon them; but respect on the
+one hand their often extreme sensitiveness and on the other the
+infinitely various angles of approach proper to our infinitely various
+souls. We should place food before them and leave them to browse. Only
+those who have tried this experiment know what such an enlargement of
+the horizon and enrichment of knowledge means to the eager, adolescent
+mind: how prompt is the response to any appeal which we make to its
+nascent sense of mystery. Yet whole schools of thought on these subjects
+are cheerfully ignored by the majority of our educationists; hence the
+unintelligent and indeed babyish view of religion which is harboured by
+many adults, even of the intellectual class.
+
+Though the spiritual life has its roots in the heart not in the head,
+and will never be brought about by merely academic knowledge; yet, its
+beginnings in adolescence are often lost, because young people are
+completely ignorant of the meaning of their own experiences, and the
+universal character of those needs and responses which they dimly feel
+stirring within them. They are too shy to ask, and no one ever tells
+them about it in a business-like and unembarrassing way. This infant
+mortality in the spiritual realm ought not to be possible. Experience of
+God is the greatest of the rights of man, and should not be left to
+become the casual discovery of the few. Therefore prayer ought to be
+regarded as a universal human activity, and its nature and difficulties
+should be taught, but always in the sense of intercourse rather than of
+mere petition: keeping in mind the doctrine of the mystics that "prayer
+in itself properly is not else but a devout intent directed unto
+God."[147] We teach concentration for the purposes of study; but too
+seldom think of applying it to the purposes of prayer. Yet real prayer
+is a difficult art; which, like other ways of approaching Perfect
+Beauty, only discloses its secrets to those who win them by humble
+training and hard work. Shall we not try to find some method of showing
+our adolescents their way into this world, lying at our doors and
+offered to us without money and without price?
+
+Again, many teachers and parents waste the religious instinct and
+emotional vigour which are often so marked in adolescence, by allowing
+them to fritter themselves upon symbols which cannot stand against
+hostile criticism: for instance, some of, the more sentimental and
+anthropomorphic aspects of Christian devotion. Did we educate those
+instincts, show the growing creature their meaning, and give them an
+objective which did not conflict with the objectives of the developing
+intellect and the will, we should turn their passion into power, and lay
+the foundations of a real spiritual life. We must remember that a good
+deal of adolescent emotion is diverted by the conditions of school-life
+from its obvious and natural objective. This is so much energy set free
+for other uses. We know how it emerges in hero-worship or in ardent
+friendships; how it reinforces the social instinct and produces the
+team-spirit, the intense devotion to the interests of his own gang or
+group which is rightly prominent in the life of many boys. The teacher
+has to reckon with this funded energy and enthusiasm, and use it to
+further the highest interests of the growing child. By this I do not
+mean that he is to encourage an abnormal or emotional concentration on
+spiritual things. Most of the impulses of youth are wholesome, and
+subserve direct ends. Therefore, it is not by taking away love,
+self-sacrifice, admiration, curiosity, from their natural objects that
+we shall serve the best interests of spirituality: but, by enlarging the
+range over which these impulses work--impulses, indeed, which no human
+object can wholly satisfy, save in a sacramental sense. Two such natural
+tendencies, specially prominent in childhood, are peculiarly at the
+disposal of the religious teacher: and should be used by him to the
+full. It is in the sublimation of the instinct of comradeship that the
+social and corporate side of the spiritual life takes its rise, and in
+closest connection with this impulse that all works of charity should be
+suggested and performed. And on the individual side, all that is best,
+safest and sweetest in the religious instinct of the child can be
+related to a similar enlargement of the instinct of filial trust and
+dependence. The educator is therefore working within the two most
+fundamental childish qualities, qualities provoked and fostered by all
+right family life, with its relation of love to parents, brothers,
+sisters and friends; and may gently lead out these two mighty impulses
+to a fulfilment which, at maturity, embrace God and the whole world. The
+wise teacher, then, must work with the instincts, not against them:
+encouraging all kindly social feelings, all vigorous self-expression,
+wonder, trustfulness, love. Recognizing the paramount importance of
+emotion--for without emotional colour no idea can be actual to us, and
+no deed thoroughly and vigorously performed--yet he must always be on
+his guard against blocking the natural channels of human feeling, and
+giving them the opportunity of exploding under pious disguises in the
+religious sphere.
+
+Here it is that the danger of too emotional a type of religious training
+comes in. Sentimentalism of all kinds is dangerous and objectionable,
+especially in the education of girls, whom it excites and debilitates.
+Boys are more often merely alienated by it. In both cases, the method
+of presentation which regards the spiritual life simply as a normal
+aspect of full human life is best. No artificial barrier should be set
+up between the sacred and the profane. The passion for truth and the
+passion for God should be treated as one: and that pursuit of knowledge
+for its own sake, those adventurous explorations of the mind, in which
+the more intelligent type of adolescent loves to try his growing powers,
+ought to be encouraged in the spiritual sphere as elsewhere. The results
+of research into religious origins should be explained without
+reservation, and no intellectual difficulty should be dodged. The
+putting-off method of meeting awkward questions, now generally
+recognized as dangerous in matters of natural history, is just as
+dangerous in the religious sphere. No teacher who is afraid to state his
+own position with perfect candour should ever be allowed to undertake
+this side of education; nor any in whom there is a marked cleavage
+between the standard of conduct and the standard of thought. The healthy
+adolescent is prompt to perceive inconsistency and unsparing in its
+condemnation.
+
+Moreover, a most careful discrimination is daily becoming more
+necessary, in the teaching of traditional religion of a supernatural and
+non-empirical type. Many of its elements must no doubt be retained by
+us, for the child-mind demands firm outlines and examples and imagery
+drawn from the world of sense. Yet grave dangers are attached to it.
+On, the one hand an exclusive reliance on tradition paves the way for
+the disillusion which is so often experienced towards the end of
+adolescence, when it frequently causes a violent reaction to
+materialism. On the other hand it exposes us to a risk which we
+particularly want to avoid: that of reducing the child's nascent
+spiritual life to the dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies
+wishes that outward life leaves unfulfilled. Many pious people,
+especially those who tell us that their religion is a "comfort" to them,
+go through life in a spiritual day-dream of this kind. Concrete life has
+starved them of love, of beauty, of interest--it has given them no
+synthesis which satisfies the passionate human search for meaning--and
+they have found all this in a dream-world, made from the materials of
+conventional piety. If religion is thus allowed to become a ready-made
+day-dream it will certainly interest adolescents of a certain sort. The
+naturally introverted type will become meditative; whilst their
+opposites, the extroverted or active type, will probably tend to be
+ritualistic. But here again we are missing the essence of spiritual
+life.
+
+Our aim should be to induce, in a wholesome way, that sense of the
+spiritual in daily experience which the old writers called the
+consciousness of the of God. The monastic training in spirituality,
+slowly evolved under pressure of experience, nearly always did this. It
+has bequeathed to us a funded wisdom of which we make little use; and
+this, reinterpreted in the light of psychological knowledge, might I
+believe cast a great deal of light on the fundamental problems of
+spiritual education. We could if we chose take many hints from it, as
+regards the disciplining of the attention, the correct use of
+suggestion, the teaching of meditation, the sublimation and direction to
+an assigned end of the natural impulse to reverie; above all, the
+education of the moral life. For character-building as understood by
+these old specialists was the most practical of arts.
+
+Further, in all this teaching, those inward activities and responses to
+which we can give generally the name of prayer, and those outward
+activities and deeds of service to which we can give the name of work,
+ought to be trained together and never dissociated. They are the
+complementary and balanced expressions of one spirit of life: and must
+be given together, under appropriately simple forms. Concrete
+application of the child's energies, aptitudes and ideals must from the
+first run side by side with the teaching of principle. Young people
+therefore should constantly be encouraged to face as practical and
+interesting facts, not as formulæ, those reactions to eternal and
+this-world reality which used to be called our duty to God and our
+neighbour; and do concrete things proper to a real citizen of a really
+theocratic world. They must be made to realize that nothing is truly
+ours until we have expressed it in our deeds. Moreover, these deeds
+should not be easy. They should involve effort and self-sacrifice; and
+also some drudgery, which is worse. The spiritual life is only valued by
+those on whom it makes genuine demands. Almost any kind of service will
+do, which calls for attention, time and hard work. Though voluntary, it
+must not be casual: but, once undertaken, should be regarded as an
+honourable obligation. The Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have shown us how
+wide a choice of possible "good deeds" is offered by every community:
+and such a banding together of young people for corporate acts of
+service is strongly to be commended. It encourages unselfish
+comradeship, satisfies that "gang-instinct" which is a well-known
+character of adolescence, and should leave no opening for
+self-consciousness, rivalry, and vanity in well-doing or in abnegation.
+
+Wise educators find that a combined system of organized games in which
+the social instinct can be expressed and developed, and of independent
+constructive work, in which the creative impulse can find satisfaction,
+best meets the corporate and creative needs of adolescence, favours the
+right development of character, and produces a harmonized life. On the
+level of the spiritual life too this principle is valid; and, guided by
+it, we should seek to give young people both corporate and personal work
+and experience. On the one hand, gregariousness is at its strongest in
+the healthy adolescent, the force of public opinion is more intensely
+felt than at any other time of life, that priceless quality the spirit
+of comradeship is most easily educed. We must therefore seek to give the
+spiritual life a vigorous corporate character; to make it "good form"
+for the school, and to use the team-spirit in the choir and the guild as
+well as in the cricket field. By an extension of this principle and
+under the influence of a suitable teacher, the school-mob may be
+transformed into a co-operative society animated by one joyous and
+unselfish spirit: all the great powers of social suggestion being freely
+used for the highest ends. Thus we may introduce the pupil, at his most
+plastic age, into a spiritual-social order and let him grow within it,
+developing those qualities and skills on which it makes demands. The
+religious exercises, whatever they are, should be in common, in order to
+develop the mass consciousness of the school and weld it into a real
+group. Music, songs, processions, etc., produce a feeling of unity, and
+encourage spiritual contagion. Services of an appropriate kind, if there
+be a chapel, or the opening of school with prayer and a hymn (which
+ought always to be followed by a short silence) provide a natural
+expression for corporate religious feeling: and remember that to give a
+feeling opportunity of voluntary expression is commonly to educe and
+affirm it. As regards active work, whilst school charities are an
+obvious field in which unselfish energies may be spent, many other
+openings will be found by enthusiastic teachers, and by the pupils whom
+their enthusiasm has inspired.
+
+On the other hand, the spare-time occupations of the adolescent; the
+independent and self-chosen work, often most arduous and always
+absorbing, of making, planning, learning about things--and most of us
+can still remember how desperately important these seemed to us, whether
+our taste was for making engines, writing poetry, or collecting
+moths--these are of the greatest importance for his development. They
+give him something really his own, exercise his powers, train his
+attention, feed his creative instinct. They counteract those mechanical
+and conventional reactions to the world, which are induced by the merely
+traditional type of education, either of manners or of mind. And here,
+in the prudent encouragement of a personal interest in and dealing with
+the actual problems of conduct and even of belief--the most difficult of
+the educator's tasks--we guard against the merely acquiescent attitude
+of much adult piety, and foster from the beginning a vigorous personal
+interest, a first-hand contact with higher realities.
+
+The heroic aspect of history may well form the second line in this
+attempt to capture education and use it in the interests of the
+spiritual life. By it we can best link up the actual and the ideal, and
+demonstrate the single character of human greatness; whether it be
+exhibited, in the physical or the supersensual sphere. Such a
+demonstration is most important; for so long as the spiritual life is
+regarded as merely a departmental thing, and its full development as a
+matter for specialists or saints, it will never produce its full effect
+in human affairs. We must exhibit it as the full flower of that Reality
+which inspires all human life. _"All_ kinds of skill," said Tauler, "are
+gifts of the Holy Ghost," and he might have said, all kinds of beauty
+and all kinds of courage too.
+
+The heroic makes a direct appeal to lads and girls, and is by far the
+safest way of approach to their emotions. The chivalrous, the noble, the
+desperately brave, attract the adolescent far more than passive
+goodness. That strong instinct of subjection, of homage, which he shows
+in his hero-worship, is a most valuable tool in the hands of the teacher
+who is seeking to lead him into greater fullness of life. Yet the range
+over which we seek material for his admiration is often deplorably
+narrow. We have behind us a great spiritual history, which shows the
+highest faculties of the soul in action: the power and the happiness
+they bring. Do we take enough notice of it? What about our English
+saints? I mean the real saints, not the official ones. Not St. George
+and St. Alban, about whom we know practically nothing: but, for
+instance, Lancelot Andrewes, John Wesley, Elizabeth Fry, about whom we
+know a great deal. Children, who find difficulty in general ideas, learn
+best from particular instances. Yet boys and girls who can give a
+coherent account of such stimulating personalities as Julius Caesar,
+William the Conqueror, Henry VIII. and his wives, or Napoleon--none of
+whom have so very much to tell us that bears on the permanent interests
+of the soul--do not as a rule possess any vivid idea, say, of Gautama,
+St. Benedict, Gregory the Great, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis
+Xavier, George Fox, St. Vincent de Paul and his friends: persons at
+least as significant, and far better worth meeting, than the military
+commanders and political adventurers of their time. The stories of the
+early Buddhists, the Sufi saints, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius,
+the early Quakers, the African missionaries, are full of things which
+can be made to interest even a young child. The legends which have grown
+up round some of them satisfy the instinct that draws it to fairy tales.
+They help it to dream well; and give to the developing mind food which
+it could assimilate in no other way. Older boys and girls, could they be
+given some idea of the spiritual heroes of Christendom as real men and
+women, without the nauseous note of piety which generally infects their
+biographies, would find much to delight them: romance of the best sort,
+because concerned with the highest values, and stories of endurance and
+courage such as always appeal to them. These people were not
+objectionable pietists. They were persons of fullest vitality and
+immense natural attraction; the pick of the race. We know that, by the
+numbers who left all to follow them. Ought we not to introduce our
+pupils to them; not as stuffed specimens, but as vivid human beings?
+Something might be done to create the right atmosphere for this, on the
+lines suggested by Dr. Hayward in that splendid little book "The Lesson
+in Appreciation." All that he says there about æsthetics, is applicable
+to any lesson dealing with the higher values of life. In this way, young
+people would be made to realize the spiritual life; not as something
+abnormal and more or less conventionalized, but as a golden thread
+running right through human history, and making demands on just those
+dynamic qualities which they feel themselves to possess. The adolescent
+is naturally vigorous and combative, and wants, above all else,
+something worth fighting for. This, too often, his teachers forget to
+provide.
+
+The study of nature, and of æsthetics--including poetry--gives us yet
+another way of approach. The child should be introduced to these great
+worlds of life and of beauty, and encouraged but never forced to feed on
+the best they contain. By implication, but never by any method savouring
+of "uplift," these subjects should be related with that sense of the
+spiritual and of its immanence in creation, which ought to inspire the
+teacher; and with which it is his duty to infect his pupils if he can.
+Children may, very early, be taught or rather induced to look at natural
+things with that quietness, attention, and delight which are the
+beginnings of contemplation, and the conditions, under which nature
+reveals her real secrets to us. The child is a natural pagan, and often
+the first appeal to its nascent spiritual faculty is best made through
+its instinctive joy in the life of animals and flowers, the clouds and
+the winds. Here it may learn very easily that wonder and adoration,
+which are the gateways to the presence of God. In simple forms of verse,
+music, and rhythmical movement it can be encouraged--as the Salvation
+Army has discovered--to give this happy adoration a natural, dramatic,
+and rhythmic expression: for the young child, as we know, reproduces the
+mental condition of the primitive, and primitive forms of worship will
+suit it best.
+
+It need hardly be said that education of the type we have been
+considering demands great gifts in the teacher: simplicity, enthusiasm,
+sympathy, and also a vigorous sense of humour, keeping him sharply aware
+of the narrow line that divides the priggish from the ideal. This
+education ought to inspire, but it ought not to replace, the fullest and
+most expert training of the body and mind; for the spirit needs a
+perfectly balanced machine, through which to express its life in the
+physical world. The actual additions to curriculum which it demands may
+be few: it is the attitude, the spirit, which must be changed.
+Specifically moral education, the building of character, will of course
+form an essential part of it: in fact must be present within it from
+the first. But this comes best without observation, and will be found to
+depend chiefly on the character of the teacher, the love, admiration and
+imitation he evokes, the ethical tone he gives. Childhood is of all ages
+the one most open to suggestion, and in this fact the educator finds at
+once his best opportunity and greatest responsibility.
+
+Ruysbroeck has described to us the three outstanding moral dispositions
+in respect of God, of man, and of the conduct of life, which mark the
+true man or woman of the Spirit; and it is in the childhood that the
+tendency to these qualities must be acquired. First, he says,--I
+paraphrase, since the old terms of moral theology are no longer vivid to
+us--there comes an attitude of reverent love, of adoration, towards all
+that is holy, beautiful, or true. And next, from this, there grows up an
+attitude towards other men, governed by those qualities which are the
+essence of courtesy: patience, gentleness, kindness, and sympathy. These
+keep us both supple and generous in our responses to our social
+environment. Last, our creative energies are transfigured by an
+energetic love, an inward eagerness for every kind of work, which makes
+impossible all slackness and dullness of heart, and will impel us to
+live to the utmost the active life of service for which we are
+born.[148]
+
+But these moral qualities cannot be taught; they are learned by
+imitation and infection, and developed by opportunity of action. The
+best agent of their propagation is an attractive personality in which
+they are dominant; for we know the universal tendency of young people to
+imitate those whom they admire. The relation between parent and child or
+master and pupil is therefore the central factor in any scheme of
+education which seeks to further the spiritual life. Only those who have
+already become real can communicate the knowledge of Reality. It is from
+the sportsman that we catch the spirit of fair-play, from the humble
+that we learn humility. The artist shows us beauty, the saint shows us
+God. It should therefore be the business of those in authority to search
+out and give scope to those who possess and are able to impart this
+triumphing spiritual life. A head-master who makes his boys live at
+their highest level and act on their noblest impulses, because he does
+it himself, is a person of supreme value to the State. It would be well
+if we cleared our minds of cant, and acknowledged that such a man alone
+is truly able to educate; since the spiritual life is infectious, but
+cannot be propagated by artificial means.
+
+Finally, we have to remember that any attempt towards the education of
+the spirit--and such an attempt must surely be made by all who accept
+spiritual values as central for life--can only safely be undertaken with
+full knowledge of its special dangers and difficulties. These dangers
+and difficulties are connected with the instinctive and intellectual
+life of the child and the adolescent, who are growing, and growing
+unevenly, during the whole period of training. They are supple as
+regards other forces than those which we bring to bear on them; open to
+suggestion from many different levels of life.
+
+Our greatest difficulty abides in the fact that, as we have seen, a
+vigorous spiritual life must give scope to the emotions. It is above all
+the heart rather than the mind which must be won for God. Yet, the
+greatest care must be exercised to ensure that the appeal to the
+emotions is free from all possibility of appeal to latent and
+uncomprehended natural instincts. This peril, to which current
+psychology gives perhaps too much attention, is nevertheless real.
+Candid students of religious history are bound to acknowledge the
+unfortunate part which it has often played in the past. These natural
+instincts fall into two great classes: those relating to
+self-preservation and those relating to the preservation of the race.
+The note of fear, the exaggerated longing for shelter and protection,
+the childish attitude of mere clinging dependence, fostered by religion
+of a certain type, are all oblique expressions of the instinct of
+self-preservation: and the rather feverish devotional moods and
+exuberant emotional expressions with which we are all familiar have,
+equally, a natural origin. Our task in the training of young people is
+to evoke enthusiasm, courage and love, without appealing to either of
+these sources of excitement. Generally speaking, it is safe to say that
+for this reason all sentimental and many anthropomorphic religious ideas
+are bad for lads and girls. These have, indeed, no part in that austere
+yet ardent love of God which inspires the real spiritual life.
+
+Our aim ought to be, to teach and impress the reality of Spirit, its
+regnancy in human life, whilst the mind is alert and supple: and so to
+teach and impress it, that it is woven into the stuff of the mental and
+moral life and cannot seriously be injured by the hostile criticisms of
+the rationalist. Remember, that the prime object of education is the
+moulding of the unconscious and instinctive nature, the home of habit.
+If we can give this the desired tendency and tone of feeling, we can
+trust the rational mind to find good reasons with which to reinforce its
+attitudes and preferences. So it is not so much the specific belief, as
+the whole spiritual attitude to existence which we seek to affirm; and
+this will be done on the whole more effectively by the generalized
+suggestions which come to the pupil from his own surroundings, and the
+lives of those whom he admires, than by the limited and special
+suggestions of a creed. It is found that the less any desired motive is
+bound up with particular acts, persons, or ideas, the greater is the
+chance of its being universalized and made good for life all round. I do
+not intend by this statement to criticize any particular presentation
+of religion. Nevertheless, educators ought to remember that a religion
+which is first entirely bound up with narrow and childish theological
+ideas, and is then presented as true in the absolute sense, is bound to
+break down under greater knowledge or hostile criticism; and may then
+involve the disappearance of the religious impulse as a whole, at least
+for a long period.
+
+Did we know our business, we ought surely to be able to ensure in our
+young people a steady and harmonious spiritual growth. The "conversion"
+or psychic convulsion which is sometimes regarded as an essential
+preliminary of any vivid awakening of the spiritual consciousness, is
+really a tribute exacted by our wrong educational methods. It is a proof
+that we have allowed the plastic creature confided to us to harden in
+the wrong shape. But if, side by side and in simplest language, we teach
+the conceptions: first, of God as the transcendent yet indwelling Spirit
+of love, of beauty and of power; next, of man's constant dependence on
+Him and possible contact with His nature in that arduous and loving act
+of attention which is the essence of prayer; last, of unselfish work and
+fellowship as the necessary expressions of all human ideals--then, I
+think, we may hope to lay the foundations of a balanced and a wholesome
+life, in which man's various faculties work together for good, and his
+vigorous instinctive life is directed to the highest ends.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 146: Spencer: "Education," Cap. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 147: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 39.]
+
+[Footnote 148: Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage,"
+Bk. I, Caps. 12-24.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
+
+
+We have come to the last chapter of this book; and I am conscious that
+those who have had the patience to follow its argument from the
+beginning, may now feel a certain sense of incompleteness. They will
+observe that, though many things have been said about the life of the
+Spirit, not a great deal seems to have been said, at any rate directly,
+about the second half of the title--the life of to-day--and especially
+about those very important aspects of our modern active life which are
+resumed in the word Social. This avoidance has been, at least in part,
+intentional. We have witnessed in this century a violent revulsion from
+the individualistic type of religion; a revulsion which parallels
+upon-its own levels, and indeed is a part of, the revolt from Victorian
+individualism in political economic life. Those who come much into
+contact with students, and with the younger and more vigorous clergy,
+are aware how far this revolt has proceeded: how completely, in the
+minds of those young people who are interested in religion, the Social
+Gospel now overpowers all other aspects of the spiritual life. Again
+and again we are assured by the most earnest among them that in their
+view religion is a social activity, and service is its proper
+expression: that all valid knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly
+known in mankind: that the use of prayer is mainly social, in that it
+improves us for service, otherwise it must be condemned as a merely
+selfish activity: finally, that the true meaning and value of suffering
+are social too. A visitor to a recent Swanwick Conference of the Student
+Christian Movement has publicly expressed his regret that some students
+still seemed to be concerned with the problems of their own spiritual
+life; and were not prepared to let that look after itself, whilst they
+started straight off to work for the social realization of the Kingdom
+of God. When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this extent, and is
+held to the exclusion of its compensating opposite, it is in a fair way
+to becoming a lie. And we have here, I think, a real confusion of ideas
+which will, if allowed to continue, react unfavourably upon the religion
+of the future; because it gives away the most sacred conviction of the
+idealist, the belief in the absolute character of spiritual values, and
+in the effort to win them as the great activity of man. Social service,
+since it is one form of such an effort, a bringing in of more order,
+beauty, joy, is a fundamental duty--the fundamental duty--of the active
+life. Man does not truly love the Perfect until he is driven thus to
+seek its incarnation in the world of time. No one doubts this. All
+spiritual teachers have said it, in one way or another, for centuries.
+The mere fact that they feel impelled to teach at all, instead of saying
+"My secret to myself"--which is so much easier and pleasanter to the
+natural contemplative--is a guarantee of the claim to service which they
+feel that love lays upon them. But this does not make such service of
+man, however devoted, either the same thing as the search for, response
+to, intercourse with God; or, a sufficient substitute for these
+specifically spiritual acts.
+
+Plainly, we are called upon to strive with all our power to bring in the
+Kingdom; that is, to incarnate in the time world the highest spiritual
+values which we have known. But our ability to do this is strictly
+dependent on those values being known, at least by some of us, at
+first-hand; and for this first-hand perception, as we have seen, the
+soul must have a measure of solitude and silence. Therefore, if the
+swing-over to a purely social interpretation of religion be allowed to
+continue unchecked, the result can only be an impoverishment of our
+spiritual life; quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which
+follows from an unbridled individualism. Without the inner life of
+prayer and-meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian
+motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active
+social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the
+channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world of
+to-day.
+
+Christ, it is true, gives nobody any encouragement for supposing that a
+merely self-cultivating sort of spirituality, keeping the home fires
+burning and so on, is anybody's main job. The main job confided to His
+friends is the preaching of the Gospel. That is, spreading Reality,
+teaching it, inserting it into existence; by prayers, words, acts, and
+also if need be by manual work, and always under the conditions and
+symbolisms of our contemporary world. But since we can only give others
+that which we already possess, this presupposes that we have got
+something of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves. The soul's
+two activities of reception and donation must be held in balance, or
+impotence and unreality will result. It is only out of the heart of his
+own experience that man really helps his neighbour: and thus there is an
+ultimate social value in the most secret responses of the soul to grace.
+No one, for instance, can help others to repentance who has not known it
+at first-hand. Therefore we have to keep the home fires burning, because
+they are the fires which raise the steam that does the work: and we do
+this mostly by the fuel with which we feed them, though partly too by
+giving free access to currents of fresh air from the outer world.
+
+We cannot read St. Paul's letters with sympathy and escape the
+conviction that in the midst of his great missionary efforts he was
+profoundly concerned too with the problems of his own inner life. The
+little bits of self-revelation that break into the epistles and,
+threaded together, show us the curve of his growth, also show us how
+much, lay behind them, how intense, and how exacting was the inward
+travail that accompanied his outward deeds. Here he is representative of
+the true apostolic type. It is because St. Augustine is the man of the
+"Confessions" that he is also the creator of "The City of God." The
+regenerative work of St. Francis was accompanied by an unremitting life
+of penitence and recollection. Fox and Wesley, abounding in labours, yet
+never relaxed the tension of their soul's effort to correspond with a
+transcendent Reality. These and many other examples warn us that only by
+such a sustained and double movement can the man of the Spirit actualize
+all his possibilities and do his real work. He must, says Ruysbroeck,
+"both ascend and descend with love."[149] On any other basis he misses
+the richness of that fully integrated human existence "swinging between
+the unseen and the seen" in which the social and individual,
+incorporated and solitary responses to the demands of Spirit are fully
+carried through. Instead, he exhibits restriction and lack balance. This
+in the end must react as unfavourably on the social as on the personal
+side of life: since the place and influence of the spiritual life in the
+social order will depend entirely on its place in the individual
+consciousness of which that social order will be built, the extent in
+which loyalty to the one Spirit governs their reactions to common daily
+experience.
+
+Here then, as in so much else, the ideal is not an arbitrary choice but
+a struck balance. First, a personal contact with Eternal Reality,
+deepening, illuminating and enlarging all of our experience of fact, all
+our responses to it: that is, faith. Next, the fullest possible sense of
+our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely
+rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life: that is, charity. The
+dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that
+divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the
+human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.
+
+It is of course true that social groups may be regenerated. The success
+of such group-formations as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of
+God, the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this. But groups, in
+the last resort, consist of individuals, who must each be regenerated
+one by one; whose outlook, if they are to be whole men, must include in
+its span abiding values as well as the stream of time, and who, for the
+full development of this their two-fold destiny, require each a measure
+both of solitude and of association. Hence it follows, that the final
+answer to the repeated question: "Does God save men, does Spirit work
+towards the regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by one, or in
+groups?" is this: that the proposed alternative is illusory. We cannot
+say that the Divine action in the world as we know it, is either merely
+social or merely individual; but both. And the next question--a highly
+practical question--is, "How _both_?" For the answer to this, if we can
+find it, will give us at last a formula by which we can true up our own
+effort toward completeness of self-expression in the here-and-now.
+
+How, then, are groups of men moved up to higher spiritual levels; helped
+to such an actual possession of power and love and a sound mind as shall
+transfigure and perfect their lives? For this, more than all else, is
+what we now want to achieve. I speak in generalities, and of average
+human nature, not of these specially sensitive or gifted individuals who
+are themselves the revealers of Reality to their fellow-men.
+
+History suggests, I think, that this group-regeneration is effected in
+the last resort through a special sublimation of the herd-instinct; that
+is, the full and willing use on spiritual levels of the characters which
+are inherent in human gregariousness.[150] We have looked at some of
+these characters in past chapters. Our study of them suggests, that the
+first stage in any social regeneration is likely to be brought about by
+the instinctive rallying of individuals about a natural leader, strong
+enough to compel and direct them; and whose appeal is to the impulsive
+life, to an acknowledged of unacknowledged lack or craving, not to the
+faculty of deliberate choice. This leader, then, must offer new life and
+love, not intellectual solutions. He must be able to share with his
+flock his own ardour and apprehension of Reality; and evoke from them
+the profound human impulse to imitation. They will catch his enthusiasm,
+and thus receive the suggestions of his teaching and of his life. This
+first stage, supremely illustrated in the disciples of Christ, and again
+in the groups who gathered round such men as St. Francis, Fox, or Booth,
+is re-experienced in a lesser way in every successful revival: and each
+genuine restoration of the life of Spirit, whether its declared aim be
+social or religious, has a certain revivalistic character. We must
+therefore keep an eye on these principles of discipleship and contagion,
+as likely to govern any future spiritualization of our own social life;
+looking for the beginnings of true reconstruction, not to the general
+dissemination of suitable doctrines, but to the living burning influence
+of an ardent soul. And I may add here, as the corollary of this
+conclusion, first that the evoking and fostering of such ardour is in
+itself a piece of social service of the highest value, and next that it
+makes every individual socially responsible for the due sharing of even
+the small measure of ardour, certitude or power he or she has received.
+We are to be conductors of the Divine energy; not to insulate it. There
+is of course nothing new in all this: but there is nothing new
+fundamentally in the spiritual life, save in St. Augustine's sense of
+the eternal youth and freshness of all beauty.[151] The only novelty
+which we can safely introduce will be in the terms in which we describe
+it; the perpetual new exhibition of it within the time-world, the fresh
+and various applications which we can give to its abiding laws, in the
+special circumstances and opportunities of our own day.
+
+But the influence of the crowd-compeller, the leader, whether in the
+crude form of the revivalist or in the more penetrating and enduring
+form of the creative mystic or religious founder, the loyalty and
+imitation of the disciple, the corporate and generalized enthusiasm of
+the group can only be the first educative phase in any veritable
+incarnation of Spirit upon earth. Each member of the herd is now
+committed to the fullest personal living-out of the new life he has
+received. Only in so far as the first stage of suggestion and imitation
+is carried over to the next stage of personal actualization, can we say
+that there is any real promotion of spiritual _life_: any hope that this
+life will work a true renovation of the group into which it has been
+inserted and achieve the social phase.
+
+If, then, it does achieve the social phase what stages may we expect it
+to pass through, and by what special characters will it be graced?
+
+Let us look back for a moment at some of our conclusions about the
+individual life. We said that this life, if fully lived, exhibited the
+four characters of work and contemplation, self-discipline and service:
+deepening and incarnating within its own various this-world experience
+its other-world apprehensions of Eternity, of God. Its temper should
+thus be both social and ascetic. It should be doubly based, on humility
+and on given power. Now the social order--more exactly, the social
+organism--in which Spirit is really to triumph, can only be built up of
+individuals who do with a greater or less perfection and intensity
+exhibit these characters, some upon independent levels of creative
+freedom, some on those of discipleship: for here all men are not equal,
+and it is humbug to pretend that they are. This social order, being so
+built of regenerate units, would be dominated by these same implicits of
+the regenerate consciousness; and would tend to solve in their light the
+special problems of community life. And this unity of aim would really
+make of it one body; the body of a fully socialized _and_ fully
+spiritualized humanity, which perhaps we might without presumption
+describe as indeed the son of God.
+
+The life of such a social organism, its growth, its cycle of corporate
+behaviour, would be strung on that same fourfold cord which combined the
+desires and deeds of the regenerate self into a series: namely,
+Penitence, Surrender, Recollection, and Work. It would be actuated first
+by a real social repentance. That is, by a turning from that constant
+capitulation to its past, to animal and savage impulse, the power of
+which our generation at least knows only too well; and by the
+complementary effort to unify vigorous instinctive action and social
+conscience. I think every one can find for themselves some sphere,
+national, racial, industrial, financial, in which social penitence could
+work; and the constant corporate fall-back into sin, which we now
+disguise as human nature, or sometimes--even more insincerely--as
+economic and political necessity, might be faced and called by its true
+name. Such a social penitence--such a corporate realization of the mess
+that we have made of things--is as much a direct movement of the Spirit,
+and as great an essential of regeneration, as any individual movement of
+the broken and contrite heart.
+
+Could a quick social conscience, aware of obligations to Reality which
+do not end with making this world a comfortable place--though we have
+not even managed that for the majority of men--feel quite at ease, say,
+after an unflinching survey of our present system of State punishment?
+Or after reading the unvarnished record of our dealings with the problem
+of Indian immigration into Africa? Or after considering the inner nature
+of international diplomacy and finance? Or even, to come nearer home,
+after a stroll through Hoxton: the sort of place, it is true, which we
+have not exactly made on purpose but which has made itself because we
+have not, as a community, exercised our undoubted powers of choice and
+action in an intelligent and loving way. Can we justify the peculiar
+characteristics of Hoxton: congratulate ourselves on the amount of
+light, air and beauty which its inhabitants enjoy, the sort of children
+that are reared in it, as the best we can do towards furthering the
+racial aim? It is a monument of stupidity no less than of meanness. Yet
+the conception of God which the whole religious experience of growing
+man presses on us, suggests that both intelligence and love ought to
+characterize His ideal for human life. Look then at these, and all the
+other things of the same kind. Look at our attitude towards
+prostitution, at the drink traffic, at the ugliness and injustice of the
+many institutions which we allow to endure. Look at them in the
+Universal Spirit; and then consider, whether a searching corporate
+repentance is not really the inevitable preliminary of a social and
+spiritual advance. All these things have happened because we have as a
+body consistently fallen below our best possible, lacked courage to
+incarnate our vision in the political sphere. Instead, we have, acted on
+the crowd level, swayed by unsublimated instincts of acquisition,
+disguised lust, self-preservation, self-assertion, and ignoble fear: and
+such a fall-back is the very essence of social sin.
+
+We have made many plans and elevations; but we have not really tried to
+build Jerusalem either in our own hearts or in "England's pleasant
+land." Blake thought that the preliminary of such a building up of the
+harmonious social order must be the building up or harmonizing of men,
+of each man; and when this essential work was really done, Heaven's
+"Countenance Divine" would suddenly declare itself "among the dark
+Satanic mills."[152] What was wrong with man, and ultimately therefore
+with society, was the cleavage between his "Spectre" or energetic
+intelligence, and "Emanation" or loving imagination. Divided, they only
+tormented one another. United, they were the material of divine
+humanity. Now the complementary affirmative movement which shall balance
+and complete true social penitence will be just such a unification and
+dedication of society's best energies and noblest ideals, now commonly
+separated. The Spectre is attending to economics: the Emanation is
+dreaming of Utopia. We want to see them united, for from this union
+alone will come the social aspect for surrender. That is to say, a
+single-minded, unselfish yielding to those good social impulses which we
+all feel from time to time, and might take more seriously did, we
+realize them as the impulsions of holy and creative Spirit pressing us
+towards novelty, giving us our chance; our small actualization of the
+universal tendency to the Divine. As it is, we do feel a little
+uncomfortable when these stirrings reach us; but commonly console
+ourselves with the thought that their realization is at present outside
+the sphere of practical politics. Yet the obligation of response to
+those stirrings is laid on all who feel them; and unless some will first
+make this venture of faith, our possible future will never be achieved.
+Christ was born among those who _expected_ the Kingdom of God. The
+favouring atmosphere of His childhood is suggested by these words. It is
+our business to prepare, so far as we may, a favourable atmosphere and
+environment for the children who will make the future: and this
+environment is not anything mysterious, it is simply ourselves. The men
+and women who are now coming to maturity, still supple to experience and
+capable of enthusiastic and disinterested choice--that is, of surrender
+in the noblest sense--will have great opportunities of influencing those
+who are younger than themselves. The torch is being offered to them; and
+it is of vital importance to the unborn future that they should grasp
+and hand it on, without worrying about whether their fingers are going
+to be burnt. If they do grasp it, they may prove to be the bringers in
+of a new world, a fresh and vigorous social order, which is based upon
+true values, controlled by a spiritual conception of life; a world in
+which this factor is as freely acknowledged by all normal persons, as is
+the movement of the earth round the sun.
+
+I do not speak here of fantastic dreams about Utopias, or of the
+coloured pictures of the apocalyptic imagination; but of a concrete
+genuine possibility, at which clear-sighted persons have hinted again
+and again. Consider our racial past. Look at the Piltdown skull:
+reconstruct the person or creature whose brain that skull contained, and
+actualize the directions in which his imperious instincts, his vaguely
+conscious will and desire, were pressing into life. They too were
+expressions of Creative Spirit; and there is perfect continuity between
+his vital impulse and our own. Now, consider one of the better
+achievements of civilization; say the life of a University, with its
+devotion to disinterested learning, its conservation of old beauty and
+quest of new truth. Even if we take its lowest common measure, the
+transfiguration of desire is considerable. Yet in the things of the
+Spirit we must surely acknowledge ourselves still to be primitive men;
+and no one can say that it yet appears what we shall be. All really
+depends on the direction in which human society decides to push into
+experience, the surrender which it makes to the impulsion of the Spirit;
+how its tendency to novelty is employed, the sort of complex habits
+which are formed by it, as more and more crude social instinct is lifted
+up into conscious intention, and given the precision of thought.
+
+In our regenerate society, then, if we ever get it, the balanced moods
+of Repentance of our racial past and Surrender to our spiritual calling,
+the pull-forward of the Spirit of Life even in its most austere
+difficult demands, will control us; as being the socialized extensions
+of these same attitudes of the individual soul. And they will press the
+community to those same balanced expressions of its instinct for
+reality, which completed the individual life: that is to say, to
+Recollection and Work. In the furnishing of a frame for the regular
+social exercise of recollection--the gathering in of the corporate mind
+and its direction to eternal values, the abiding foundations of
+existence; the consideration of all its problems in silence and peace;
+the dramatic and sacramental expression of its unity and of its
+dependence on the higher powers of life--in all this, the institutional
+religion of the future will perhaps find its true sphere of action, and
+take its rightful place in the socialized life of the Spirit.
+
+Finally, the work which is done by a community of which the inner life
+is controlled by these three factors will be the concrete expression of
+these factors in the time-world; and will perpetuate and hand on all
+that is noble, stable and reasonable in human discovery and tradition,
+whether in the sphere of conduct, of thought, of creation, of manual
+labour, or the control of nature, whilst remaining supple towards the
+demands and gifts of novelty. New value will be given to craftsmanship
+and a sense of dedication--now almost unknown--to those who direct it.
+Consider the effect of this attitude on worker, trader, designer,
+employer: how many questions would then answer themselves, how many sore
+places would be healed.
+
+It is not necessary, in order to take sides with this possible new
+order and work for it, that we should commit ourselves to any one party
+or scheme of social reform. Still less is it necessary to suppose such
+reform the only field in which the active and social side of the
+spiritual life is to be lived. Repentance, surrender, recollection and
+industry can do their transfiguring work in art, science, craftsmanship,
+scholarship, and play: making all these things more representative of
+reality, nearer our own best possible, and so more vivid and worth
+while. If Tauler was right, and all kinds of skill are gifts of the Holy
+Ghost--a proposition which no thorough-going theist can refuse--then
+will not a reference back on the part of the worker to that fontal
+source of power make for humility and perfection in all work? Personally
+I am not at all afraid to recognize a spiritual element in all good
+craftsmanship, in the delighted and diligent creation of the fine
+potter, smith or carpenter, in the well-tended garden and beehive, the
+perfectly adjusted home; for do not all these help the explication of
+the one Spirit of Life in the diversity of His gifts?
+
+The full life of the Spirit must be more rich and various in its
+expression than any life that we have yet known, and find place for
+every worthy and delightful activity. It does not in the least mean a
+bloodless goodness; a refusal of fun and everlasting fuss about uplift.
+But it does mean looking at and judging each problem in a particular
+light, and acting on that judgment without fear. Were this principle
+established, and society poised on this centre, reforms would follow its
+application almost automatically; specific evils would retreat. New
+knowledge of beauty would reveal the ugliness of many satisfactions
+which we now offer to ourselves, and new love the defective character of
+many of our social relations. Certain things would therefore leave off
+happening, would go; because the direction of desire had changed. I do
+not wish to particularize, for this only means blurring the issue by
+putting forward one's own pet reforms. But I cannot help pointing out
+that we shall never get spiritual values out of a society harried and
+tormented by economic pressure, or men and women whose whole attention
+is given up to the daily task of keeping alive. This is not a political
+statement: it is a plain fact that we must face. Though the courageous
+lives of the poor, their patient endurance of insecurity may reveal a
+nobility that shames us, it still remains true that these lives do not
+represent the most favourable conditions of the soul. It is not poverty
+that matters; but strain and the presence of anxiety and fear, the
+impossibility of detachment. Therefore this oppression at least would
+have to be lightened, before the social conscience could be at ease.
+Moreover as society advances along this way, every--even the most
+subtle--kind of cruelty and exploitation of self-advantage obtained to
+the detriment of other individuals, must tend to be eliminated; because
+here the drag-back of the past will be more and more completely
+conquered, its instincts fully sublimated, and no one will care to do
+those things any more. Bringing new feelings and more real concepts to
+our contact with our environment, we shall, in accordance with the law
+of apperception, see this environment in a different way; and so obtain
+from it a fresh series of experiences. The scale of pain and pleasure
+will be altered. We shall feel a searching responsibility about the way
+in which our money is made, and about any disadvantages to others which
+our amusements or comforts may involve.
+
+Here, perhaps, it is well to register a protest against the curious but
+prevalent notion that any such concentrated effort for the
+spiritualization of society must tend to work itself out in the
+direction of a maudlin humanitarianism, a soft and sentimental reading
+of life. This idea merely advertises once more the fact that we still
+have a very mean and imperfect conception of God, and have made the
+mistake of setting up a water-tight bulkhead; between His revelation, in
+nature and His discovery in the life of prayer. It shows a failure to
+appreciate the stern, heroic aspect of Reality; the element of austerity
+in all genuine religion, the distinction between love and
+sentimentalism, the rightful place of risk, effort, even suffering, in
+all full achievement and all joy. If we are surrendered in love to the
+purposes of the Spirit, we are committed to the bringing out of the
+best possible in life; and this is a hard business, involving a quite
+definite social struggle with evil and atavism, in which some one is
+likely to be hurt. But surely that manly spirit of adventure which has
+driven men to the North Pole and the desert, and made them battle with
+delight against apparently impossible odds, can here find its
+appropriate sublimation?
+
+If anyone who has followed these arguments, and now desires to bring
+them from idea into practice, asks: "What next?" the answer simply
+is--Begin. Begin with ourselves; and if possible, do not begin in
+solitude. "The basal principles of all collective life," says McDougall,
+"are sympathetic contagion, mass suggestion, imitation":[153] and again
+and again the history of spiritual experience illustrates this law, that
+its propagation is most often by way of discipleship and the corporate
+life, not by the intensive culture of purely solitary effort. It is for
+those who believe in the spiritual life to take full advantage now of
+this social suggestibility of man; though without any detraction from
+the prime importance of the personal spiritual life. Therefore, join up
+with somebody, find fellowship; whether it be in a church or society, or
+among a few like-minded friends. Draw together for mutual support, and
+face those imperatives of prayer and work which we have seen to be the
+condition of the fullest living-out of our existence. Fix and keep a
+reasonably balanced daily rule. Accept leadership where you find
+it--give it, if you feel the impulse and the strength. Do not wait for
+some grand opportunity, and whilst you are waiting stiffen in the wrong
+shape. The great opportunity may not be for us, but for the generation
+whose path we now prepare: and we do our best towards such preparation,
+if we begin in a small and humble way the incorporation of our hopes and
+desires as for instance Wesley and the Oxford Methodists did. They
+sought merely to put their own deeply felt ideas into action quite
+simply and without fuss; and we know how far the resulting impulse
+spread. The Bab movement in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show
+us this principle still operative; what a "little flock" dominated by a
+suitable herd-leader and swayed by love and adoration can do--and these,
+like Christianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous groups. It
+may be that our hope for the future depends on the formation of such
+groups--hives of the Spirit--in which the worker of every grade, the
+thinker, the artist, might each have their place: obtaining from
+incorporation the herd-advantages of mutual protection and unity of aim,
+and forming nuclei to which others could adhere.
+
+Such a small group--and I am now thinking of something quite practical,
+say to begin with a study-circle, or a company of like-minded friends
+with a definite rule of life--may not seem to the outward eye very
+impressive. Regarded as a unit, it will even tend to be inferior to its
+best members: but it will be superior to the weakest, and with its
+leader will possess a dynamic character and reproductive power which he
+could never have exhibited alone. It should form a compact organization,
+both fervent and business-like; and might take as its ideal a
+combination of the characteristic temper of the contemplative order,
+with that of active and intelligent Christianity as seen in the best
+type of social settlement. This double character of inwardness and
+practicality seems to me to be essential to its success; and
+incorporation will certainly help it to be maintained. The rule should
+be simple and unostentatious, and need indeed be little more than the
+"heavenly rule" of faith, hope, and charity. This will involve first the
+realization of man's true life within a spiritual world-order, his utter
+dependence upon its realities and powers of communion with them; next
+his infinite possibilities of recovery and advancement; last his duty of
+love to all other selves and things. This triple law would be applied
+without shirking to every problem of existence; and the corporate spirit
+would be encouraged by meetings, by associated prayer, and specially I
+hope by the practice of corporate silence. Such a group would never
+permit the intrusion of the controversial element, but would be based on
+mutual trust; and the fact that all the members shared substantially the
+same view of human life, strove though in differing ways for the same
+ideals, were filled by the same enthusiasms, would allow the problems
+and experiences of the Spirit to be accepted as real, and discussed with
+frankness and simplicity. Thus oases of prayer and clear thinking might
+be created in our social wilderness, gradually developing such power and
+group-consciousness as we see in really living religious bodies. The
+group would probably make some definite piece of social work, or some
+definite question, specially its own. Seeking to judge the problem this
+presented in the Universal Spirit, it would work towards a solution,
+using for this purpose both heart and head. It would strive in regard to
+the special province chosen and solution reached to make its weight
+felt, either locally or nationally, in a way the individual could never
+hope to do; and might reasonably hope that its conclusions and its
+actions would exceed in balance and sanity those which any one of the
+members could have achieved alone.
+
+I think that these groups would develop their own discipline, not borrow
+its details from the past: for they would soon find that some drill was
+necessary to them, and that luxury, idleness, self-indulgence and
+indifference to the common-good were in conflict with the inner spirit
+of the herd. They would inevitably come to practise that sane
+asceticism, not incompatible with gaiety of heart, which consists in
+concentration on the real, and quiet avoidance of the attractive sham.
+Plainness and simplicity do help the spiritual life, and these are more
+easy and wholesome when practised in common than when they are displayed
+by individuals in defiance of the social order that surrounds them. The
+differences of temperament and of spiritual level in the group members
+would prevent monotony; and insure that variety of reaction to the life
+of the Spirit which we so much wish to preserve. Those whose chief gift
+was for action would thus be directly supported by those natural
+contemplatives who might, if they remained in solitude, find it
+difficult to make their special gift serve their fellows as it must.
+Group-consciousness would cause the spreading and equalization of that
+spiritual sensitiveness which is, as a matter of fact, very unequally
+distributed amongst men. And in the backing up of the predominantly
+active workers by the organized prayerful will of the group, all the
+real values of intercession would be obtained: for this has really
+nothing to do with trying to persuade God to do specific acts, it is a
+particular way of exerting love, and thus of reaching and using
+spiritual power.
+
+This incorporation, as I see it, would be made for the express purpose
+of getting driving force with which to act directly upon life. For
+spirituality, as we have seen all along, must not be a lovely fluid
+notion or a merely self-regarding education; but an education for
+action, for the insertion of eternal values into the time-world, in
+conformity with the incarnational philosophy which justifies it. Such
+action--such Insertion--depends on constant recourse to the sources of
+spiritual power. At present we tend to starve our possible centres of
+regeneration, or let them starve themselves, by our encouragement of the
+active at the expense of the contemplative life; and till this is
+mended, we shall get nothing really done. Forgetting St. Teresa's
+warning, that to give our Lord a perfect service, Martha and Mary must
+combine,[154] we represent the service of man as being itself an
+attention to God; and thus drain our best workers of their energies, and
+leave them no leisure for taking in Fresh supplies. Often they are
+wearied and confused by the multiplicity in which they must struggle;
+and they are not taught and encouraged to seek the healing experience of
+unity. Hence even our noblest teachers often show painful signs of
+spiritual exhaustion, and tend to relapse into the formal repetition of
+a message which was once a burning fire.
+
+The continued force of any regenerative movement depends above all else
+on continued vivid contact with the Divine order, for the problems of
+the reformer are only really understood and seen in true proportion in
+its light. Such contact is not always easy: it is a form of work. After
+a time the weary and discouraged will need the support of discipline if
+they are to do it. Therefore definite role of silence and
+withdrawal--perhaps an extension of that system of periodical retreats
+which is one of the most hopeful features of contemporary religious
+life--is essential to any group-scheme for the general and social
+furtherance of the spiritual life. It is not to be denied for a moment,
+that countless good men and women who love the world in the divine and
+not in the self-regarding sense, are busy all their lives long in
+forwarding the purposes of the Spirit: which is acting through them, as
+truly as through the conscious prophets and regenerators of the race.
+But, to return for a moment to psychological language, whilst the Divine
+impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is not doing all that
+it could for us nor we all that we could do for it; for we are not
+completely unified. We can by appropriate education bring up that
+imperative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, and wittingly
+dedicate to its uses our heart, mind and will; and such realization in
+its most perfect form appears to be the psychological equivalent of the
+state which is described by spiritual writers, in their own special
+language, as "union with God."
+
+I have been at some pains to avoid the use of this special language of
+the mystics; but now perhaps we may remind ourselves that, by the
+declaration of all who have achieved it, the mature spiritual life is
+such a condition of completed harmony--such a theopathetic state.
+Therefore here to-day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble,
+no less that in the Indian forest or the mediæval cloister, man's really
+religious method and self-expression must be harmonious with a
+life-process of which this is the recognized if distant goal: and in all
+the work of restatement, this abiding objective must be kept in view.
+Such union, such full identification with the Divine purpose, must be a
+social as well as an individual expression of full life. It cannot be
+satisfied by the mere picking out of crumbs of perfection from the
+welter, but must mean in the end that the real interests of society are
+indentical with the interests of Creative Spirit, in so far as these are
+felt and known by man; the interests, that is, of a love that is energy
+and an energy that is love. Towards this identification, the willed
+tendency of each truly awakened individual must steadfastly be set; and
+also the corporate desire of each group, as expressed in its prayer and
+work. For the whole secret of life lies in directed desire.
+
+A wide-spreading love to all in common, says Ruysbroeck in a celebrated
+passage, is the authentic mark of a truly spiritual man.[155] In this
+phrase is concealed the link between the social and personal aspects of
+the spiritual life. It means that our passional nature with its cravings
+and ardours, instead of making self-centred whirlpools, flows out in
+streams of charity and power towards all life. And we observe too that
+the Ninth Perfection of the Buddhist is such a state of active charity.
+"In his loving, sympathizing, joyful and steadfast mind he will
+recognize himself in all things, and will shed warmth and light on the
+world in all directions out of his great, deep, unbounded heart."[156]
+
+Let this, then, be the teleological objective on which the will and the
+desire of individual and group are set: and let us ask what it involves,
+and how it is achieved. It involves all the ardour, tenderness and
+idealism of the lover, spent not on one chosen object but on all living
+things. Thus it means an immense widening of the arc of human sympathy;
+and this it is not possible to do properly, unless we have found the
+centre of the circle first. The glaring defect of current religion--I
+mean the vigorous kind, not the kind that is responsible for empty
+churches--is that it spends so much time in running round the arc, and
+rather takes the centre for granted. We see a great deal of love in
+generous-minded people, but also a good many gaps in it which reference
+to the centre might help us to find and to mend. Some Christian people
+seem to have a difficulty about loving reactionaries, and some about
+loving revolutionaries. And in institutional religion there are people
+of real ardour, called by those beautiful names Catholic and
+Evangelical, who do not seem able to see each other in the light of this
+wide-spreading love. Yet they would meet at the centre. And it is at the
+centre that the real life of the Spirit aims first; thence flowing out
+to the circumference--even to its most harsh, dark, difficult and
+rugged limits--in unbroken streams of generous love.
+
+Such love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending
+itself on the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed,
+and has as its special vocation--a vocation identical with that of the
+great artist--the "loving of the unlovely into lovableness." Thus does
+it participate according to its measure in the work of Divine
+incarnation. This does not mean a maudlin optimism, or any other kind of
+sentimentality; for as we delve more deeply into life, we always leave
+sentimentality behind. But it does mean a love which is based on a deep
+understanding of man's slow struggles and of the unequal movements of
+life, and is expressed in both arduous and highly skillful actions. It
+means taking the grimy, degraded, misshapen, and trying to get them
+right; because we feel that essentially they can be right. And further,
+of course, it means getting behind them to the conditions that control
+their wrongness; and getting these right if we can. Consider what human
+society would be if each of its members--not merely occasional
+philanthropists, idealists or saints, but financiers, politicians,
+traders, employers, employed--had this quality of spreading a creative
+love: if the whole impulse of life in every man and woman were towards
+such a harmony, first with God, and then with all other things and
+souls. There is nothing unnatural in this conception. It only means that
+our vital energy would flow in its real channel at last. Where then
+would be our most heart-searching social problems? The social order then
+would really be an order; tallying with St. Augustine's definition of a
+virtuous life as the ordering of love.
+
+What about the master and the worker in such a possibly regenerated
+social order? Consider alone the immense release of energy for work
+needing to be done, if the civil wars of civilized man could cease and
+be replaced by that other mental fight, for the upbuilding of Jerusalem:
+how the impulse of Creative Spirit, surely working in humanity, would
+find the way made clear. Would not this, at last, actualize the Pauline
+dream, of each single citizen as a member of the Body of Christ? It is
+because we are not thus attuned to life, and surrendered to it, that our
+social confusion arises; the conflict of impulse within society simply
+mirrors the conflict of impulse within each individual mind.
+
+We know that some of the greatest movements of history, veritable
+transformations of the group-mind, can be traced back to a tiny
+beginning in the faithful spiritual experience and response of some one
+man, his contact with the centre which started the ripples of creative
+love. If, then, we could elevate such universalized individuals into the
+position of herd-leaders, spread their secret, persuade society first to
+imitate them, and then to share their point of view, the real and sane,
+because love-impelled social revolution might begin. It will begin, when
+more and ever more people find themselves unable to participate in, or
+reap advantage from, the things which conflict with love: when tender
+emotion in man is so universalized, that it controls the instincts of
+acquisitiveness and of self-assertion. There are already for each of us
+some things in which we cannot participate, because they conflict too
+flagrantly with some aspect of our love, either for truth, or for
+justice, or for humanity, or for God; and these things each individual,
+according to his own level of realization, is bound to oppose without
+compromise. Most of us have enough widespreading love to be--for
+instance--quite free from temptation to be cruel, at any rate directly,
+to children or to animals. I say nothing about the indirect tortures
+which our sloth and insensitiveness still permit. Were these first
+flickers made ardent, and did they control all our reactions to
+life--and there is nothing abnormal, no break in continuity involved in
+this, only a reasonable growth--then, new paths of social discharge
+would have been made for-our chief desires and impulses; and along these
+they would tend more and more to flow freely and easily, establishing
+new social-habits, unhampered by solicitations from our savage past. To
+us already, on the whole, these solicitations are less insistent than
+they were to the men of earlier centuries. We see their gradual defeat
+in slave emancipation, factory acts, increased religious tolerance,
+every movement towards social justice, every increase of the arc over
+which our obligations to other men obtain. They must now disguise
+themselves as patriotic or economic necessities, if we are to listen to
+them: as, in the Freudian dream, our hidden unworthy wishes slip through
+into consciousness in a symbolic form. But when their energy has been
+fully sublimated, the social action will no longer be a conflict but a
+harmony. Then we shall live the life of Spirit; and from this life will
+flow all love-inspired reform.
+
+Yet we are, above all, to avoid the conclusion that the spiritual life,
+in its social expression, shall necessarily push us towards mere change;
+that novelty contains everything, and stability nothing, of the will of
+the Spirit for the race. Surely our aim shall be this: that religious
+sensitiveness shall spread, as our discovery of religion in the universe
+spreads, so that at last every man's reaction to the whole of experience
+shall be entinctured with Reality, coloured by this dominant
+feeling-tone. Spirit would then work from within outwards, and all life
+personal and social, mental and physical, would be moulded by its
+inspiring power. And in looking here for our best hope of development,
+we remain safely within history; and do not strive for any desperate
+pulling down or false simplification of our complex existence, such as
+has wrecked many attempts to spiritualize society in the past.
+
+Consider the way by which we have come. We found in man an instinct for
+a spiritual Reality. A single, concrete, objective Fact, transcending
+yet informing his universe, compels his adoration, and is apperceived by
+him in three main ways. First, as the very Being, Heart and Meaning of
+that universe, the universal of all universals, next as a Presence
+including and exceeding the best that personality can mean to him, last
+as an indwelling and energizing Life. We saw in history the persistent
+emergence of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as to subdue to
+its interests all the activities of life; ever seeking to incarnate its
+abiding values in the world of time. And further, psychology suggested
+to us, even in its tentative new findings, its exploration of our
+strange mental deeps, reason for holding such surrender to the purposes
+of the Spirit to represent the condition of man's fullest psychic
+health, and access to his real sources of power. We found in the
+universal existence of religious institutions further evidence of this
+profound human need of spirituality. We saw there the often sharp and
+sky-piercing intensity of the individual aptitude for Reality enveloped,
+tempered and made wholesome by the social influences of the cultus and
+the group: made too, available for the community by the symbolisms that
+cultus had preserved. So that gradually the life of the Spirit emerged
+for us as something most actual, not archaic: a perennial possibility of
+newness, of regeneration, a widening of our span of pain and joy. A
+human fact, completing and most closely linked with those other human
+facts, the vocation to service, to beauty, to truth. A fact, then,
+which must control our view of personal self-discipline, of education,
+and of social effort: since it refers to the abiding Reality which alone
+gives all these their meaning and worth, and which man, consciously or
+unconsciously, must pursue.
+
+And last, if we ask as a summing up of the whole matter: _Why_ man is
+thus to seek the Eternal, through, behind and within the ever-fleeting?
+The answer is that he cannot, as a matter of fact, help doing it sooner
+or later: for his heart is never at rest, till it finds itself there.
+But he often wastes a great deal of time before he realizes this. And
+perhaps we may find the reason why man--each man--is thus pressed
+towards some measure of union with Reality, in the fact that his
+conscious will thus only becomes an agent of the veritable purposes of
+life: of that Power which, in and through mankind, conserves and slowly
+presses towards realization the noblest aspirations of each soul. This
+power and push we may call if we like in the language of realism the
+tendency of our space-time universe towards deity; or in the language of
+religion, the working of the Holy Spirit. And since, so far as we know,
+it is only in man that life becomes self-conscious, and ever more and
+more self-conscious, with the deepening and widening of his love and his
+thought; so it is only in man that it can dedicate the will and desire
+which are life's central qualities to the furtherance of this Divine
+creative aim.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 149: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 150: A good general discussion in Tansley: "The New Psychology
+and its Relation to Life," Caps. 19, 20.]
+
+[Footnote 151: Aug. Conf., Bk. X, Cap. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 152: Blake; "Jerusalem."]
+
+[Footnote 153: "Social Psychology," Cap. i.]
+
+[Footnote 154: "The Interior Castle": Sleuth Habitation, Cap. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 155: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk. II, Cap.
+44.]
+
+[Footnote 156: Warren: "Buddhism in Translations," p. 28.]
+
+
+
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+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+  Abreaction, 109
+
+  Abu Said, 16
+
+  Adolescence, 240 seq.
+
+  Alexander, S. 26
+
+  Angela of Foligno, Blessed, 99, 130
+
+  Apperception, 179, 284
+
+  Aquinas, St. Thomas, 26, 58, 200
+
+  Asceticism, 69, 89, 288
+
+  Augustine, St., 8, 13, 27, 60, 198, 202, 208, 270, 273, 295
+
+  Autistic thought, 112, 117, seq.
+
+  Auto Suggestion _see_ Suggestion
+
+
+  Baudouin, C., 144, 173
+
+  Benedict, St. 48, 64, seq., 68, 210
+
+  Benedictine Order, 52, 61, 64, seq.
+
+  Bernard, St. 52
+
+  Bhakti Marga, 18, 21
+
+  Bible-reading, 212
+
+  Blake, W., 11, 33, 46, 71, 277
+
+  Boehme, Jacob, 4, 33, 55, 70, 84, 86, 89, 118, 150, seq., 198, 201,
+  204, 244
+
+  Bonaventura, St., 146
+
+  Booth, General, 54, 59, 63, 96
+
+  Bosanquet, Bernard 6
+
+  Brahmo Samaj, 155
+
+  Brothers of Common Life, 52
+
+  Buddhism, 72, 182, 258, 292
+
+  Butler, Dom C., 65, 169
+
+
+  Caird, Edward, 246
+
+  Catherine of Genoa, St., 55, 67, 70, 71
+
+  Catherine of Siena, St., 68, 71, 87, 128
+
+  Christianity, Primitive, 56, 164
+
+  Church, 155, seq.
+    essentials of, 164, seq., 171
+    future, 188, 281
+    gifts of, 161
+    limitations, 170
+
+  Cloud of Unknowing, The, 87, 96, 104, seq., 110, 123, 143, 145, 146,
+  147, 151, 248
+
+  Complex, 108, seq.
+
+  Conflict, Psychic, 81, 88, 100, 103, 216, seq.
+
+  Consciousness, 116, seq.
+    group, 162, seq., 288, seq.
+    spiritual, 219, 225
+
+  Contemplation, 17, 121, seq., 138, seq., 212, 219 in children, 260
+
+  Conversion, 68, 75, 89, 93, 103, 265
+
+  Croce, Benedetto, 41, 43
+
+  Cultus, 171, seq.
+
+
+  Dante, 9
+
+  Delatte, Abbot, 65
+
+  Dionysius, the Areopagite, 9, 141
+
+  Discipleship, 58, 271, seq.
+
+  Donne, John, 16, 46
+
+
+  Eckhart, Master, 9, 142
+
+  Education, 102, seq., 177 seq.
+    factors of, 231, seq.
+    Spencer on, 234
+    Spiritual, 179, 206, 228, seq., 243, seq., 251, 264
+    dangers of, 250, seq., 262
+
+  Emotion, Religious, 18, 99, 145, 250, 263
+
+  Eternal Life, 3, 48, 195, 271
+
+  Everard, John, 35, 40
+
+
+  Fox, George, 8, 45, 59, 62, 67, 96, 109, 155, 215, 270, 273
+
+  Francis of Assisi, St., 47, 54, 59, 61, 63, 67, 270, 273
+
+  Friends of God, 63, 271
+
+  Fry, Elizabeth, 55, 63, 210
+
+
+  Gardner, Edmund, 87
+
+  God, Experience of, 7 seq., 74, 127, 214, 238, seq., 252, 275, 298
+    personality of, 9, seq., 17 seq.
+
+  Grace, 138, seq., 206, 211
+
+  Groot, Gerard, 68
+
+  Groups, 61, 271, 285, seq.
+
+  Guyon, Madame, 143
+
+
+  Habit, 85, 90, 102, 172
+
+  Hadfield, J.A., 100
+
+  Haldane, Viscount, 28
+
+  Hayward, F.H., 259
+
+  Hinduism, 18, 21, 45, 51, 155, 182
+
+  History and spiritual life, 38, seq., 212
+    in education, 256, seq.
+
+  Höffding, H., 24, 212
+
+  Hügel, Baron, F. von, 2, 29, 52, 70, 125, 209
+    on spiritual life, 195, seq.
+
+  Humility, 109, 217, 275, 282
+
+  Hymns, 148, 173, seq.
+
+
+  Ignatius, Loyola, St., 61, 68, 95
+
+  Instinct, 76, 78, seq., 90, seq., 102, 263
+    herd, 272
+    in children, 249
+
+  Intercession, 289
+
+  Introversion, 121
+
+  Isaiah, 12
+
+
+  Jacopone da Todi, 12, 55, 68, 90, 93, 107, 131
+
+  James, William, 157
+
+  Jerome, St., 154
+
+  Jesus Christ, 17, 40, 47, 51, 56, 59, 61, 156, 182, 198, 202, 268,
+  273, 279
+
+  Joan of Arc, St., 95
+
+  "John Inglesant", 61
+
+  John, St., 107, 244
+
+  John of the Cross, St., 128, 208
+
+  Julian of Norwich, 20, 87, 135, 144
+
+
+  Kabir, 5, 11, 70, 155, 198
+
+
+  Lawrence, Brother, 55
+
+  Law, William, 27, 90, 91
+
+  Liturgy, _see_ Cultus
+
+  Livingstone, W.P., 96
+
+  Love, 90, 97, 104, 211, 244, seq., 292, seq.
+    defined, 200, seq.
+
+  Lucie, Christine, 14
+
+
+  Mass, The, 177
+
+  McDougall, W., 163, 285
+
+  McGovern, W.M., 72
+
+  Mechthild of Magdeburg, St., 89, 129
+
+  Memory, 179, seq.
+
+  Methodists, 15, 53, 286
+
+  Mind, analysis of, 76, seq.
+    foreconscious, 117, seq.
+    instinctive, 89, seq., 137, seq.
+    primitive, 82, 99, 104, 181, seq.
+    rational, 100, seq.
+    unconscious, 114, seq., 141, seq., 230, 264
+
+  Motive, 84, 109
+
+  Mystical Experience, 99, 107, 113
+
+
+  Nanak, 155
+
+  Nicholson, Reynold, 11, 16, 18, 51, 70
+
+
+  Pascal, 137
+
+  Patmore, Coventry, 119
+
+  Paul, St., 13, 52, 55, 63, 68, 81, 83, 95, 136, 210, 244, 269
+
+  Penn, William, 36, 125, 137
+
+  Plotinus, 2, 5, 11, 18, 29, 37, 77, 201, 205
+
+  Pratt, J.B., 20, 149, 157
+
+  Prayer 52, 108, 113, 120, seq., 199, 204, seq., 211, 253, 265, seq.
+    Childrens', 229, 243
+    corporate, 169, 286
+    distractions in, 126, 149
+    education in, 102, 248
+    of quiet, 124, 141
+    Sadhu on, 209
+    short act, 144
+    and suggestion 138, seq.
+    vocal, 144
+    and work, 253
+
+  Psyche, The, 77, seq., 103, 116, 230
+
+  Purgation, 69, 76, 90, 108, seq., 218
+
+
+  Quakers, 63, 164, 174, 258
+
+
+  Ramakrishna, 149
+
+  Recollection, 123, seq., 139, 208, 219, seq.
+    corporate, 281
+
+  Regeneration, 15, 89, 94
+  corporate, 271, seq., 293, seq.
+
+  Religious ceremonies, 173, seq., 188
+    education, 179, seq.
+    institutions, 154, seq., 281
+    magic 185, seq.
+    orders, 60
+
+  Repentance, 108, seq., 218, 269
+    social, 275, seq.
+
+  Reverie, 117, 122, seq.
+
+  Richard of St. Victor, 55, 58
+
+  Rolle, Richard, 41, seq., 67
+
+  Rosary, 144
+
+  Russell, Bertrand, 102, 179
+
+  Ruysbroeck, 17, 17, 51, 54, seq., 106, 120, seq., 126, 142, 199, 212,
+  261, 270, 292
+
+
+  Sacrifice, 185
+
+  Sadhu, Sundar, Singh, 68, 130, 209
+
+  Saints, 41, 257
+
+  Salvation, 76, 89, seq.
+
+  Salvation Army, 48, 91, 260, 286
+
+  Semon, R., 179
+
+  Sin, 76, 81, 85, seq., 109, 149, 218
+    corporate, 276
+
+  Sins, Seven Deadly, 93
+
+  Slessor, Mary, 54, seq., 96
+
+  Social reform, 282, seq., 296
+    service, 267, seq.
+
+  Spencer, Herbert, 234
+
+  Spirit of Power, 13, 52, 62, 222, 290
+
+  Spiritual Life
+    in adolescence, 247, seq.
+    characters of, 22, seq., 32, 43, 54, 58, 64, 76, 96, seq.,
+    158, seq., 192, seq., 221, seq., 261, 269, 274, seq., 283, 292, 298
+    contagious, 56, seq., 72, 169, 261, 273, 285, seq., 295
+    corporate, 58, 153, seq., 168, 250, 254, 275, seq., 285, seq.
+    dangers of 99, seq., 263
+    development of, 67, seq., 108, 213, seq.
+    and education, 228, seq.
+    and history, 38, seq., 159, seq., 212
+    and institutions 158, seq.
+    personal, 191, seq., 250, seq., 256, 268, 274
+    and prayer, 204, seq.
+    and, psychology, 76, seq., 195, seq.
+    and reading, 211
+    social, aspect of, 266, seq.
+    and work, 222, 253, 256, 282
+
+  Spiritual Type, 51, 192, seq., 226
+
+  Stigmata, 134
+
+  Streeter, B.H., 47, 130
+
+  Sublimation, 91, 96, seq., 110, 201. 297
+
+  Sufis, 11, 16, 18, 51, 59, 70, 155, 258
+
+  Suggestion, 75, 103, 132, seq., 167
+  and faith, 137
+    laws of, 141, seq.
+    in worship, 148, 173, seq.
+
+  Surrender, 220, 299
+
+  Symbols, 127, seq., 173, seq., 180, seq.
+
+
+  Tagore, Maharerhi Devendranath, 13, 14, 51, 67, 213
+
+  Tansley, C., 272
+
+  Tauler, 257, 282
+
+  Teresa, St, 47, 54, 61, 69, 71, 88, 95, 123, 142, 150, 202, 212, 290
+
+  Theologia, Germanica, 211, 222
+
+  Thérèse de l'Enfant, Jésus, Vénérable, 137, 148
+
+  Thomas à Kempis, 48, 83, 128, 139, 198, 212
+
+  Trinity, Doctrine of, 14
+
+  Trotter, W.F., 168
+
+
+  Unamuno, Don M. de, 10, 85
+
+  Unification, 98, seq., 110, 195, 198, 221, 227, 278
+
+  Union with God, 67, 72, 204, 291, 299
+
+  Upton, T., 10
+
+
+  Varendonck, J., 117
+
+  Vincent de Paul, St. 55
+
+  Virtues, Evangelical, 94
+
+  Visions, 129, seq.
+
+  Vocation, 220, 225, 294, 300
+
+
+  Wesley, John, 53, 55, 62, 71, 210, 270
+
+  Work, 222, 253, 282
+
+  Worship, 175, 255, 260
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day, by Evelyn Underhill
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day, by Evelyn Underhill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+Title: The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
+
+Author: Evelyn Underhill
+
+Release Date: February 16, 2005 [EBook #15082]
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT ***
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+</pre>
+
+
+<h1><a name="Page_-11" id="Page_-11" />THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</h1>
+
+<h3>AND</h3>
+
+<h1>THE LIFE OF TO-DAY</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>EVELYN UNDERHILL</h2>
+
+<p class="center">Author of &quot;MYSTICISM,&quot; &quot;THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM,&quot; etc.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><br /><br />NEW YORK</p>
+
+<p class="center">E.P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY</p>
+
+<p class="center">681 FIFTH AVENUE</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_-10" id="Page_-10" />Copyright, 1922.</p>
+
+<p class="center">BY E.P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>All rights reserved</i>
+</p>
+
+<h4><a name="Page_-9" id="Page_-9" />IN MEMORIAM</h4>
+
+<h4>E.R.B.</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE" /><a name="Page_-8" id="Page_-8" /><a name="Page_-7" id="Page_-7" />PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>This book owes its origin to the fact that in the autumn of 1921 the
+authorities of Manchester College, Oxford invited me to deliver the
+inaugural course of a lectureship in religion newly established under
+the will of the late Professor Upton. No conditions being attached to
+this appointment, it seemed a suitable opportunity to discuss, so far as
+possible in the language of the moment, some of the implicits which I
+believe to underlie human effort and achievement in the domain of the
+spiritual life. The material gathered for this purpose has now been
+added to, revised, and to some extent re-written, in order to make it
+appropriate to the purposes of the reader rather than the hearer. As the
+object of the book is strictly practical, a special attempt has been
+made to bring the classic experiences of the spiritual life into line
+with the conclusions of modern psychology, and in particular, to suggest
+some of the directions in which recent psychological research may cast
+light on the standard problems of the religious consciousness. This
+subject is still in its infancy; but it is destined, I am sure, in the
+near future to exercise a transforming influence on the study of
+spiritual experience, and may even prove to be the starting point of a
+new apologetic. Those who are <a name="Page_-6" id="Page_-6" />inclined either to fear or to resent the
+application to this experience of those laws which&mdash;as we are now
+gradually discovering&mdash;govern the rest of our psychic life, or who are
+offended by the resulting demonstrations of continuity between our most
+homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to
+themselves the plain words of Thomas &agrave; Kempis: &quot;Thou art a man and not
+God, thou art flesh and no angel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity but the normal
+life of the Spirit, as it may be and is lived in the here-and-now, I
+have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in
+the ordinary terms of present day thought, and with little or no use of
+the technical language of mysticism. For the same reason, no attention
+has been given to those abnormal experiences and states of
+consciousness, which, too often regarded as specially &quot;mystical,&quot; are
+now recognized by all competent students as representing the unfortunate
+accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirituality. Readers of
+these pages will find nothing about trances, Ecstasies and other rare
+psychic phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and sometimes only
+disease. For information on these matters they must go to larger and
+more technical works. My aim here is the more general one, of indicating
+first the characteristic experiences&mdash;discoverable within all great
+religions&mdash;which justify or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and
+the way in which these experiences may be accommodated <a name="Page_-5" id="Page_-5" />to the
+world-view of the modern man: and next, the nature of that spiritual
+life as it appears in human history. The succeeding sections of the book
+treat in some detail the light cast on spiritual problems by mental
+analysis&mdash;a process which need not necessarily be conducted from the
+standpoint of a degraded materialism&mdash;and by recent work on the
+psychology of autistic thought and of suggestion. These investigations
+have a practical interest for every man who desires to be the &quot;captain
+of his soul.&quot; The relation in which institutional religion does or
+should stand to the spiritual life is also in part a matter for
+psychology; which is here called upon to deal with the religious aspect
+of the social instincts, and the problems surrounding symbols and cults.
+These chapters lead up to a discussion of the personal aspect of the
+spiritual life, its curve of growth, characters and activities; and a
+further section suggests some ways in which educationists might promote
+the up springing of this life in the young. Finally, the last chapter
+attempts to place the fact of the life of the Spirit in its relation to
+the social order, and to indicate some of the results which might follow
+upon its healthy corporate development. It is superfluous to point out
+that each of these subjects needs, at least, a volume to itself: and to
+some of them I shall hope to return in the future. Their treatment in
+the present work is necessarily fragmentary and suggestive; and is
+intended rather to stimulate thought, than to offer solutions.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_-4" id="Page_-4" />Part of <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Chapter IV</a> has already appeared in &quot;The Fortnightly Review&quot;
+under the title &quot;Suggestion and Religious Experience.&quot; <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">Chapter VIII</a>
+incorporates several passages from an article on &quot;Sources of Power in
+Human Life&quot; originally contributed to the &quot;Hubert Journal.&quot; These are
+reprinted by kind permission of the editors concerned. My numerous debts
+to previous writers are obvious, and for the most part are acknowledged
+in the footnotes; the greatest, to the works of Baron Von Hugely, will
+be clear to all students of his writings. Thanks are also due to my old
+friend William Scott Palmer, who read part of the manuscript and gave me
+much generous and valuable advice. It is a pleasure to express in this
+place my warm gratitude first to the Principal and authorities of
+Manchester College, who gave me the opportunity of delivering these
+chapters in their original form, and whose unfailing sympathy and
+kindness so greatly helped me: and secondly, to the members of the
+Oxford Faculty of Theology, to whom I owe the great Honor of being the
+first woman lecturer in religion to appear in the University list.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">E.U.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Epiphany</i>, 1922.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS" /><a name="Page_-3" id="Page_-3" />CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class="centered"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="7" summary="Table of Contents">
+
+<tr><th align='right'>&nbsp;</th><th align='right'>&nbsp;</th><th align='left'>&nbsp;</th><th align='right'><span class="smcap">Page</span></th></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'><br /></td><td align='right'><br /></td><td align='left'>
+<span class="smcap"><a href="#PREFACE">PREFACE</a></span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_-8">vii</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_38">38</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:<br />(I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:<br />(II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_112">112</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_228">228</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><span class="smcap">Chapter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII</a></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"> THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><br /></td><td align='right'><br /></td><td align='left'>
+<span class="smcap"><a href="#PRINCIPAL_WORKS_USED_OR_CITED">PRINCIPAL WORKS USED AND CITED</a></span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><br /></td><td align='right'><br /></td><td align='left'>
+<span class="smcap"><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_307">307</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan='4'></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_LIFE_OF_THE_SPIRIT" id="THE_LIFE_OF_THE_SPIRIT" /><a name="Page_-2" id="Page_-2" /><a name="Page_-1" id="Page_-1" />THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</h2>
+
+<h3>AND</h3>
+
+<h2>THE LIFE OF TO-DAY</h2>
+
+<p><a name="Page_0" id="Page_0" />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Initio tu, Domine, terram fundasti; et opera manuum tuarum sunt caeli.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanes; et omnes sicut vestimentum veterascent.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Et sicut opertorium mutabis eos, et mutabuntur;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Filii servorum tuorum habitabunt; et semen eorum in seculum dirigetur.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16.5em;">&mdash;Psalm cii: 25-28</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I" /><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1" />CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE</p>
+
+
+<p>This book has been called &quot;The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day&quot; in order to emphasize as much as possible the practical,
+here-and-now nature of its subject; and specially to combat the idea
+that the spiritual life&mdash;or the mystic life, as its more intense
+manifestations are sometimes called&mdash;is to be regarded as primarily a
+matter of history. It is not. It is a matter of biology. Though we
+cannot disregard history in our study of it, that history will only be
+valuable to us in so far as we keep tight hold on its direct connection
+with the present, its immediate bearing on our own lives: and this we
+shall do only in so far as we realize the unity of all the higher
+experiences of the race. In fact, were I called upon to choose a motto
+which should express the central notion of these chapters, that motto
+would be&mdash;&quot;There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.&quot; This
+declaration I would in<a name="Page_2" id="Page_2" />terpret in the widest possible sense; as
+suggesting the underlying harmony and single inspiration of all man's
+various and apparently conflicting expressions of his instinct for
+fullness of life. For we shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful
+sense, of the tangle of material which is before us, until we have
+subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one transcendent Object towards
+which all our twisting pathways run, and one impulsion pressing us
+towards it.</p>
+
+<p>As psychology is now teaching us to find, at all levels of our craving,
+dreaming, or thinking, the diverse expressions of one psychic energy; so
+that type of philosophy which comes nearest to the religion of the
+Spirit, invites us to find at all levels of life the workings and
+strivings of one Power: &quot;a Reality which both underlies and crowns all
+our other, lesser strivings.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1" /><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Variously manifested in partial
+achievements of order and goodness, in diversities of beauty, and in our
+graded apprehensions of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us
+in the transcendent values of holiness and love. The more deeply it is
+loved by man, the nearer he draws to its heart: and the greater his
+love, the more fully does he experience its transforming and energizing
+power. The words of Plotinus are still true for every one of us, and are
+unaffected by the presence or absence of creed:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<a name="Page_3" id="Page_3" />Yonder is the true object of our love, which it is possible to grasp
+and to live with and truly to possess, since no envelope of flesh
+separates us from it. He who has seen it knows what I say, that the soul
+then has another life, when it comes to God, and having come possesses
+Him, and knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the
+dispenser of true life and that it needs nothing further.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2" /><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>So, if we would achieve anything like a real integration of life&mdash;and
+until we have done so, we are bound to be restless and uncertain in our
+touch upon experience&mdash;we are compelled to press back towards contact
+with this living Reality, however conceived by us. And this not by way
+of a retreat from our actual physical and mental life, but by way of a
+fulfilment of it.</p>
+
+<p>More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the
+searching question of the disciple in Boehme's Dialogue on the
+Supersensual Life: &quot;Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature
+into the supersensual ground, without destroying nature?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3" /><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> And such a
+coming through into the ground, such a finding and feeling of Eternal
+Life, is I take it the central business of religion. For religion is
+committed to achieving a synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting,
+of nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to a greater
+reality, because a greater participation in <a name="Page_4" id="Page_4" />eternity. Such a
+participation in eternity, manifested in the time-world, is the very
+essence of the spiritual life: but, set as we are in mutability, our
+apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative. Absolutes are
+known only to absolute mind; our measurements, however careful and
+intricate, can never tally with the measurements of God. As Einstein
+conceives of space curved round the sun we, borrowing his symbolism for
+a moment, may perhaps think of the world of Spirit as curved round the
+human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, and therefore presenting
+to us innumerable angles of approach. This means that God can and must
+be sought only within and through our human experience. &quot;Where,&quot; says
+Jacob Boehme, &quot;will you seek for God? Seek Him in your soul, which has
+proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living fountain of forces
+wherein the Divine working stands.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4" /><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>
+
+<p>But, on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for
+agnosticism. For this our human experience in its humbling imperfection,
+however we interpret it, is as real within its own system of reference
+as anything else. It is our inevitably limited way of laying hold on the
+stuff of existence: and not less real for that than the monkeys' way on
+one hand, or the angels' way on the other. Only we must be sure that we
+do it as thoroughly and completely as we can; disdaining the indolence
+<a name="Page_5" id="Page_5" />which so easily relapses to the lower level and the smaller world.</p>
+
+<p>And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call
+the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all
+times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which
+is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or
+rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of
+fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some
+form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and
+also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience,
+whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as
+effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most
+readily understand and respond to it.</p>
+
+
+<p>Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of
+analysis, can only say: &quot;The soul knows when in that state that it is in
+the presence of the dispenser of true life.&quot; Yet in saying this, does he
+not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful
+longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of
+Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying &quot;More than all
+else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless
+life in this world,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5" /><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> assures us in these words that he too has known
+that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious
+experience, in so far <a name="Page_6" id="Page_6" />as &quot;pure&quot; experience is possible to us; which is
+only of course in a limited and relative sense. The subjective element,
+all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and
+control it. Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an
+independent objective Reality. This experience is more real and
+concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which
+theology seeks to explain it. We may then take it, without prejudice to
+any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is <i>one
+life</i>; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the
+diversity of gifts and graces which men have been willing to call true,
+holy, beautiful and good. For the moment at least we may accept the
+definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as &quot;oneness with the Supreme
+Good in every facet of the heart and will.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6" /><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> And since without
+derogation of its transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and worth,
+it is in human experience rather than in speculation that we are bound
+to seek it, we shall look first at the forms taken by man's intuition of
+Eternity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next at the actual
+appearance of this life in history. Then at the psychological machinery
+by which we may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious
+institutions make to its realization; and last, turning our backs on
+these partial explorations of the living Whole, seek if we can to seize
+something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way <a name="Page_7" id="Page_7" />in
+which education may best prepare its fulfilment, and the part it must
+play in the social group.</p>
+
+<p>We begin therefore at the starting point of this life of Spirit: in
+man's vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and
+transcendent reality&mdash;his instinct for God. The characteristic forms
+taken by this instinct are simple and fairly well known. Complication
+only comes in with the interpretation we put on them.</p>
+
+<p>By three main ways we tend to realize our limited personal relations
+with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real; and
+these, appearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, might
+be illustrated from all places and all times.</p>
+
+<p>First, there is the profound sense of security: of being safely held in
+a cosmos of which, despite all contrary appearance, peace is the very
+heart, and which is not inimical to our true interests. For those whose
+religious experience takes this form, God is the Ground of the soul, the
+Unmoved, our Very Rest; statements which meet us again and again in
+spiritual literature. This certitude of a principle of permanence within
+and beyond our world of change&mdash;the sense of Eternal Life&mdash;lies at the
+very centre of the religious consciousness; which will never on this
+point capitulate to the attacks of philosophy on the one hand (such as
+those of the New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, assuring
+him that what he mistakes for the Eternal World is really his own
+unconscious mind. Here <a name="Page_8" id="Page_8" />man, at least in his great representatives&mdash;the
+persons of transcendent religious genius&mdash;seems to get beyond all
+labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that
+satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that
+transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art.
+If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever
+its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived,
+as George Fox was so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know
+the great passage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes
+how &quot;the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never
+changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7" /><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> There is
+nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend
+on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as
+fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine
+and discipline of Christian prayer have always admitted its validity.</p>
+
+<p>Here and in many other examples which might be quoted, the spiritual
+fact is interpreted in a non-personal and cosmic way; and we must
+remember that what is described to us is always, inevitably, the more or
+less emotional interpretation, never the pure immediacy of experience.
+This interpretation frequently makes use of the symbolisms of space,
+stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is &quot;lost <a name="Page_9" id="Page_9" />in the ocean of
+the Godhead,&quot; &quot;enters His silence&quot; or exclaims with Dante:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">&quot;la mia vista, venendo sincera,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">e pi&ugrave; e pi&ugrave; entrava per lo raggio<br /></span>
+<span>dell' alta luce, che da s&egrave; &egrave; vera.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8" /><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the
+relationship is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of
+a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the
+great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while
+doubtless including in its span all the values we associate with
+personality, must far overpass it: and this conclusion has been reached
+again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians
+we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
+Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of
+finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a
+prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and
+emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to
+God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is
+significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of
+rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus
+we have on <a name="Page_10" id="Page_10" />the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox
+Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
+of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
+leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself
+suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself
+at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in
+choosing one I should be renouncing all the others&mdash;for there is no
+turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique
+moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious,
+sovereign and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens
+out the way of the Lord.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9" /><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></p>
+
+<p>Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: &quot;If,&quot; he says, &quot;this Absolute
+Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our
+life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new
+life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite
+infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is
+only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it
+associations too human and too limited adequately to express this
+profound God-consciousness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10" /><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11" />Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those
+moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic
+activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.
+We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their
+philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the
+self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so
+to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an
+&quot;intellectual fountain,&quot; hears the Divine Voice crying:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;<br /></span>
+<span>Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11" /><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12" /><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father
+and ever-present Companion of the soul,<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13" /><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> and Kabir, for whom God is
+the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and
+thee: and how shall such love be extinguished?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14" /><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<p>Christianity, through its concepts of the Divine Fatherhood and of the
+Eternal Christ, has given to this sense of personal communion its
+fullest and most beautiful expression:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12" />
+<span>&quot;Amore, chi t'ama non sta ozioso,<br /></span>
+<span>tanto li par dolce de te gustare,<br /></span>
+<span>ma tutta ora vive desideroso<br /></span>
+<span>como te possa stretto pi&uacute; amare;<br /></span>
+<span>ch&eacute; tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso,<br /></span>
+<span>chi nol sentisse, nol porr&iacute;a parlare<br /></span>
+<span>quanto &eacute; dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15" /><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>On the immense question of <i>what</i> it is that lies behind this sense of
+direct intercourse, this passionate friendship with the Invisible, I
+cannot enter. But it has been one of the strongest and most fruitful
+influences in religious history, and gives in particular its special
+colour to the most perfect developments of Christian mysticism.</p>
+
+<p>Last&mdash;and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially
+to concern us&mdash;Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable
+accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group,
+impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its
+existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh
+levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions
+of the Spirit. &quot;He giveth power to the faint,&quot; says the Second Isaiah,
+&quot;and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that
+wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
+wings as eagles; they shall run and not be <a name="Page_13" id="Page_13" />weary; and they shall walk,
+and not faint.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16" /><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> &quot;I live&mdash;yet not I,&quot; &quot;I can do all things,&quot; says St.
+Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading
+and controlling him: and assures his neophytes that they too have
+received &quot;the Spirit of power.&quot; &quot;My life,&quot; says St. Augustine, &quot;shall be
+a real life, being wholly full of Thee.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17" /><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> &quot;Having found God,&quot; says a
+modern Indian saint, &quot;the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained
+fresh strength.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18" /><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the
+same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and
+endurance.</p>
+
+<p>So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be
+resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The
+cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite
+Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living
+and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The
+dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us.
+These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving
+objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into
+account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual
+life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be
+present in some meas<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14" />ure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine
+says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same
+time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power,<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19" /><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> and her Indian contemporary
+the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that &quot;Seekers after God must realize
+Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without,
+and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20" /><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> And
+it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
+Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
+these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
+us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
+an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
+which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
+part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
+knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
+how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power,
+of beauty which are contained in them.</p>
+
+<p>And if the first type of experience, with the immense feeling of
+assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive
+contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the &quot;world that is
+unwalled,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21" /><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> and from the mind's utter surrender <a name="Page_15" id="Page_15" />and abolition of
+resistances&mdash;if all this seems to lead to a merely static or
+contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of
+experience, with its impulse towards action, its often strongly felt
+accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and
+dynamic interpretation of that life. Indeed, if the first moment in the
+life of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal Life, the second
+moment&mdash;without which the first has little worth for him&mdash;consists of
+his response to that transcendent Reality. Perception of it lays on him
+the obligation of living in its atmosphere, fulfilling its meaning, if
+he can: and this will involve for him a measure of inward
+transformation, a difficult growth and change. Thus the ideas of new
+birth and regeneration have always been, and I think must ever be,
+closely associated with man's discovery of God: and the soul's true path
+seems to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral effort, and
+thence to charity.</p>
+
+<p>Even so did the Oxford Methodists, who began by trying only to worship
+God and <i>be</i> good by adhering to a strict devotional rule, soon find
+themselves impelled to try to <i>do</i> good by active social work.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22" /><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> And
+at his highest development, and in so far as he has appropriated the
+full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should
+find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and
+contemplation. Between the call <a name="Page_16" id="Page_16" />to transcendence, to a simple self-loss
+in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich
+and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a
+fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent
+love, and its felt possession of and duty towards immanent love&mdash;a paradox
+which only some form of incarnational philosophy can solve. It is said
+of Abu Said, the great S&#363;fi, at the full term of his development,
+that he &quot;did all normal things while ever thinking of God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23" /><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> Here, I
+believe, we find the norm of the spiritual life, in such a complete
+response both to the temporal and to the eternal revelations and demands
+of the Divine nature: on the one hand, the highest and most costing
+calls made on us by that world of succession in which we find ourselves;
+on the other, an unmoved abiding in the bosom of eternity, &quot;where was
+never heard quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to
+turne.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24" /><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></p>
+
+<p>There have been many schools and periods in which one half of this dual
+life of man has been unduly emphasized to the detriment of the other.
+Often in the East&mdash;and often too in the first, pre-Benedictine phase of
+Christian monasticism&mdash;there has been an unbalanced cultivation of the
+contemplative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imperfectly
+vitalized a-social type of spirituality. On <a name="Page_17" id="Page_17" />the other hand, in our own
+day the tendency to action usually obliterates the contemplative side of
+experience altogether: and the result is the feverishness, exhaustion
+and uncertainty of aim characteristic of the over-driven and the
+underfed. But no one can be said to live in its fulness the life of the
+Spirit who does not observe a due balance between the two: both
+receiving and giving, both apprehending and expressing, and thus
+achieving that state of which Ruysbroeck said &quot;Then only is our life a
+whole, when work and contemplation dwell in us side by side, and we are
+perfectly in both of them at once.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25" /><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> All Christian writers on the
+life of the Spirit point to the perfect achievement of this two-fold
+ideal in Christ; the pattern of that completed humanity towards which
+the indwelling Spirit is pressing the race. His deeds of power and
+mercy, His richly various responses to every level of human existence,
+His gift to others of new faith and life, were directly dependent on the
+nights spent on the mountain in prayer. When St. Paul entreats us to
+grow up into the fulness of His stature, this is the ideal that is
+implied.</p>
+
+<p>In the intermediate term of the religious experience, that felt
+communion with a Person which is the <i>clou</i> of the devotional life, we
+get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of
+transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of
+contemplation and of action; and also a focus <a name="Page_18" id="Page_18" />for that
+religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual
+growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity
+has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the
+exaggerations to which it has led. Both extremes are richly represented
+in the literature of mysticism. But we should remember that Christianity
+is not alone in thus requiring place to be made for such a conception of
+God as shall give body to all the most precious and fruitful experiences
+of the heart, providing simple human sense and human feeling with
+something on which to lay hold. In India, there is the existence, within
+and alongside the austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of the
+ardent personal Vaishnavite devotion to the heart's Lord, known as
+Bhakti Marga. In Islam, there is the impassioned longing of the S&#363;fis
+for the Beloved, who is &quot;the Rose of all Reason and all Truth.&quot;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;Without Thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest;<br /></span>
+<span>Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon.<br /></span>
+<span>Tho' every hair on my body becomes a tongue<br /></span>
+<span>A thousandth part of the thanks due to Thee I cannot tell.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26" /><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is the sudden note of rapture which startles us in the
+Neoplatonists, as when Plotinus speaks of &quot;the name of love for what is
+there to know&mdash;the passion of the lover testing on the 'bosom of his
+love.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27" /><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> Surely we may accept all these, as the in<a name="Page_19" id="Page_19" />stinctive responses
+of a diversity of spirits to the one eternal Spirit of life and love:
+and recognize that without such personal response, such a discovery of
+imperishable love, a fully lived spiritual life is no more possible than
+is a fully lived physical life from which love has been left out.</p>
+
+<p>When we descend from experience to interpretation, the paradoxical
+character of such a personal sense of intimacy is eased for us, if we
+remember that the religious man's awareness of the indwelling Spirit, or
+of a Divine companionship&mdash;whatever name he gives it&mdash;is just his
+limited realization, achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of a
+universal and not a particular truth. To this realization he brings all
+his human&mdash;more, his sub-human&mdash;feelings and experiences: not only those
+which are vaguely called his spiritual intuitions, but the full weight
+of his impulsive and emotional life. His experience and its
+interpretation are, then, inevitably conditioned by this apperceiving
+mass. And here I think the intellect should show mercy, and not probe
+without remorse into those tender places where the heart and the spirit
+are at one. Let us then be content to note, that when we consult the
+works of those who have best and most fully interpreted their religion
+in a universal sense, we find how careful they are to provide a category
+for this experience of a personally known and loved indwelling
+Divinity&mdash;man's Father, Lover, Saviour, ever-present Companion&mdash;which
+shall avoid its <a name="Page_20" id="Page_20" />identification with the mere spirit of Nature, whilst
+safeguarding its immanence no less than its transcendent quality. Thus,
+Julian of Norwich heard in her meditations the voice of God saying to
+her, &quot;See! I am in all things! See! I lift never mine hand from off my
+works, nor ever shall!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28" /><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> Is it possible to state more plainly the
+indivisible identity of the Spirit of Life? &quot;See! I am in <i>all</i> things!&quot;
+In the terrific energies of the stellar universe, and the smallest song
+of the birds. In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much
+a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the
+more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive. This
+sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and
+transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of
+effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual
+experience, wherever found. It chimes well with the definition of
+Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly spiritual man, though he
+may not be any better morally than his non-religious neighbour, &quot;has a
+confidence in the universe and an inner joy which the other does not
+know&mdash;is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29" /><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p>
+
+<p>If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning
+Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and
+symbols of <a name="Page_21" id="Page_21" />poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order
+to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love. Such a
+divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic
+incarnation, though not limited by it: and it is continued into history
+by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.
+The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest
+and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that
+this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.</p>
+
+<p>Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as
+a genuine and abiding human fact&mdash;a form of life&mdash;independent of the
+dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed. I now
+wish to go on to a second point: this&mdash;that it follows that any complete
+description of human life as we know it, must find room for the
+spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it
+finds expression. This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal
+series, as we might find room for any special human activity or
+aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but
+deep-set in the enduring stuff of man's true life. We must believe that
+the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot <i>in fact</i> be
+broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth with the universe
+as a whole. But the extent in which we find and feel it is the measure
+of the fullness of spiritual life that we enjoy. Organic union <a name="Page_22" id="Page_22" />must be
+lifted to conscious realization: and this to do, is the business of
+religion. In this act of realization each aspect of the psychic
+life&mdash;thought, will and feeling&mdash;must have its part, and from each must
+be evoked a response. Only in so far as such all-round realization and
+response are achieved by us do we live the spiritual life. We do it
+perhaps in some degree, every time that we surrender to pure beauty or
+unselfish devotion; for then all but the most insensitive must be
+conscious of an unearthly touch, and hear the cadence of a heavenly
+melody. In these partial experiences something, as it were, of the
+richness of Reality overflows and is experienced by us. But it is in the
+wholeness of response characteristic of religion&mdash;that uncalculated
+response to stimulus which is the mark of the instinctive life&mdash;that
+this Realty of love and power is most truly found and felt by us. In
+this generous and heart-searching surrender of religion, rightly made,
+the self achieves inner harmony, and finds a satisfying objective for
+all its cravings and energies. It then finds its life, and the
+possibilities before it, to be far greater than it knew.</p>
+
+<p>We need not claim that those men and women who have most fully realized,
+and so at first hand have described to us, this life of the Spirit, have
+neither discerned or communicated the ultimate truth of things; nor need
+we claim that the symbols they use have intrinsic value, beyond the
+poetic power of suggesting to us the quality and wonder of their
+<a name="Page_23" id="Page_23" />transfigured lives. Still less must we claim this discovery as the
+monopoly of any one system of religion. But we can and ought to claim,
+that no system shall be held satisfactory which does not find a place
+for it: and that only in so far as we at least apprehend and respond to
+the world's spiritual aspect, do we approach the full stature of
+humanity. Psychologists at present are much concerned to entreat us to
+&quot;face reality,&quot; discarding idealism along with the other phantasies that
+haunt the race. Yet this facing of reality can hardly be complete if we
+do not face the facts of the spiritual life. Certainly we shall find it
+most difficult to interpret these facts; they are confused, and more
+than one reading of them is possible. But still we cannot leave them out
+and claim to have &quot;faced reality.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>H&ouml;ffding goes so far as to say that any real religion implies and must
+give us a world-view.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30" /><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> And I think it is true that any vividly lived
+spiritual life must, as soon as it passes beyond the level of mere
+feeling and involves reflection, involve too some more or less
+articulated conception of the spiritual universe, in harmony with which
+that life is to be lived. This may be given to us by authority, in the
+form of creed: but if we do not thus receive it, we are committed to the
+building of our own City of God. And to-day, that world-view, that
+spiritual landscape, must harmonize&mdash;if it is needed to help our
+living&mdash;with the outlook, the cosmic map, <a name="Page_24" id="Page_24" />of the ordinary man. If it be
+adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless
+conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving world of
+biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical
+relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy&mdash;these great
+constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind,
+must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view
+which centres on the God known in religious experience. They are true
+within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis
+wide enough to contain them.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional
+type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which
+devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an
+explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to
+live. But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of
+modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the
+explorations of history and of psychology. Even contrasted with our
+every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in
+a wilderness. Whilst we are inside everything seems all right.</p>
+
+<p>Beauty and fragrance surround us. But emerging from its doors, we find
+ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of
+reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we possess has got to
+accommodate itself to the conditions in which they live. If the claim of
+religion be <a name="Page_25" id="Page_25" />true at all, it is plain that the conservatory-type of
+spiritual world is inconsistent with it. Imperfect though any conception
+we frame of the universe must be&mdash;and here we may keep in mind Samuel
+Butler's warning that &quot;there is no such source of error as the pursuit
+of absolute truth&quot;&mdash;still, a view which is controlled by the religious
+factor ought to be, so to speak, a hill-top view. Lifting us up to
+higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. Hence, the wider
+the span of experience which we are able to bring within our system, the
+more valid its claim becomes: and the setting apart of spiritual
+experience in a special compartment, the keeping of it under glass, is
+daily becoming less possible. That experience is life in its fullness,
+or nothing at all. Therefore it must come out into the open, and must
+witness to its own most sacred conviction; that the universe as a whole
+is a religious fact, and man is not living completely until he is living
+in a world religiously conceived.</p>
+
+<p>More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading
+of existence. The revolt from the last century's materialism is almost
+complete. In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and
+feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and
+realization the meaning, and perhaps&mdash;if we may dare to use such a
+word&mdash;the purpose of life. It suggests&mdash;and here, more and more,
+psychology supports it&mdash;that, real and alive as we are in relation to
+this system <a name="Page_26" id="Page_26" />with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet we are
+not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to be. The characters of
+our psychic life point us on and up to other levels. Already we perceive
+that man's universe is no fixed order; and that the many ways in which
+he is able to apprehend it are earnests of a greater transfiguration, a
+more profound contact with reality yet possible to him. Higher forms of
+realization, a wider span of experience, a sharpening of our vague,
+uncertain consciousness of value&mdash;these may well be before us. We have
+to remember how dim, tentative, half-understood a great deal of our
+so-called &quot;normal&quot; experience is: how narrow the little field of
+consciousness, how small the number of impressions it picks up from the
+rich flux of existence, how subjective the picture it constructs from
+them. To take only one obvious example, artists and poets have given us
+plenty of hints that a real beauty and significance which we seldom
+notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us to contradict the statement
+of religion that God is standing there too.</p>
+
+<p>That thought which inspires the last chapters of Professor 'Alexander's
+&quot;Space, Time, and Deity,&quot; that the universe as a whole has a tendency
+towards deity, does at least seem true of the fully awakened human
+consciousness.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31" /><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> Though St. Thomas Aquinas may not have covered all
+the facts when he called man a contemplative animal,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32" /><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> he came <a name="Page_27" id="Page_27" />nearer
+the mark than more modern anthropologists. Man has an ineradicable
+impulse to transcendence, though sometimes&mdash;as we may admit&mdash;it is
+expressed in strange ways: and no psychology which fails to take account
+of it can be accepted by us as complete. He has a craving which nothing
+in his material surroundings seems adequate either to awaken or to
+satisfy; a deep conviction that some larger synthesis of experience is
+possible to him. The sense that we are not yet full grown has always
+haunted the race. &quot;I am the Food of the full-grown. <i>Grow,</i> and thou
+shalt feed on Me!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33" /><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> said the voice of supreme Reality to St.
+Augustine. Here we seem to lay our finger on the distinguishing mark of
+humanity: that in man the titanic craving for a fuller life and love
+which is characteristic of all living things, has a teleological
+objective. He alone guesses that he may or should be something other;
+yet cannot guess what he may be. And from this vague sense of being <i>in
+via,</i> the restlessness and discord of his nature proceed. In him, the
+onward thrust of the world of becoming achieves self-consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>The best individuals and communities of each age have felt this craving
+and conviction; and obeyed, in a greater or less degree, its persistent
+onward push. &quot;The seed of the new birth,&quot; says William Law, &quot;is not a
+notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting, a magnetic
+desire.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34" /><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> Over and <a name="Page_28" id="Page_28" />over again, rituals have dramatized this, desire
+and saints have surrendered to it. The history of religion and
+philosophy is really the history of the profound human belief that we
+have faculties capable of responding to orders of truth which, did we
+apprehend them, would change the whole character of our universe;
+showing us reality from another angle, lit by another light. And time
+after time too&mdash;as we shall see, when we come to consider the testimony
+of history&mdash;favourable variations have arisen within the race and proved
+in their own persons that this claim is true. Often at the cost of great
+pain, sacrifice, and inward conflict they have broken their attachments
+to the narrow world of the senses: and this act of detachment has been
+repaid by a new, more lucid vision, and a mighty inflow of power. The
+principle of degrees assures us that such changed levels of
+consciousness and angles of approach may well involve introduction into
+a universe of new relations, which we are not competent to
+criticize.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35" /><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> This is a truth which should make us humble in our
+efforts to understand the difficult and too often paradoxical utterances
+of religious genius. It suggests the puzzlings of philosophers and
+theologians&mdash;and, I may add, of psychologists too&mdash;over experiences
+which they have not shared, are not of great authority for those whose
+object is to find the secret of the Spirit, and make it useful for life.
+Here, the only witnesses we can receive are, on the one part, the
+first-hand <a name="Page_29" id="Page_29" />witnesses of experience, and on the other part, our own
+profound instinct that these are telling us news of our native land.</p>
+
+<p>Baron von H&uuml;gel has finely said, that the facts of this spiritual life
+are themselves the earnests of its objective. These facts cannot be
+explained merely as man's share in the cosmic movement towards a yet
+unrealized perfection; such as the unachieved and self-evolving Divinity
+of some realist philosophers. &quot;For we have no other instance of an
+unrealized perfection producing such pain and joy, such volitions, such
+endlessly varied and real results; and all by means of just this vivid
+and persistent impression that this Becoming is an already realized
+Perfection.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36" /><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> Therefore though the irresistible urge and the effort
+forward, experienced on highest levels of love and service, are plainly
+one-half of the life of the Spirit&mdash;which can never be consistent with a
+pious indolence, an acceptance of things as they are, either in the
+social or the individual life&mdash;yet, the other half, and the very
+inspiration of that striving, is this certitude of an untarnishable
+Perfection, a great goal really there; a living God Who draws all
+spirits to Himself. &quot;Our quest,&quot; said Plotinus, &quot;is of an End, not of
+ends: for that only can be chosen by us which is ultimate and noblest,
+that which calls forth the tenderest longings of our soul.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37" /><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30" />There is of course a sense in which such a life of the Spirit is the
+same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Even if we consider it in relation
+to historical time, the span within which it has appeared is so short,
+compared with the ages of human evolution, that we may as well regard it
+as still in the stage of undifferentiated infancy. Yet even babies
+change, and change quickly, in their relations with the external world.
+And though the universe with which man's childish spirit is in contact
+be a world of enduring values; yet, placed as we are in the stream of
+succession, part of the stuff of a changing world and linked at every
+point with it, our apprehensions of this life of spirit, the symbols we
+use to describe it&mdash;and we must use symbols&mdash;must inevitably change too.
+Therefore from time to time some restatement becomes imperative, if
+actuality is not to be lost. Whatever God meant man to do or to be, the
+whole universe assures us that He did not mean him to stand still. Such
+a restatement, then, may reasonably be called a truly religious work;
+and I believe that it is indeed one of the chief works to which religion
+must find itself committed in the near future. Hence my main object In
+this book is to recommend the consideration of this enduring fact of the
+life of the Spirit and what it can mean to us, from various points of
+view; thus helping to prepare the ground for that synthesis which we may
+not yet be able to achieve, but towards which we ought to look. It is
+from <a name="Page_31" id="Page_31" />this stand-point, and with this object of examining what we have,
+of sorting out if we can the permanent from the transitory, of noticing
+lacks and bridging cleavages, that we shall consider in turn the
+testimony of history, the position in respect of psychology, and the
+institutional personal and social aspects of the spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>In such a restatement, such a reference back to actual man, here at the
+present day as we have him&mdash;such a demand for a spiritual interpretation
+of the universe, which will allow us to fit in all his many-levelled
+experiences&mdash;I believe we have the way of approach to which religion
+to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that
+museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which&mdash;agreeable as it
+may be to the historic or &aelig;sthetic sense&mdash;makes it so unreal to our
+workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the
+tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is
+already a marked character of contemporary thought.</p>
+
+<p>And note that, working on this basis, we need not in order to find room
+for the facts commit ourselves to the harsh dualism, the opposition
+between nature and spirit, which is characteristic of some earlier forms
+of Christian thought. In this dualism, too, we find simply an effort to
+describe felt experience. It is an expression of the fact, so strongly
+and deeply felt by the richest natures, that there <i>is</i> an utter
+difference in kind between the natural life of <a name="Page_32" id="Page_32" />use and wont, as most of
+us live it, and the life that is dominated by the spiritual
+consciousness. The change is indeed so great, the transfiguration so
+complete, that they seize on the strongest language in which to state
+it. And in the good old human way, referring their own feelings to the
+universe, they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds of matter
+and of spirit, of nature and of grace. But those who have most deeply
+reflected, have perceived that the change effected is not a change of
+worlds. It is rather such a change of temper and attitude as will
+disclose within our one world, here and now, the one Spirit in the
+diversity of His gifts; the one Love, in homeliest incidents as well as
+noblest vision, laying its obligations on the soul; and so the true
+nature and full possibilities of this our present life.</p>
+
+<p>Although it is true that we must register our profound sense of the
+transcendental character of this spirit-life, its otherness from mere
+nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature
+receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more
+naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language
+of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this
+perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it.
+And whatever its special, language and personal colour be&mdash;for all our
+news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual men, and
+arrives tinc<a name="Page_33" id="Page_33" />tured by their feelings and beliefs&mdash;in the end it does
+this by disclosing us to ourselves as spirits growing up, though
+unevenly and hampered by our past, through the physical order into
+completeness of response to a universe that is itself a spiritual fact.
+&quot;Heaven,&quot; said Jacob Boehme, &quot;is nothing else but a manifestation of the
+Eternal One, wherein all worketh and willeth in quiet love.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38" /><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> Such a
+manifestation of Spirit must clearly be made through humanity, at least
+so far as our own order is concerned: by our redirection and full use of
+that spirit of life which energizes us, and which, emerging from the
+more primitive levels of organic creation, is ours to carry on and
+up&mdash;either to new self-satisfactions, or to new consecrations.</p>
+
+<p>It is hardly worth while to insist that the need for such a redirection
+has never been more strongly felt than at the present day. There is
+indeed no period in which history exhibits mankind as at once more
+active, more feverishly self-conscious, and more distracted, than is our
+own bewildered generation; nor any which stood in greater need of
+Blake's exhortation: &quot;Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage
+himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit
+for the Building up of Jerusalem.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39" /><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a></p>
+
+<p>How many people do each of us know who work and will in quiet love, and
+thus participate in eternal life?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34" />Consider the weight of each of these words. The energy, the clear
+purpose, the deep calm, the warm charity they imply. Willed work; not
+grudging toil. Quiet love, not feverish emotionalism. Each term is quite
+plain and human, and each has equal importance as an attribute of
+heavenly life. How many politicians&mdash;the people to whom we have confided
+the control of our national existence&mdash;work and will in quiet love? What
+about industry? Do the masters, or the workers, work and will in quiet
+love? that is to say with diligence and faithful purpose, without
+selfish anxiety, without selfish demands and hostilities? What about the
+hurried, ugly and devitalizing existence of our big towns? Can we
+honestly say that young people reared in them are likely to acquire this
+temper of heaven? Yet we have been given the secret, the law of
+spiritual life; and psychologists would agree that it represents too the
+most favourable of conditions for a full psychic life, the state in
+which we have access to all our sources of power.</p>
+
+<p>But man will not achieve this state unless he dwells on the idea of it;
+and, dwelling on that idea, opening his mind to its suggestions, brings
+its modes of expression into harmony with his thought about the world of
+daily life. Our spiritual life to-day, such as it is, tends above all to
+express itself in social activities. Teacher after teacher comes forward
+to plume himself on the fact that Christianity is now <a name="Page_35" id="Page_35" />taking a &quot;social
+form&quot;; that love of our neighbour is not so much the corollary as the
+equivalent of the love of God, and so forth. Here I am sure that all can
+supply themselves with illustrative quotations. Yet is there in this
+state of things nothing but food for congratulation? Is such a view
+complete? Is nothing left out? Have we not lost the wonder and poetry of
+the forest in our diligent cultivation of the economically valuable
+trees; and shall we ever see life truly until we see it with the poet's
+eyes? There is so much meritorious working and willing; and so little
+time left for quiet love. A spiritual fussiness&mdash;often a material
+fussiness too&mdash;seems to be taking the place of that inward resort to the
+fontal sources of our being which is the true religious act, our chance
+of contact with the Spirit. This compensating beat of the fully lived
+human life, that whole side of existence resumed in the word
+contemplation, has been left out. &quot;All the artillery of the world,&quot; said
+John Everard, &quot;were they all discharged together at one clap, could not
+more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamourings of desires in the
+soul deaf its ears, so you see a man must go into the silence, or else
+he cannot hear God speak.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40" /><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> And until we remodel our current
+conception of the Christian life in such a sense as to give that silence
+and its revelation their full value, I do not think that we can hope to
+exhibit the triumphing power of the Spirit in human character and human
+<a name="Page_36" id="Page_36" />society. Our whole notion of life at present is such as to set up
+resistances to its inflow. Yet the inner mood, the consciousness, which
+makes of the self its channel, are accessible to all, if we would but
+believe this and act on our belief. &quot;Worship,&quot; said William Penn, &quot;is
+the supreme act of a man's life.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41" /><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> And what is worship but a
+reach-out of the finite spirit towards Infinite Life? Here thought must
+mend the breach which thought has made: for the root of our trouble
+consists in the fact that there is a fracture in our conception of God
+and of our relation with Him. We do not perceive the &quot;hidden unity in
+the Eternal Being&quot;; the single nature and purpose of that Spirit which
+brought life forth, and shall lead it to full realization.</p>
+
+<p>Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our view, in rushing
+round the sun; but perhaps found from another angle to fill quite
+another part in the cosmic scheme. And on this apparently unimportant
+speck, wandering among systems of suns, the appearance of life and its
+slow development and ever-increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain
+and of pleasure; and presently man with his growing capacity for
+self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, for rapture and for grief. Love
+with its unearthly happiness, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain;
+all the ecstasy, all the anguish that we extract from the rhythm of life
+and death. It is much, really, for one little planet to bring to birth.
+And presently <a name="Page_37" id="Page_37" />another music, which some&mdash;not many perhaps yet, in
+comparison with its population&mdash;are able to hear. The music of a more
+inward life, a sort of fugue in which the eternal and temporal are
+mingled; and here and there some, already, who respond to it. Those who
+hear it would not all agree as to the nature of the melody; but all
+would agree that it is something different in kind from the rhythm of
+life and death. And in their surrender to this&mdash;to which, as they feel
+sure, the physical order too is really keeping time&mdash;they taste a larger
+life; more universal, more divine. As Plotinus said, they are looking at
+the Conductor in the midst; and, keeping time with Him, find the
+fulfilment both of their striving and of their peace.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1" /><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Von H&uuml;gel: &quot;Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of
+Religion,&quot; p. 60.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2" /><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Ennead I, 6. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3" /><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Jacob Boehme: &quot;The Way to Christ,&quot; Pt. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4" /><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Op. cit., loc. cit.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5" /><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> &quot;One Hundred Poems of Kabir,&quot; p. 31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6" /><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Bernard Bosanquet: &quot;What Religion Is&quot; p. 32.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7" /><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Aug.: Conf. VII, 27.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8" /><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> &quot;My vision, becoming more purified, entered deeper and
+deeper into the ray of that Supernal Light, which in itself is
+true&quot;&mdash;Par. XXXIII, 52.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9" /><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> &quot;The Tragic Sense of Life In Men and Peoples,&quot; p. 194.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10" /><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> T. Upton: &quot;The Bases of Religious Belief,&quot; p. 363.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11" /><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Blake: &quot;Jerusalem,&quot; Cap. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12" /><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Nicholson: &quot;The Div&atilde;ni Shamsi Tabriz,&quot; p. 141.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13" /><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Ennead V. i. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14" /><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Kabir, op. cit., p. 41.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15" /><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> &quot;Love, whoso loves thee cannot idle be, so sweet to him to
+taste thee; but every hour he lives in longing that he may love thee
+more straitly. For in thee the heart so joyful dwells, that he who feels
+it not can never say how sweet it is to taste thy savour&quot;&mdash;Jacopone da
+Todi: Lauda 101.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16" /><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> Isaiah xl, 29-31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17" /><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Aug.: Conf. X, 28.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18" /><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> &quot;Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore,&quot; Cap.
+12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19" /><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> &quot;Le Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine,&quot; p. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20" /><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> &quot;Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore,&quot; Cap.
+20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21" /><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> Ruysbroeck: &quot;The Book of the XII B&eacute;guines;&quot; Cap. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22" /><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> Overton: &quot;Life of Wesley.&quot; Cap. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23" /><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> R.A. Nicholson: &quot;Studies In Islamic Mysticism,&quot; Cap. I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24" /><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> &quot;Donne's Sermons,&quot; edited by L. Pearsall Smith, p. 236.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25" /><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Ruysbroeck, &quot;The Sparkling Stone,&quot; Cap. 14.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26" /><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Bishr-i-Yasin, cf. Nicholson, op. cit., loc. cit.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27" /><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> Ennead VI. 9. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28" /><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> &quot;Revelations of Divine Love,&quot; Cap. II.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29" /><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Pratt: &quot;The Religious Consciousness,&quot; Cap. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30" /><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> H&ouml;ffding: &quot;Philosophy of Religion,&quot; Pt. II, A</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31" /><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Op. cit., Bk. 4, Cap. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32" /><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> &quot;Summa contra Gentiles,&quot; L. III. Cap. 37.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33" /><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> Aug: Conf. VII, 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34" /><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> &quot;The Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law,&quot; p.
+154.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35" /><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> Cf. Haldane, &quot;The Reign of Relativity,&quot; Cap. VI.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36" /><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> Von H&uuml;gel: &quot;Eternal Life,&quot; p. 385.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37" /><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> Ennead I. 4. 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38" /><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Boehme: &quot;The Way to Christ,&quot; Pt. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39" /><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> Blake: &quot;Jerusalem&quot;: To the Christians.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40" /><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> &quot;Some Gospel Treasures Opened,&quot; p. 600.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41" /><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> William Penn, &quot;No Cross, No Crown.&quot;</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II" /><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38" />CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</p>
+
+
+<p>We have already agreed that, if we wish to grasp the real character of
+spiritual life, we must avoid the temptation to look at it as merely a
+historical subject. If it is what it claims to be, it is a form of
+eternal life, as constant, as accessible to us here and now, as in any
+so-called age of faith: therefore of actual and present importance, or
+else nothing at all. This is why I think that the approach to it through
+philosophy and psychology is so much to be preferred to the approach
+through pure history. Yet there is a sense in which we must not neglect
+such history; for here, if we try to enter by sympathy into the past, we
+can see the life of the Spirit emerging and being lived in all degrees
+of perfection and under many different forms. Here, through and behind
+the immense diversity of temperaments which it has transfigured, we can
+best realise its uniform and enduring character; and therefore our own
+possibility of attaining to it, and the way that we must tread so to do.
+History does not exhort us or explain to us, but exhibits living
+specimens to us; and these specimens witness again and again to the fact
+that a compelling power does exist in the world&mdash;<a name="Page_39" id="Page_39" />little understood,
+even by those who are inspired by it&mdash;which presses men to transcend
+their material limitations and mental conflicts, and live a new creative
+life of harmony, freedom and joy. Directly human character emerges as
+one of man's prime interests, this possibility emerges too, and is never
+lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian,
+Moslem and Christian all declare with more or less completeness a way of
+life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment;
+and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women
+who have followed this way, and found its promise to be true.</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did
+truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the
+pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic
+love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to
+them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not
+of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to
+our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it
+could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest
+actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been
+given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete
+image&mdash;and ever the more concrete, the greater his art&mdash;the results of
+his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. <a name="Page_40" id="Page_40" />Thus, as the
+tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made
+of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic
+answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of
+the Spirit&mdash;eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the
+circumstances of their own time&mdash;are the earnests of our own latent
+destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to &quot;grow taller in
+Christ.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42" /><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> These powers&mdash;that ability&mdash;are factually present in the
+race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which
+may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.</p>
+
+<p>In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of
+vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold
+on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the
+quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic
+spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we
+can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who
+have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types,
+varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that
+form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured
+with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative
+for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle
+of past events; and <a name="Page_41" id="Page_41" />of historic personalities as stuffed specimens
+exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less
+picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete
+thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs
+now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as
+some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden
+atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such
+conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense;
+and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit&mdash;that
+is to say, with the Saints&mdash;they are particularly common and
+particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very
+condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated
+must live and be present in the soul of the historian; must be
+emotionally realized by him <i>now,</i> as a concrete fact weighted with
+significance. It must answer to a present, not to a past interest of the
+race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rolle, who has been
+called the father of English mysticism. It is easy enough for those who
+regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something
+different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of
+the soul's reaction to God&mdash;the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of
+his spiritual intercourse, the joyous <a name="Page_42" id="Page_42" />melody with which it filled his
+austere, self-giving life<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43" /><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a>&mdash;as the probable result of the reaction of
+a neurotic temperament to medi&aelig;val traditions. But if, for instance the
+Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque
+fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student&mdash;another Oxford
+undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time&mdash;who gave
+up that university and the career it could offer him, under the
+compulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then he re-enters the
+living past. If, standing by him in that small hut in the Yorkshire
+wolds, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the
+north of England, he hears Rolle saying &quot;Nought more profitable, nought
+merrier than grace of contemplation, the which lifteth us from low
+things and presenteth us to God. What thing is grace but beginning of
+joy? And what is perfection of joy but grace complete?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44" /><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a>&mdash;if, I say,
+he so re-enters history that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not as
+a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life's very secret&mdash;then,
+his heart may be touched and he may begin to understand. And then it may
+occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard
+life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his
+own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental
+life, and are not wholly to be ac<a name="Page_43" id="Page_43" />counted for in terms of superstition
+or of pathology.</p>
+
+<p>When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past,
+our time-span is enlarged, and history is born and becomes contemporary;
+thus both widening and deepening our vital experience. It then becomes
+not only a real mode of life to us; but more than this, a mode of social
+life. Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time
+stream to achieve by ourselves, and in defiance of tradition, a true
+integration of existence. Thus to defy tradition is to refuse all the
+gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off from the cumulative
+experiences of the race. The Spirit, as Croce<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45" /><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> reminds us, is
+history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all
+preceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, the creative
+formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed.</p>
+
+<p>It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical
+aspect of the life of Spirit; re-entering the past by sympathetic
+imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but
+seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which
+persist and have significance for it&mdash;getting, if we can, face to face
+with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it. This
+is not easy. In studying all such experience, we have to remember that
+the men and women of the Spirit are members of two orders. <a name="Page_44" id="Page_44" />They have
+attachments both to time and to eternity. Their characteristic
+experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth;
+the earth of their own day. Therefore two factors will inevitably appear
+in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free
+movements of creative life: and we, if we would understand, must
+discriminate between them. In this power of taking from the past and
+pushing on to the future, the balance maintained between stability and
+novelty, we find one of their abiding characteristics. When this balance
+is broken&mdash;when there is either too complete a submission to tradition
+and authority, or too violent a rejection of it&mdash;full greatness is not
+achieved.</p>
+
+<p>In complete lives, the two things overlap: and so perfectly that no
+sharp distinction is made between the gifts of authority and of fresh
+experience. Traditional formul&aelig;, as we all know, are often used because
+they are found to tally with life, to light up dark corners of our own
+spirits and give names to experiences which we want to define.
+Ceremonial deeds are used to actualize free contacts with Reality. And
+we need not be surprised that they can do this; since tradition
+represents the crystallization, and handling on under symbols, of all
+the spiritual experiences of the race.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the man or woman of the Spirit will always accept and use some
+tradition; and unless he does so, he is not of much use to his
+fellow-men. He must not, then, be discredited on account of the
+<a name="Page_45" id="Page_45" />symbolic system he adopts; but must be allowed to tell his news in his
+own way. We must not refuse to find reality within the Hindu's account
+of his joyous life-giving communion with Ram, any more than we refuse to
+find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with
+Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout
+Buddhist who faithfully follows the Middle Way, or deny that Pagan
+sacramentalism was to its initiates a channel of grace. For all these
+are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of
+history; and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this
+fact with all that it involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see
+when we come to discuss the laws of suggestion and the function of
+belief, the weight of tradition presses the loyal and humble soul which
+accepts it, to such an interpretation of its own spiritual intuitions as
+its Church, its creed, its environment give to it. Thus St. Catherine of
+Genoa, St. Teresa, even Ruysbroeck, are able to describe their intuitive
+communion with God in strictly Catholic terms; and by so doing renew,
+enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow
+them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the
+current formul&aelig;&mdash;Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the
+sterility of the contemporary Church&mdash;were forced to find elsewhere some
+tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it
+in the Bible; Wesley <a name="Page_46" id="Page_46" />in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic
+system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic and
+Christian connections. And all these regarded themselves far less as
+bringers-in of novelty, than as restorers of lost truth. So we must be
+prepared to discriminate the element of novelty from the element of
+stability; the reality of the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral
+situation, from the traditional and often symbolic language in which it
+is given to us. The comparative method helps us towards this; and is
+thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but rightly
+used the revealer of the Spirit of Life in its variety of gifts. In this
+connection we might remember that time&mdash;like space&mdash;is only of secondary
+importance to us. Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of
+years of our animal and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as
+it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous
+rather than successive. We may borrow the imagery of Donne's great
+discourse on Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the spiritual
+life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique, or
+medi&aelig;val men, were &quot;but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some
+at seven, some at eight&mdash;all in one morning in respect of this day.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46" /><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a></p>
+
+<p>Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere
+differences of language and ap<a name="Page_47" id="Page_47" />pearance, and grasp the warmly living and
+contemporary character of all historic truth. It preserves us, too, from
+the common error of discriminating between so-called &quot;ages of faith&quot; and
+our own. The more we study the past, the more clearly we recognize that
+there are no &quot;ages of faith.&quot; Such labels merely represent the arbitrary
+cuts which we make in the time-stream, the arbitrary colours which we
+give to it. The spiritual man or woman is always fundamentally the same
+kind of man or woman; always reaching out with the same faith and love
+towards the heart of the same universe, though telling that faith and
+love in various tongues. He is far less the child of his time, than the
+transformer of it. His this-world business is to bring in novelty, new
+reality, fresh life. Yet, coming to fulfil not to destroy, he uses for
+this purpose the traditions, creeds, even the institutions of his day.
+But when he has done with them, they do not look the same as they did
+before. Christ himself has been well called a Constructive
+Revolutionary,<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47" /><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> yet each single element of His teaching can be found
+in Jewish tradition; and the noblest of His followers have the same
+character. Thus St. Francis of Assisi only sought consistently to apply
+the teaching of the New Testament, and St. Teresa that of the Carmelite
+Rule. Every element of Wesleyanism is to be found in primitive
+Christianity; and Wesleyanism is itself the tradition from which the new
+vigour <a name="Page_48" id="Page_48" />of the Salvation Army sprang. The great regenerators of history
+are always in fundamental opposition to the common life of their day,
+for they demand by their very existence a return to first principles, a
+revolution in the ways of thinking and of acting common among men, a
+heroic consistency and single-mindedness: but they can use for their own
+fresh constructions and contacts with Eternal Life the material which
+this life offers to them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis,
+Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith.
+They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding
+apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with
+society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with
+the Spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and
+spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even
+eccentric at the time at which it appears. We are accustomed to think of
+&quot;The Imitation of Christ&quot; as the classic expression of medi&aelig;val
+spirituality. But when Thomas &agrave; Kempis wrote his book, it was the
+manifesto of that which was called the Modern Devotion; and represented
+a new attempt to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to
+surrounding apathy.</p>
+
+<p>When we re-enter the past, what we find, there is the persistent
+conflict between this novelty and this apathy; that is to say between
+man's instinct for transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of
+<a name="Page_49" id="Page_49" />the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his tendency to lag
+behind towards animal levels, in which we see the influence of his
+racial past. So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion
+means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by
+sin under the second head. And the most striking&mdash;though not the
+only&mdash;examples of the forward reach of life towards freedom (that is, of
+conquering grace) are those persons whom we call men and women of the
+Spirit. In them it is incarnate, and through them, as it were, it
+spreads and gives the race a lift: for their transfiguration is never
+for themselves alone, they impart it to all who follow them. But the
+downward falling movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit; and
+tends to drag back to the average level the group these have vivified,
+when their influence is withdrawn. Hence the history of the Spirit&mdash;and,
+incidentally, the history of all churches&mdash;exhibits to us a series of
+strong movements towards completed life, inspired by vigorous and
+transcendent personalities; thwarted by the common indolence and
+tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. We have no reason to
+suppose that this history is a closed book, or that the spiritual life
+struggling to emerge among ourselves will follow other laws.</p>
+
+<p>We desire then, if we can, to discover what it was that these
+transcendent personalities possessed. We may think, from the point at
+which we now <a name="Page_50" id="Page_50" />stand, that they had some things which were false, or, at
+least, were misinterpreted by them. We cannot without insincerity make
+their view of the universe our own. But, plainly, they also possessed
+truths and values which most of us have not: they obtained from their
+religion, whether we allow that it had as creed an absolute or a
+symbolic value, a power of living, a courage and clear vision, which we
+do not as a rule obtain. When we study the character and works of these
+men and women, observing their nobility, their sweetness, their power of
+endurance, their outflowing love, we must, unless we be utterly
+insensitive, perceive ourselves to be confronted by a quality of being
+which we do not possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet one of
+them in the flesh, though his conduct is commonly more normal than our
+own, we know then with Plotinus that the soul <i>has</i> another life. Yet
+many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies,
+acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law. But as
+something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the
+great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes
+more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new,
+intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable
+variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life
+and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the
+race.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51" />Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two
+groups:</p>
+
+<p>First, <i>Type.</i> What are the characters which mark this life of the
+Spirit?</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, <i>Process.</i> What is the line of development by which the
+individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?</p>
+
+<p>First, then, the <i>Spiritual Type.</i></p>
+
+<p>What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated
+that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort
+to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and
+real source of power is this single-mindedness. They aim at God: the
+phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the
+Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that &quot;the householder
+must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48" /><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> Thus the Sufi says
+he has but two laws&mdash;to look in one direction and to live in one
+way.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49" /><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ;
+and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that
+all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The
+New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord's
+life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility
+to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were
+inspired by this union; and that He declared it, not as a unique fact,
+but <a name="Page_52" id="Page_52" />as a possible human ideal. This Is not a theological, but a
+historical statement, which applies, in its degree to every man and
+woman who has been a follower of Christ: for He was, as St. Paul has
+said, &quot;the eldest in a vast family of brothers.&quot; The same single-minded
+effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths; though these may
+lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love. And by a paradox
+repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to
+the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant
+fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do
+difficult things, but that creative charity which &quot;wins and redeems the
+unlovely by the power of its love.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50" /><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> The man or woman of prayer, the
+community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the
+most practical ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was
+the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the
+soul; and it became one of the chief instruments in the civilization of
+Europe, carrying forward not only religion, but education, pure
+scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The object of St. Bernard's
+reform was the restoration of the life of prayer. His monks, going out
+into the waste places with no provision but their own faith, hope and
+charity, revived agriculture, established industry, literally compelled
+the wilderness to flower for God. The Brothers of the Common <a name="Page_53" id="Page_53" />Life
+joined together, in order that, living simply and by their own industry,
+they might observe a rule of constant prayer: and they became in
+consequence a powerful educational influence. The object of Wesley and
+his first companions was by declaration the saving of their own souls
+and the living only to the glory of God; but they were impelled at once
+by this to practical deeds of mercy, and ultimately became the
+regenerators of religion in the English-speaking world.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to emphasize this truth, for it conveys a lesson which we can
+learn from history at the present time with much profit to ourselves. It
+means that reconstruction of character and reorientation of attention
+must precede reconstruction of society; that the Sufi is right when he
+declares that the whole secret lies in looking in one direction and
+living in one way. Again and again it has been proved, that those who
+aim at God do better work than those who start with the declared
+intention of benefiting their fellow-men. We must <i>be</i> good before we
+can <i>do</i> good; be real before we can accomplish real things. No
+generalized benevolence, no social Christianity, however beautiful and
+devoted, can take the place of this centring of the spirit on eternal
+values; this humble, deliberate recourse to Reality. To suppose that it
+can do so, is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect for
+cause.</p>
+
+<p>This brings us to the <i>Second Character</i>: the rich <a name="Page_54" id="Page_54" />completeness of the
+spiritual life, the way in which it fuses and transfigures the
+complementary human tendencies to contemplation and action, the
+non-successive and successive aspects of reality. &quot;The love of God,&quot;
+said Ruysbroeck, &quot;is an indrawing <i>and</i> outpouring tide&quot;;<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51" /><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> and
+history endorses this. In its greatest representatives, the rhythm of
+adoration and work is seen in an accentuated form. These people seldom
+or never answer to the popular idea of idle contemplatives. They do not
+withdraw from the stream of natural life and effort, but plunge into it
+more deeply, seek its heart. They have powers of expression and
+creation, and use them to the full. St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard,
+St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius organizing families which shall
+incarnate the gift of new life; Fox, Wesley and Booth striving to save
+other men; Mary Slessor driven by vocation from the Dundee mill to the
+African swamps&mdash;these are characteristic of them. We perceive that they
+are not specialists, as more earthly types of efficiency are apt to be.
+Theirs are rich natures, their touch on existence has often an artistic
+quality, St. Paul in his correspondence could break into poetry, as the
+only way of telling the truth. St. Jerome lived to the full the lives of
+scholar and of ascetic. St. Francis, in his perpetual missionary
+activities, still found time for his music songs; St. Hildegarde and St.
+Catherine of Siena had their strong political <a name="Page_55" id="Page_55" />interests; Jacopone da
+Todi combined the careers of contemplative politician and poet. So too
+in practical matters. St. Catherine of Genoa was one of the first
+hospital administrators, St. Vincent de Paul a genius in the sphere of
+organized charity, Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform. Brother
+Laurence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in
+the Presence of God. Jacob Boehme was a hard-working cobbler, and
+afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition. The
+perpetual journeyings and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller
+compass the career of St. Paul: he was also an exact scholar and a
+practical educationist. Mary Slessor showed the quality of a ruler as
+well as that of a winner of souls. In the intellectual region, Richard
+of St. Victor was supreme in contemplation, and also a psychologist far
+in advance of his time. We are apt to forget the mystical side of
+Aquinas; who was poet and contemplative as well as scholastic
+philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>And the third feature we notice about these men and women is, that this
+new power by which they lived was, as Ruysbroeck calls it, &quot;a spreading
+light.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52" /><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> It poured out of them, invading and illuminating other men:
+so that, through them, whole groups or societies were re-born, if only
+for a time, on to fresh levels of reality, goodness and power. Their own
+intense personal experience was valid not only for themselves. They
+belonged to that <a name="Page_56" id="Page_56" />class of natural, leaders who are capable,&mdash;of
+infecting the herd with their own ideals; leading it to new feeding
+grounds, improving the common level It is indeed the main social
+function of the man or woman of the Spirit to be such a crowd-compeller
+In the highest sense; and, as the artist reveals new beauty to his
+fellow-men, to stimulate in their neighbours the latent human capacity
+for God. In every great surge forward to new life, we can trace back the
+radiance to such a single point of light; the transfiguration of an
+individual soul. Thus Christ's communion with His Father was the
+life-centre, the point of contact with Eternity, whence radiated the joy
+and power of the primitive Christian flock: the classic example of a
+corporate spiritual life. When the young man with great possessions
+asked Jesus, &quot;What shall I do to be saved?&quot; Jesus replied in effect,
+&quot;Put aside all lesser interests, strip off unrealities, and come, give
+yourself the chance of catching the Infection of holiness from Me.&quot;
+Whatever be our view of Christian dogma, whatever meaning we attach to
+the words &quot;redemption&quot; and &quot;atonement,&quot; we shall hardly deny that in the
+life and character of the historic Christ something new was thus evoked
+from, and added to, humanity. No one can read with attention the Gospel
+and the story of the primitive Church, without being struck by the
+consciousness of renovation, of enhancement, experienced by all who
+received the Christian secret in its charismatic stage. This new factor
+is some<a name="Page_57" id="Page_57" />times called re-birth, sometimes grace, sometimes the power of
+the Spirit, sometimes being &quot;in Christ.&quot; We misread history if we regard
+it either as a mere gust of emotional fervour, or a theological idea, or
+discount the &quot;miracles of healing&quot; and other proofs of enhanced power by
+which it was expressed. Everything goes to prove that the &quot;more abundant
+life&quot; offered by the Johannine Christ to His followers, was literally
+experienced by them; and was the source of their joy, their enthusiasm,
+their mutual love and power of endurance.</p>
+
+<p>On lower levels, and through the inspiration of lesser teachers, history
+shows us the phenomena of primitive Christianity repeated again and
+again; both within and without the Christian circle of ideas. Every
+religion looks for, and most have possessed, some revealer of the
+Spirit; some Prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the
+characteristic demonstrations of the human power of transcendence&mdash;a
+supernatural life which can be lived by us&mdash;have begun in one person,
+who has become a creative centre mediating new life to his fellow-men:
+as were Buddha and Mohammed for the faiths which they founded. Such
+lives as those of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley,
+Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of this law. The parable
+of the leaven is in fact an exact description of the way in which the
+spiritual consciousness&mdash;the supernatural urge&mdash;is observed to spread in
+human society. It is characteristic of <a name="Page_58" id="Page_58" />the regenerate type, that he
+should as it were overflow his own boundaries and energize other souls:
+for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours out inevitably from
+those who possess it to other men. We notice that the great mystics
+recognize again and again such a fertilizing and creative power, as a
+mark of the soul's full vitality. It is not the personal rapture of the
+spiritual marriage, but rather the &quot;divine fecundity&quot; of one who is a
+parent of spiritual children; which seems to them the goal of human
+transcendence, and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels, in
+real union with God. &quot;In the fourth and last degree of love the soul
+brings forth its children,&quot; says Richard of St. Victor.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53" /><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> &quot;The last
+perfection to supervene upon a thing,&quot; says Aquinas, &quot;is its becoming
+the cause of other things.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54" /><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> In a word, it is creative. And the
+spiritual life as we see it in history is thus creative; the cause of
+other things.</p>
+
+<p>History is full of examples of this law: that the man or woman of the
+spirit is, fundamentally, a life-giver; and all corporate achievement of
+the life of the spirit flows from some great apostle or initiator, is
+the fruit of discipleship. Such corporate achievement is a form of group
+consciousness, brought into being through the power and attraction of a
+fully harmonized life, infecting others with its own sharp sense of
+Divine reality. Poets and artists <a name="Page_59" id="Page_59" />thus infect in a measure all those
+who yield to their influence. The active mystic, who is the poet of
+Eternal Life, does it in a supreme degree. Such a relation of master and
+disciples is conspicuous in every true spiritual revival; and is the
+link between the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration. We see
+it in the little flock that followed Christ, the Little Poor Men who
+followed Francis, the Friends of Fox, the army of General Booth. Not
+Christianity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify to this
+necessity. The Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a
+<i>guru</i> who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere; and
+must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience. The S&#363;fi
+neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his <i>sheikh</i> &quot;as a
+corpse in the hands of the washer&quot;; and all the great saints of Islam
+have been the inspiring centres of more or less organized groups.</p>
+
+<p>History teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through
+men. We most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring
+human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic
+contagion. Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into
+the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous
+outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful
+analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment,
+tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it.
+There <a name="Page_60" id="Page_60" />is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human
+experience and education. Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of
+God are also the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped by those
+who go before them. And as regards the generality, not isolated effort
+but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher&mdash;and every man
+and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of
+influence&mdash;the unselfconscious trust of the disciple, are the means by
+which the secret of full life has been handed on. &quot;One loving spirit,&quot;
+said St. Augustine, &quot;sets another on fire&quot;; and expressed in this phrase
+the law which governs the spiritual history of man. This law finds
+notable expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; a type of
+association, found in more or less perfection in every great religion,
+which has not received the attention it deserves from students of
+psychology. If we study the lives of those who founded these
+Orders&mdash;though such a foundation was not always intended by them&mdash;we
+notice one general characteristic: each was an enthusiast, abounding in
+zest and hope, and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a
+source of spiritual infection, for those who came under his influence.
+In each the spiritual world was seen &quot;through a temperament,&quot; and so
+mediated to the disciples; who shared so far as they were able the
+master's special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Benedict's sane
+and generous outlook is crystallized in <a name="Page_61" id="Page_61" />the Benedictine rule. St.
+Francis' deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave
+Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character. The heroisms of the
+early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St.
+Ignatius. The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance
+from St. Teresa's mystical experience. The great Orders in their purity
+were families, inheriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their
+patriarch; who gave, as a father to his children, life stamped with his
+own characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of its founder, the group
+appears to lose its spontaneous and enthusiastic character. Zest fails.
+Unless a fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles down again
+towards the general level of the herd. Thence it can only be roused by
+means of &quot;reforms&quot; or &quot;revivals,&quot; the arrival of new, vigorous leaders,
+and the formation of new enthusiastic groups: for the bulk of men as we
+know them cannot or will not make the costing effort needed for a
+first-hand participation in eternal life. They want a &quot;crowd-compeller&quot;
+to lift them above themselves. Thus the history of Christianity is the
+history of successive spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to
+survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed His little flock
+with the avowed aim of &quot;bringing in the Kingdom of God&quot;&mdash;transmuting the
+mentality of the race, and so giving it more abundant life.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62" />Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of
+their Master, the influence and infection of His spirit and atmosphere,
+as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life:
+and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain
+contact with the eternal world in prayer. The great speech of Serenus de
+Cressy in &quot;John Inglesant&quot; described once for all the highest type of
+Christian spirituality.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55" /><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> But in practice this link and this influence
+are too subtle for the mass of men. They must constantly be
+re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and by them be mediated
+to fresh groups, formed within or without the institutional frame. Thus
+in the thirteenth century St. Francis, and in the fourteenth the Friends
+of God, created a true spiritual society within the Church, by restoring
+in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian
+idea and Christian life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
+Fox and Wesley possessed by the same essential vision, broke away from
+the institution which was no longer supple enough to meet their needs,
+and formed their fresh groups outside the old herd.</p>
+
+<p>When such creative personalities appear and such groups are founded by
+them, the phenomena of the spiritual life reappear in their full vigour,
+and are disseminated. A new vitality, a fresh power of endurance, is
+seen in all who are drawn within the <a name="Page_63" id="Page_63" />group and share its mind. This is
+what St. Paul seems to have meant, when he reminded his converts that
+they had the mind of Christ. The primitive friars, living under the
+influence of Francis, did practice the perfect poverty which is also
+perfect joy. The assured calm and willing sufferings of the early
+Christians were reproduced in the early Quakers, secure in their
+possession of the inner light. We know very well the essential
+characters of this fresh mentality; the power, the enthusiasm, the
+radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hardship it confers. But we
+can no more produce it from these raw materials than the chemist's
+crucible can produce life. The whole experience of St. Francis is
+implied in the Beatitudes. The secret of Elizabeth Fry is the secret of
+St. John. The doctrine of General Booth is fully stated by St. Paul. But
+it was not by referring inquirers to the pages of the New Testament that
+the first brought men fettered by things to experience the freedom of
+poverty; the second faced and tamed three hundred Newgate criminals, who
+seemed at her first visit &quot;like wild beasts&quot;; or the third created
+armies of the redeemed from the dregs of the London Slums. They did
+these things by direct personal contagion; and they will be done among
+us again when the triumphant power of Eternal Spirit is again exhibited,
+not in ideas but in human character.</p>
+
+<p>I think, then, that history justifies us in regarding the full living of
+the spiritual life as implying at <a name="Page_64" id="Page_64" />least these three characters. First,
+single-mindedness: to mean only God. Second, the full integration of the
+contemplative and active sides of existence, lifted up, harmonized, and
+completely consecrated to those interests which the self recognizes as
+Divine. Third, the power of reproducing this life; incorporating it in a
+group. Before we go on, we will look at one concrete example which
+illustrates all these points. This example is that of St. Benedict and
+the Order which he founded; for in the rounded completeness of his life
+and system we see what should be the normal life of the Spirit, and its
+result.</p>
+
+<p>Benedict was born in times not unlike our own, when wars had shaken
+civilization, the arts of peace were unsettled, religion was at a low
+ebb. As a young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from the
+vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the hills, and lived in a
+cave for three years alone with his thoughts of God. It would be easy to
+regard him as an eccentric boy: but he was adjusting himself to the real
+centre of his life. Gradually others who longed for a more real
+existence joined him, and he divided them into groups of twelve, and
+settled them in small houses; giving them a time-table by which to live,
+which should make possible a full and balanced existence of body, mind
+and soul. Thanks to those years of retreat and preparation, he knew what
+he wanted and what he ought to do; and they ushered in a long life of
+intense <a name="Page_65" id="Page_65" />mental and spiritual activity. His houses were schools, which
+taught the service of God and the perfecting of the soul as the aims of
+life. His rule, in which genial human tolerance, gentle courtesy, and a
+profound understanding of men are not less marked than lofty
+spirituality, is the classic statement of all that the Christian
+spiritual life implies and should be.<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56" /><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a></p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the character of the life which St. Benedict proposed as
+a remedy for the human failure and disharmony that he saw around him? It
+was framed, of course, for a celibate community: but it has many
+permanent features which are unaffected by his limitation. It offers
+balanced opportunities of development to the body, the mind and the
+spirit; laying equal emphasis on hard work, study, and prayer. It aims
+at a robust completeness, not at the production of professional
+ascetics; indeed, its Rule says little about physical austerities,
+insists on sufficient food and rest, and countenances no extremes.
+According to Abbot Butler, St. Benedict's day was divided into three and
+a half hours for public worship, four and a half for reading and
+meditation, six and a half for manual work, eight and a half for sleep,
+and one hour for meals. So that in spite of the time devoted to
+spiritual and mental interests, the primitive Benedictine did a good
+day's work and had a good night's rest at the <a name="Page_66" id="Page_66" />end of it. The work might
+be anything that wanted doing, so long as the hours of prayer were not
+infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, handicrafts and art have
+all been done perfectly by St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in
+quiet love. This is what one of the greatest constructive minds of
+Christendom regarded as a reasonable way of life; a frame within which
+the loftiest human faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieve that
+harmony with God which is its goal. Moreover, this life was to be
+social. It was in the beginning just the busy useful life of an Italian
+farm, lived in groups&mdash;in monastic families, under the rule and
+inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the
+spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility,
+obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the
+authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has
+something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried
+and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time
+for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those
+marks of the regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown to us
+as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action
+and contemplation, the creative power, and above all the principle of
+social solidarity and discipleship.</p>
+
+<p>We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the
+process by which the individual <a name="Page_67" id="Page_67" />normally develops this life of the
+Spirit, the serial changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is of
+practical importance to us. The full inwardness of these changes will be
+considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life.
+Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the
+constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and
+small personalities under the various labels which have been given to
+it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence
+with the temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that
+union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This life we must
+believe in some form and degree to be possible for all; but we study it
+best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its
+fullest records survive.</p>
+
+<p>The first moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love
+with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it.
+Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his
+nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he
+has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict,
+disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis,
+abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle,
+turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life; in the restless
+misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking &quot;something
+that could speak to <a name="Page_68" id="Page_68" />his condition&quot;; and also in two outstanding
+examples from modern India, those of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore
+and the Sadhu Sundar Singh. This dissatisfaction, sometimes associated
+with the negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with the
+positive longing for holiness and peace, is the mental preparation of
+conversion; which, though not a constant, is at least a characteristic
+feature of the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history. We
+might, indeed, expect some crucial change of attitude, some inner
+crisis, to mark the beginning of a new life which is to aim only at God.
+Here too we find one motive of that movement of world-abandonment which
+so commonly follows conversion, especially in heroic souls. Thus St.
+Paul hides himself in Arabia; St. Benedict retires for three years to
+the cave at Subiaco; St. Ignatius to Manresa. Gerard Groot, the
+brilliant and wealthy young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of the
+Common Life, began his new life by self-seclusion in a Carthusian cell.
+St. Catherine of Siena at first lived solitary in her own room. St.
+Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his whole past, even the
+clothing that was part of it. Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer
+converted to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to
+express his utter separation from the world. Others, it is true, have
+chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the
+cell of self-knowledge the solitude they re<a name="Page_69" id="Page_69" />quired; but <i>some</i> decisive
+break was imperative for all. History assures us that there is no easy
+sliding into the life of the Spirit.</p>
+
+<p>A secondary cause of such world refusal is the first awakening of the
+contemplative powers; the intuition of Eternity, hitherto dormant, and
+felt at this stage to be&mdash;in its overwhelming reality and appeal&mdash;in
+conflict with the unreal world and unsublimated active life. This is the
+controlling idea of the hermit and recluse. It is well seen in St.
+Teresa; whom her biographers describe as torn, for years, between the
+interests of human intercourse and the imperative inner voice urging her
+to solitary self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that in the
+beginning of the life of the Spirit, as history shows it to us, if
+disillusion marks the first moment, some measure of asceticism, of
+world-refusal and painful self-schooling, is likely to mark the second
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>What we are watching is the complete reconstruction of personality; a
+personality that has generally grown into the wrong shape. This is
+likely to be a hard and painful business; and indeed history assures us
+that it is, and further that the spiritual life is never achieved by
+taking the line of least resistance and basking in the divine light.
+With world-refusal, then, is intimately connected stern moral conflict;
+often lasting for years, and having as its object the conquest of
+selfhood in all its insidious forms. &quot;Take one step out of your<a name="Page_70" id="Page_70" />self,&quot;
+say the S&#363;fis, &quot;and you will arrive at God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57" /><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> This one step is the
+most difficult act of life; yet urged by love, man has taken it again
+and again. This phase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual
+biography, that I need not insist upon it. &quot;In the field of this body,&quot;
+says Kabir, &quot;a great war goes forward, against passion, anger, pride and
+greed. It is in the Kingdom of Truth, Contentment and Purity that this
+battle is raging, and the sword that rings forth most loudly is the
+sword of His Name.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58" /><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> &quot;Man,&quot; says Boehme, &quot;must here be at war with
+himself if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen ... fighting must be the
+watchword, not with tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit; and not
+to give over.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59" /><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> The need of such a conflict, shown to us in history,
+is explained on human levels by psychology. On spiritual levels it is
+made plain to all whose hearts are touched by the love of God. By this
+way all must pass who achieve the life of the Spirit; subduing to its
+purposes their wayward wills, and sublimating in its power their
+conflicting animal impulses. This long effort brings, as its reward a
+unification of character, an inflow of power: from it we see the mature
+man or woman of the Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this
+conflict lasted for four years, after which the thought of sin ceased to
+rule her consciousness.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60" /><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> St. Teresa's <a name="Page_71" id="Page_71" />intermittent struggles are
+said to have continued for thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply
+religious, did not attain the inner stability he calls assurance till he
+was thirty-five years old. Blake was for twenty years in mental
+conflict, shut off from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do
+great personalities come to their full stature, and subdue their
+vigorous impulses to the one ruling idea.</p>
+
+<p>The ending of this conflict, the self's unification and establishment in
+the new life, commonly means a return more or less complete to that
+world from which the convert had retreated; taking up of the fully
+energized and fully consecrated human existence, which must express
+itself in work no less than in prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity
+for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the &quot;first
+return&quot; of the Buddhist saint is &quot;from the absolute world to the world
+of phenomena to save all sentient beings.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61" /><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> Thus St. Benedict's and
+St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for
+their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a
+disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as a
+busy and devoted hospital matron and inspired teacher of a group of
+disciples. St. Teresa's long interior struggles precede her vigorous
+career as founder and reformer; her creation of spiritual families, new
+centres of con<a name="Page_72" id="Page_72" />templative life. The vast activities of Fox and Wesley
+were the fruits first of inner conflict, then of assurance&mdash;the
+experience of God and of the self's relation to Him. And on the highest
+levels of the spiritual life as history shows them to us, this
+experience and realization, first of profound harmony with Eternity and
+its interests, next of a personal relation of love, last of an
+indwelling creative power, a givenness, an energizing grace, reaches
+that completeness to which has been given the name of union with God.</p>
+
+<p>The great man or woman of the Spirit who achieves this perfect
+development is, it is true, a special product: a genius, comparable with
+great creative personalities in other walks of life. But he neither
+invalidates the smaller talent nor the more general tendency in which
+his supreme gift takes its rise. Where he appears, that tendency is
+vigorously stimulated. Like other artists, he founds a school; the
+spiritual life flames up, and spreads to those within his circle of
+influence. Through him, ordinary men, whose aptitude for God might have
+remained latent, obtain a fresh start; an impetus to growth. There is a
+sense in which he might say with the Johannine Christ, &quot;He that
+receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me&quot;; for yielding to his magnetism,
+men really yield to the drawing of the Spirit itself. And when they do
+this, their lives are found to reproduce&mdash;though with less
+intensity&mdash;the life history of their leader. Therefore the <a name="Page_73" id="Page_73" />main
+characters of that life history, that steady undivided process of
+sublimation; are normal human characters. We too may heal the discords
+of our moral nature, learn to judge existence in the universal light,
+bring into consciousness our latent transcendental sense, and keep
+ourselves so spiritually supple that alike in times of stress and hours
+of prayer and silence we are aware of the mysterious and energizing
+contact of God. Psychology suggests to us that the great spiritual
+personalities revealed in history are but supreme instances of a
+searching self-adjustment and of a way of life, always accessible to
+love and courage, which all men may in some sense undertake.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42" /><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Everard, &quot;Some Gospel Treasures Opened,&quot; p. 555</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43" /><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> <i>Canor Dulcor, Canor;</i> cf. Rolle: &quot;The Fire of Love,&quot; Bk.
+1, Cap. 14</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44" /><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> Rolle: &quot;The Mending of Life,&quot; Cap. XII.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45" /><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> Benedetto Croce: &quot;Theory and History of Historiography,&quot;
+trans. by Douglas Ainslie, p. 25.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46" /><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> &quot;Donne's Sermons,&quot; p. 236.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47" /><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> B.H. Streeter, in &quot;The Spirit,&quot; p. 349 <i>seq</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48" /><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> &quot;Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore,&quot; Cap.
+23.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49" /><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> R.A. Nicholson: &quot;Studies in Islamic Mysticism,&quot; Cap. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50" /><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> Baron von H&uuml;gel In the &quot;Hibbert Journal,&quot; July, 1921.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51" /><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> Ruysbroeck: &quot;The Sparkling Stone,&quot; Cap. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52" /><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> Ruysbroeck: &quot;The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage,&quot; Bk.
+II, Cap. 39.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53" /><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> R. of St. Victor: &quot;De Quatuor Gradibus Violent&aelig;
+Charitatis&quot; (Migne, Pat. Lat.) T. 196, Col. 1216.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54" /><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> &quot;Summa Contra Gentiles,&quot; Bk. III, Cap. 21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55" /><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> J.E. Shorthouse: &quot;John Inglesant,&quot; Cap. 19.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56" /><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> Cf. Delatte: &quot;The Rule of St. Benedict&quot;; and C. Butler:
+&quot;Benedictine Monachism.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57" /><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> R.A. Nicholson: &quot;Studies in Islamic Mysticism,&quot; Cap. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58" /><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> &quot;One Hundred Poems of Kabir,&quot; p. 44.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59" /><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> Boehme: &quot;Six Theosophic Points,&quot; p. 111.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60" /><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> Cf. Von H&uuml;gel: &quot;The Mystical Element of Religion,&quot; Vol. I,
+Pt. II.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61" /><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> McGovern: &quot;An Introduction to Mah&atilde;y&atilde;na Buddhism,&quot; p. 175.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III" /><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74" />CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</p>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>(I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND</p>
+
+
+<p>Having interrogated history in our attempt to discover the essential
+character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to
+see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of
+the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It
+is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out,
+would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in
+a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming
+available for it: but many of the principles involved are, even yet,
+obscure. Therefore any conclusions at which we may arrive can only be
+tentative; and the theories and schematic representations that we shall
+be obliged to use must be regarded as mere working diagrams&mdash;almost
+certainly of a temporary character&mdash;but useful to us, because they do
+give us an interpretation of inner experience with which we can deal. I
+need not emphasize the extent in which modern developments of psychology
+are affecting our conceptions of <a name="Page_75" id="Page_75" />the spiritual life, and our reading of
+many religious phenomena on which our ancestors looked with awe. When we
+have eliminated the more heady exaggerations of the psycho-analysts, and
+the too-violent simplifications of the behaviourists, it remains true
+that many problems have lately been elucidated in an unexpected, and
+some in a helpful, sense. We are learning in particular to see in true
+proportion those abnormal states of trance and ecstasy which were once
+regarded as the essentials, but are now recognized as the by-products,
+of the mystical life. But a good deal that at first sight seems
+startling, and even disturbing to the religious mind, turns out on
+investigation to be no more than the re-labelling of old facts, which
+behind their new tickets remain unchanged. Perhaps no generation has
+ever been so much at the mercy of such labels as our own. Thus many
+people who are inclined to jibe at the doctrine of original sin welcome
+it with open arms when it is reintroduced as the uprush of primitive
+instinct. Opportunity of confession to a psychoanalyst is eagerly sought
+and gladly paid for, by troubled spirits who would never resort for the
+same purpose to a priest. The formul&aelig; of auto-suggestion are freely used
+by those who repudiate vocal prayer and acts of faith with scorn. If,
+then, I use for the purpose of exposition some of those labels which are
+affected by the newest schools, I do so without any suggestion that they
+represent the only valid way of dealing with the psychic life of <a name="Page_76" id="Page_76" />man.
+Indeed, I regard these labels as little more than exceedingly clever
+guesses at truth. But since they are now generally current and often
+suggestive, it is well that we should try to find a place for spiritual
+experience within the system which they represent; thus carrying through
+the principle on which we are working, that of interpreting the abiding
+facts of the spiritual life, so far as we can, in the language of the
+present day.</p>
+
+<p>First, then, I propose to consider the analysis of mind, and what It has
+to tell us about the nature of Sin, of Salvation, of Conversion; what
+light it casts on the process of purgation or self-purification which is
+demanded by all religions of the Spirit; what are the respective parts
+played by reason and instinct in the process of regeneration; and the
+importance for religious experience of the phenomena of apperception.</p>
+
+<p>We need not at this point consider again all that we mean by the life of
+the Spirit. We have already considered it as it appears in history&mdash;its
+inexhaustible variety, its power, nobility, and grace. We need only to
+remind ourselves that what we have got to find room for in our
+psychological scheme is literally, a changed and enhanced life; a life
+which, immersed in the stream of history, is yet poised on the eternal
+world. This life involves a complete re-direction of our desires and
+impulses, a transfiguration of character; and often, too, a sense of
+subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of <a name="Page_77" id="Page_77" />impersonal strength,
+so overwhelming as to give many of its activities an inspirational or
+automatic character. We found that this life was marked by a rhythmic
+alternation between receptivity and activity, more complete and
+purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should
+condition, the healthy life of sense. This re-direction and
+transfiguration, this removal to a higher term of our mental rhythm, are
+of course psychic phenomena; using this word in a broad sense, without
+prejudice to the discrimination of any one aspect of it as spiritual.
+All that we mean at the moment is, that the change which brings in the
+spiritual life is a change in the mind and heart of man, working in the
+stuff of our common human nature, and involving all that the modern
+psychologist means by the word psyche.</p>
+
+<p>We begin therefore with the nature of the psyche as this modern,
+growing, changing psychology conceives it; for this is the raw material
+of regenerate man. If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological
+theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate
+minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche&mdash;by which of
+course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William
+James&mdash;was anticipated by Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Ennead,
+that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the
+body and of the higher for the purposes of the Spirit, and yet
+constitutes a unity; <a name="Page_78" id="Page_78" />an unbroken series of ascending values and powers
+of response, from the levels of merely physical and mainly unconscious
+life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62" /><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> We
+first discover psychic energy as undifferentiated directive power,
+controlling response and adaption to environment; and as it develops,
+ever increasing the complexity of its impulses and habits, yet never
+abandoning anything of its past. Instinct represents the correspondence
+of this life-force with mere nature, its effort as it were to keep its
+footing and accomplish its destiny in the world of time. Spirit
+represents this same life acting on highest levels, with most vivid
+purpose; seeking and achieving correspondence with the eternal world,
+and realities of the loftiest order yet discovered to be accessible to
+us. We are compelled to use words of this kind; and the proceeding is
+harmless enough so long as we remember that they are abstractions, and
+that we have no real reason to suppose breaks in the life process which
+extends from the infant's first craving for food and shelter to the
+saint's craving for the knowledge of God. This urgent, craving life is
+the dominant characteristic of the psyche. Thought is but the last come
+and least developed of its powers; one among its various responses to
+environment, and ways of laying hold on experience.</p>
+
+<p>This conception of the multiplicity in unity of the psyche, conscious
+and unconscious, is probably one <a name="Page_79" id="Page_79" />of the most important results of
+recent psychological advance. It means that we cannot any longer in the
+good old way rule off bits or aspects of it, and call them intellect,
+soul, spirit, conscience and so forth; or, on the other hand, refer to
+our &quot;lower&quot; nature as if it were something separate from ourselves. I am
+spirit when I pray, if I pray rightly. I am my lower nature, when my
+thoughts and deeds are swayed by my primitive impulses and physical
+longings, declared or disguised. I am most wholly myself when that
+impulsive nature and that craving spirit are welded into one, subject to
+the same emotional stimulus, directed to one goal. When theologians and
+psychologists, ignoring this unity of the self, set up arbitrary
+divisions&mdash;and both classes are very fond of doing so&mdash;they are merely
+making diagrams for their own convenience. We ourselves shall probably
+be compelled to do this: and the proceeding is harmless enough, so long
+as we recollect that these diagrams are at best symbolic pictures of
+fact. Specially is it necessary to keep our heads, and refuse to be led
+away by the constant modern talk of the primitive, unconscious,
+foreconscious instinctive and other minds which are so prominent in
+modern psychological literature, or by the spatial suggestions of such
+terms as threshold, complex, channel of discharge: remembering always
+the central unity and non-material nature of that many-faced psychic
+life which is described under these various formul&aelig;.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80" />If we accept this central unity with all its implications, it follows
+that we cannot take our superior and conscious faculties, set them
+apart, and call them &quot;ourselves&quot;; refusing responsibility for the more
+animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with
+such distressing ease and frequency from the deeps, by attributing these
+to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that
+the sophisticated surface-mind which alone we usually recognize is the
+smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least
+important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and
+desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate
+for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic
+unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying
+with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices,
+impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to
+us the extent in which the jungle and the Stone Age are still active in
+our games, our politics and our creeds; how many of our motives are
+still those of primitive man, and how many of our social institutions
+offer him a discreet opportunity of self-expression.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of
+religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one
+another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely
+restating the fundamental Christian par<a name="Page_81" id="Page_81" />adox, that man is truly one, a
+living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; and
+yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic
+natures&mdash;that duality which St. Paul calls the old Adam and the new
+Adam. The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the
+earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life
+of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are
+conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise.
+True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of
+the facts. That which one calls original sin, the other calls the
+instinctive mind: but the situation each puts before us is the same. &quot;I
+find a law,&quot; says St. Paul, &quot;that when I would do good evil is present
+with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man <i>but</i> I
+see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind....
+With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law
+of sin.&quot; Without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said
+in my hearing, &quot;If St. Paul had come to me, I feel I could have helped
+him,&quot; I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to
+this, and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more
+psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction; demonstrating
+that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the
+impulsive and the rational life, the many conflicts which sap his
+energy, arise from the per<a name="Page_82" id="Page_82" />sistence within us of the archaic and
+primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many
+stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one
+of us; though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly
+instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety
+and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried
+over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when
+we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive; with
+its outlook of wonder, self-interest and fear, developed under
+conditions of ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. The
+history of primitive man covers millions of years: the history of
+civilized man, a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not
+surprising that the primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the
+plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still the infantile
+foundation of our mental life. Finally, there is the rational life, so
+far as the rational is yet achieved by us; correcting, conflicting with,
+and seeking to refine and control the vigour of primitive impulse.</p>
+
+<p>But if it is to give an account of all the facts psychology must also
+point out, and find place for, the last-comer in the evolutionary
+series: the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual
+consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and
+pointing, not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human
+growth. But it <a name="Page_83" id="Page_83" />cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as
+something separate from, and wholly unconditioned by, our racial past.
+We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the
+end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which
+St. Paul calls &quot;growing up into the stature of Christ.&quot; Here psychology
+is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to
+recognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us. In the
+spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the
+religious consciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we
+perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of this deep germinal
+life. And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward
+the upgrowth of this spiritual life, we must take into account those
+earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue
+underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition
+and explain so many of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that the
+psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven; and that every one of us
+still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many
+of the characters of those stages of development through which the race
+has passed&mdash;characters which inevitably give their colour to our
+religious no less than to our social life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I desire,&quot; says &agrave; Kempis, &quot;to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take
+thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and
+unmortified <a name="Page_84" id="Page_84" />passions depress me. I will in my mind be above all things
+but in despite of myself I am constrained to be beneath, so I unhappy
+man fight with myself and am made grievous to myself while the spirit
+seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath. O what I suffer
+within while I think on heavenly things in my mind; the company of
+fleshly things cometh against me when I pray.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63" /><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a></p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh Master,&quot; says the Scholar in Boehme's great dialogue, &quot;the creatures
+that live in me so withhold me, that I cannot wholly yield and give
+myself up as I willingly would.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64" /><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a></p>
+
+<p>No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation
+than have these old specialists in the spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>The bearing of all this on the study of organized religion is of course
+of great importance; and will be discussed in a subsequent section. All
+that I wish to point out now is that the beliefs, and the explanations
+of action, put forward by our rationalizing surface consciousness are
+often mere veils which drape the crudeness of our real desires and
+reactions to life; and that before life can be reintegrated about its
+highest centres, these real beliefs and motives must be tracked down,
+and their humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and the tiger, in
+fact, are not dead in any one of us. In polite persons they are caged,
+which Is a very <a name="Page_85" id="Page_85" />different thing: and a careful introspection will teach
+us to recognize their snarls and chatterings, their urgent requests for
+more mutton chops or bananas, under the many disguises which they
+assume&mdash;disguises which are not infrequently borrowed from ethics or
+from religion. Thus a primitive desire for revenge often masquerades as
+justice, and an unedifying interest in personal safety can be discerned
+in at least some interpretations of atonement, and some aspirations
+towards immortality.<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65" /><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a></p>
+
+<p>I now go on to a second point. It will already be clear that the modern
+conception of the many-levelled psyche gives us a fresh standpoint from
+which to consider the nature of Sin. It suggests to us, that the essence
+of much sin is conservatism, or atavism: that it is rooted in the
+tendency of the instinctive life to go on, in changed circumstances,
+acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence
+with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our
+best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct,
+the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess; and
+perpetually forces us to use on new and higher levels that machinery of
+habit-formation, that power of implanting tendencies in the plastic
+psyche, to which man owes his earthly dominance. When our unstable
+psychic life relaxes <a name="Page_86" id="Page_86" />tension and sinks to lower levels than this, and
+it Is always tending so to do, we are relapsing to antique methods of
+response, suitable to an environment which is no longer there. Few
+people go through life without knowing what it is to feel a sudden, even
+murderous, impulse to destroy the obstacle in their path; or seize, at
+all costs, that which they desire. Our ancestors called these uprushes
+the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the Christian soul;
+and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our
+spiritual strength. It is true that every man has within him such a
+tempting spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the
+Zoological Gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell.
+&quot;External Reason,&quot; says Boehme, &quot;supposes that hell is far from us. But
+it is near us. Every one carries it in himself.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66" /><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> Many of our vices,
+in fact, are simply savage qualities&mdash;and some are even savage
+virtues&mdash;in their old age. Thus in an organized society the
+acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive
+dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and
+covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar,
+the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the
+great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted
+expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual
+could hardly survive.</p>
+
+<p>When therefore qualities which were once use<a name="Page_87" id="Page_87" />ful on their own level are
+outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's
+spiritualization, then&mdash;whatever they may be&mdash;they belong to the body of
+death, not to the body of life, and are &quot;sin.&quot; &quot;Call sin a lump&mdash;none
+other thing than thyself,&quot; says &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67" /><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a>
+Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as
+religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich
+declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.
+Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse
+satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The
+violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to
+wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature&mdash;the old Adam, in
+fact&mdash;leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength. He
+obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with
+the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality
+keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural
+instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures
+came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68" /><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> St.
+Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a
+spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69" /><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> Games and sport
+of a combative or destructive kind pro<a name="Page_88" id="Page_88" />vide an innocent outlet for a
+certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of
+games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The
+sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent
+in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved:
+failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the
+moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this
+fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London
+provoke the immediate attention of the police.</p>
+
+<p>Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of
+conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its
+conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to
+look at the idea of Salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit
+have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation: on the
+conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if
+he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it, then, from which he
+must be saved?</p>
+
+<p>I think that the answer must be, from conflict: the conflict between the
+pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual
+destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul,
+each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may
+as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts
+and resistances: that the trite verse about &quot;fightings and <a name="Page_89" id="Page_89" />fears
+within, without&quot; does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive
+mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its
+inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason need some
+reinforcement, some helping power, if they are to conquer and control
+his archaic impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from
+the wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive impulse in its many
+strange forms, is a prime business of religion; sometimes achieved in
+the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower
+process of education. The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of
+the Puritan and the extreme ascetic, where all animal impulse is
+regarded as &quot;sin&quot; and repressed: a proceeding which involves the risk of
+grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a
+bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by
+Jacob Boehme, when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man
+to &quot;harness his fiery energies to the service of the light&mdash;&quot; that is to
+say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction,
+harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration:
+this is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic
+conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The
+voice which St. Mechthild heard, saying &quot;Come and be reconciled,&quot;
+expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity.</p>
+
+<p>This need for the conversion or remaking of the <a name="Page_90" id="Page_90" />instinctive life,
+rather than the achievement of mere beliefs, has always been appreciated
+by real spiritual teachers; who are usually some generations in advance
+of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the &quot;root of evil,&quot; the
+heart of the &quot;old man&quot; and best promise of the &quot;new.&quot; Here is the raw
+material both of vice and of virtue&mdash;namely, a mass of desires and
+cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural
+and self-regarding. &quot;In will, imagination and desire,&quot; says William Law,
+&quot;consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70" /><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a>
+The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi &quot;Set love in order, thou
+that lovest Me!&quot; declared the one law of mental growth.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71" /><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> To use for a
+moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the
+first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the
+direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in
+which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast
+setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of
+the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and
+which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard,
+conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and
+higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true
+self-<a name="Page_91" id="Page_91" />conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness,
+reality and worth.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, Academicus,&quot; says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would
+endorse, &quot;forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a
+plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that
+there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth
+of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives
+within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have
+in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and
+rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a
+wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a
+sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only
+restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall
+offer.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72" /><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild
+beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find
+the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert
+turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to
+save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work
+of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been
+directed into a fresh channel of use.</p>
+
+<p>We may now look a little more closely at the char<a name="Page_92" id="Page_92" />acter and
+potentialties of our instinctive life: for this life is plainly of the
+highest importance to us, since it will either energize or thwart all
+the efforts of the rational self. Current psychology, even more plainly
+than religion, encourages us to recognize in this powerful instinctive
+nature the real source of our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic
+personal demands, those impulses to action, which condition the full and
+successful life of the natural man. Instincts in the animal and the
+natural man are the methods by which the life force takes care of its
+own interests, insures its own full development, its unimpeded forward
+drive. In so far as we form part of the animal kingdom our own safety,
+property, food, dominance, and the reproduction of our own type, are
+inevitably the first objects of our instinctive care. Civilized life has
+disguised some of these crude demands and the behaviour which is
+inspired by them, but their essential character remains unchanged. Love
+and hate, fear and wonder, self-assertion and self-abasement, the
+gregarious, the acquisitive, the constructive tendencies, are all
+expressions of instinctive feeling; and can be traced back to our
+simplest animal needs.</p>
+
+<p>But instincts are not fixed tendencies: they are adaptable. This can be
+seen clearly in the case of animals whose environment Is artificially
+changed. In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of the pack
+has become loyalty to his master's household. In man, too, there has
+already been obvious <a name="Page_93" id="Page_93" />modification and sublimation of many instincts.
+The hunting impulse begins in the jungle, and may end in the
+philosopher's exploration of the Infinite. It is the combative instinct
+which drives the reformer headlong against the evils of the world, as it
+once drove two cave men at each others' throats. Love, which begins in
+the mergence of two cells, ends in the saint's supreme discovery, &quot;Thou
+art the Love wherewith the heart loves Thee.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73" /><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> The much advertized
+herd instinct may weld us into a mob at the mercy of unreasoning
+passions; but it can also make us living members of the Communion of
+Saints. The appeals of the prophet and the revivalist, the Psalmist's
+&quot;Taste and see,&quot; the Baptist's &quot;Change your hearts,&quot; are all invitations
+to an alteration in the direction of desire, which would turn our
+instinctive energies in a new direction and begin the domestication of
+the human soul for God.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, is the real business of conversion and of the character
+building that succeeds it; the harnessing of instinct to idea and its
+direction into new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting the
+turmoil of man's merely egoistic ambitions, anxieties and emotional
+desires into fresh forms of creative energy, and transferring their
+interest from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven
+deadly sins of Christian ethics&mdash;Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth,
+Gluttony, and Lust&mdash;repre<a name="Page_94" id="Page_94" />sent not so much deliberate wrongfulness, as
+the outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self-regarding
+instincts; unbridled self-assertion, ruthless acquisitiveness, and
+undisciplined indulgence of sense. The traditional evangelical virtues
+of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience which sum up the demands of the
+spiritual life exactly oppose them. Over against the self-assertion of
+the proud and angry is set the ideal of humble obedience, with its wise
+suppleness and abnegation of self-will. Over against the acquisitiveness
+of the covetous and envious is set the ideal of inward poverty, with its
+liberation from the narrow self-interest of I, Me and Mine. Over against
+the sensual indulgence of the greedy, lustful and lazy is set the ideal
+of chastity, which finds all creatures pure to enjoy, since it sees them
+in God, and God in all creatures. Yet all this, rightly understood, is
+no mere policy of repression. It is rather a rational policy of release,
+freeing for higher activities instinctive force too often thrown away.
+It is giving the wild beast his work to do, training him. Since the
+instincts represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to achieve
+self-protection and self-realization, it is plain that the true
+regeneration of the psyche, its redirection from lower to higher levels,
+can never be accomplished without their help. We only rise to the top of
+our powers when the whole man acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or
+an instinctive need.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95" />Further, a complete and ungraduated response to stimulus&mdash;an
+&quot;all-or-none reaction&quot;&mdash;is characteristic of the instinctive life and of
+the instinctive life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give
+themselves wholly to it; and so display a power far beyond that of the
+critical and the controlled. Thus, fear or rage will often confer
+abnormal strength and agility. A really dominant instinct is a veritable
+source of psycho-physical energy, unifying and maintaining in vigour all
+the activities directed to its fulfilment.<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74" /><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> A young man in love is
+stimulated not only to emotional ardour, but also to hard work in the
+interests of the future home. The explorer develops amazing powers of
+endurance; the inventor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital
+forces, and may carry on for long periods without sleep or food. If we
+apply this law to the great examples of the spiritual life, we see in
+the vigour and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests a
+mark of instinctive action; and in the power, the indifference to
+hardship which these selves develop, the result of unification, of an
+&quot;all-or-none&quot; response to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It
+helps us to understand the cheerful austerities of the true ascetic; the
+superhuman achievement of St. Paul, little hindered by the &quot;thorn in the
+flesh&quot;; the career of St. Joan of Arc; the way in which St. Teresa or
+St. Ignatius, tormented by ill-health, yet <a name="Page_96" id="Page_96" />brought their great
+conceptions to birth; the powers of resistance displayed by George Fox
+and other Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slessor living and working
+bare-foot and bare-headed under the tropical sun, disdaining the use of
+mosquito nets, eating native food, and taking with impunity daily risks
+fatal to the average European.<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75" /><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> It shows us, too, why the great
+heroes of the spiritual life so seldom think out their positions, or
+husband their powers. They act because they are impelled: often in
+defiance of all prudent considerations! yet commonly with an amazing
+success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by &quot;the impulses
+and urgings of an undying ambition&quot; to save souls. What was this impulse
+and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a
+sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced
+will determine its value for life; but its character is much the same in
+the convert at a revival, in the postulant's vivid sense of vocation and
+consequent break with the world? in the disinterested man of science
+consecrated to the search for truth, and in the apostle's self-giving to
+the service of God, with its answering gift of new strength and
+fruitfulness. Its secret, and indeed the secret of all transcendence is
+implied In the direction of the old English mystic: &quot;Mean God all, all
+God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76" /><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a>
+The over-belief, the <a name="Page_97" id="Page_97" />religious formula in which this instinctive
+passion is expressed, is comparatively unimportant The revivalist,
+wholly possessed by concrete and anthropomorphic ideas of God which are
+impossible to a man of different&mdash;and, as we suppose,
+superior&mdash;education, can yet, because of the burning reality with which
+he lives towards the God so strangely conceived, infect those with whom
+he comes in contact with the spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>We are now in a position to say that the first necessity of the life of
+the Spirit is the sublimation of the instinctive life, involving the
+transfer of our interest and energy to new objectives, the giving of our
+old vigour to new longings and new loves. It appears that the invitation
+of religion to a change of heart, rather than a change of belief, is
+founded on solid psychological laws. I need not dwell on the way in
+which Divine love, as the saints have understood it, answers to the
+complete sublimation of our strongest natural passion; or the extent in
+which the highest experiences of the religious life satisfy man's
+instinctive craving for self-realization within a greater Reality, how
+he feels himself to be fed with a mysterious food, quickened by a fresh
+dower of life, assured of his own safety within a friendly universe,
+given a new objective for his energy. It is notorious that one of the
+most striking things about a truly spiritual man is, that he has
+achieved a certain stability which others lack. In him, the central
+craving of the psyche for more <a name="Page_98" id="Page_98" />life and more love has reached its
+bourne; instead of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire which
+may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it He loves the thing which he
+ought to love, wants to do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all
+aspects of his personality satisfied in one objective. Every one has
+really a forced option between the costly effort to achieve this
+sublimation of impulse, this unification of the self on spiritual
+levels, and the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation to
+the animal instincts and unordered cravings of our many-levelled being.
+We cannot stand still; and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in
+mind of all the backward-tending possibilities collectively to be
+thought of as sin, and explains to us why sloth, lack of spiritual
+energy, is held by religion to be one of the capital forms of human
+wrongness.</p>
+
+<p>I go on to another point, which I regard as of special importance.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be supposed that the life of the Spirit begins and with the
+sublimation of, the instinctive and emotional life; though this is
+indeed for it a central necessity. Nor must we take it for granted that
+the apparent redirection of impulse to spiritual objects is always and
+inevitably an advance. All who are or may be concerned with the
+spiritual training, help, and counselling of others ought clearly to
+recognize that there are elements in religious experience which
+represent, not a true sub<a name="Page_99" id="Page_99" />limation, but either disguised primitive
+cravings and ideas, or uprushes from lower instinctive levels: for these
+experiences have their special dangers. As we shall see when we come to
+their more detailed study, devotional practices tend to produce that
+state which psychologists call mobility of the threshold of
+consciousness; and may easily permit the emergence of natural
+inclinations and desires, of which the self does not recognize the real
+character. As a matter of fact, a good deal of religious emotion is of
+this kind. Instances are the childish longing for mere protection, for a
+sort of supersensual petting, the excessive desire for shelter and rest,
+voiced in too many popular hymns; the subtle form of self-assertion
+which can be detected in some claims to intercourse with God&mdash;e.g. the
+celebrated conversation of Angela of Foligno with the Holy Ghost;<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77" /><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a>
+the thinly veiled human feelings which find expression in the personal
+raptures of a certain type of pious literature, and in what has been
+well described as the &quot;divine duet&quot; type of devotion. Many, though not
+all of the supernormal phenomena of mysticism are open to the same
+suspicion: and the Church's constant insistence on the need of
+submitting these to some critical test before, accepting them at face
+value, is based on a most wholesome scepticism. Though a sense of meek
+depen<a name="Page_100" id="Page_100" />dence on enfolding love and power is the very heart of religion,
+and no intense spiritual life is possible unless it contain a strong
+emotional element, it is of first importance to be sure that its
+affective side represents a true sublimation of human feelings and
+desires, and not merely an oblique indulgence of lower cravings.</p>
+
+<p>Again, we have to remember that the instinctive self, powerful though it
+be? does not represent the sum total of human possibility. The maximum
+of man's strength is not reached until all the self's powers, the
+instinctive and also the rational, are united and set on one objective;
+for then only is he safe from the insidious inner conflict between
+natural craving and conscious purpose which saps his energies, and is
+welded into a complete and harmonious instrument of life, &quot;The source of
+power,&quot; says Dr. Hadfield in &quot;The Spirit,&quot; &quot;lies not in instinctive
+emotion alone, but in instinctive emotion expressed in a way with which
+the whole man can, for the time being at least, identify himself.
+Ultimately, this is impossible without the achievement of a harmony of
+all the instincts <i>and</i> the approval of the reason.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78" /><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thus we see that any unresolved conflict or divorce between the
+religious instinct and the intellect will mar the full power of the
+spiritual life: and that an essential part of the self's readjustment to
+reality must consist in the uniting of these <a name="Page_101" id="Page_101" />partners, as intellect and
+intuition are united in creative art. The noblest music, most satisfying
+poetry are neither the casual results of uncriticized inspiration nor
+the deliberate fabrications of the brain, but are born of the perfect
+fusion of feeling and of thought; for the greatest and most fruitful
+minds are those which are rich and active on both levels&mdash;which are
+perpetually raising blind impulse to the level of conscious purpose,
+uniting energy with skill, and thus obtaining the fiery energies of the
+instinctive life for the highest uses. So too the spiritual life is only
+seen in its full worth and splendour when the whole man is subdued to
+it, and one object satisfies the utmost desires of heart and mind. The
+spiritual impulse must not be allowed to become the centre of a group of
+specialized feelings, a devotional complex, in opposition to, or at
+least alienated from, the intellectual and economic life. It must on the
+contrary brim over, invading every department of the self. When the
+mind's loftiest and most ideal thought, its conscious vivid aspiration,
+has been united with the more robust qualities of the natural man; then,
+and only then, we have the material for the making of a possible saint.</p>
+
+<p>We must also remember that, important as our primitive and instinctive
+life may be&mdash;and we should neither despise nor neglect it&mdash;its religious
+impulses, taken alone, no more represent the full range of man's
+spiritual possibilities than the life <a name="Page_102" id="Page_102" />of the hunting tribe or the
+African kraal represent his full social possibilities. We may, and
+should, acknowledge and learn from our psychic origins. We must never be
+content to rest in them. Though in many respects, mental as well as
+physical, we are animals still; yet we are animals with a possible
+future in the making, both corporate and individual, which we cannot yet
+define. All other levels of life assure us that the impulsive nature is
+peculiarly susceptible to education. Not only can the whole group of
+instincts which help self-fulfilment be directed to higher levels,
+united and subdued to a dominant emotional interest; but merely
+instinctive actions can, by repetition and control, be raised to the
+level of habit and be given improved precision and complexity. This, of
+course, is a primary function of devotional exercises; training the
+first blind instinct for God to the complex responses of the life of
+prayer. Instinct is at best a rough and ready tool of life: practice is
+required if it is to produce its best results. Observe, for instance,
+the poor efforts of the young bird to escape capture; and compare this
+with the finished performance of the parent.<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79" /><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> Therefore in estimating
+man's capacity for spiritual response, we must reckon not only his
+innate instinct for God, but also his capacity for developing this
+instinct on the level of habit; educating and using its latent powers to
+the best advantage. Especially on the contemplative side <a name="Page_103" id="Page_103" />of life,
+education does great things for us; or would do, if we gave it the
+chance. Here, then, the rational mind and conscious will must play their
+part in that great business of human transcendence, which is man's
+function within the universal plan.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the deep-seated human tendency to God may best be
+understood as the highest form of that out-going instinctive craving of
+the psyche for more life and love which, on whatever level it be
+experienced, is always one. But some external stimulus seems to be
+needed, if this deep tendency is to be brought up into consciousness;
+and some education, if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus and
+this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition; that is to say,
+by religious belief and practice. Or they may come from the countless
+minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few
+of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or
+environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual
+order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied,
+the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule,
+this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of
+conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and
+reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. There is, however,
+nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself. It has its parallel
+in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a
+method by which <a name="Page_104" id="Page_104" />selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the
+union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.</p>
+
+<p>Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for
+the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the
+Divine. But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very
+little. Thus we see that the author of &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing&quot; spoke as
+a true psychologist when he said that &quot;a secret blind love pressing
+towards God&quot; held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do;
+&quot;for He may well be loved but not thought&mdash;by love He may be gotten and
+holden, but by thought never.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80" /><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> Nevertheless, if that consistency of
+deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by
+us, every man's conception of the God Whom he serves ought to be the
+very best of which he is capable. Because ideas which we recognize as
+partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of
+other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and
+seeking a Reality which fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and
+beauty, as well, as our instinct for good. It is easy, natural, and
+always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a
+little bit below its highest possible. On one hand to wallow in easy
+loves, rest in traditional formul&aelig;, or enjoy a &quot;moving type of devotion&quot;
+which makes no in<a name="Page_105" id="Page_105" />tellectual demand. On the other, to accept without
+criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in
+the furrow of intelligent agnosticism.</p>
+
+<p>Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre
+levels; reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to
+the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for
+comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and
+satisfying its devotional inclinations by any &quot;long psalter unmindfully
+mumbled in the teeth.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81" /><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a> And a certain type of intelligent people have
+an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the
+traditional notions of the past. In so far as all this represents a
+slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin: at
+any rate, it lacks the true character of spiritual life. Such life
+involves growth, sublimation, the constant and difficult redirection of
+energy from lower to higher levels; a real effort to purge motive, see
+things more truly, face and resolve the conflict between the deep
+instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the
+nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do
+not do with them the very best that they possibly can: and the penalty
+of this sin must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The laws of
+apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to
+our sensual impressions: <a name="Page_106" id="Page_106" />what we bring with us will condition what we
+obtain.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We behold that which we are!&quot; said Ruysbroeck long ago.<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82" /><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> The mind's
+content and its ruling feeling-tone, says psychology, all its memories
+and desires, mingle with all incoming impressions, colour them and
+condition those which our consciousness selects. This intervention of
+memory and emotion in our perceptions is entirely involuntary; and
+explains why the devotee of any specific creed always finds in the pure
+immediacy of religious experience the special marks of his own belief.
+In most acts of perception&mdash;and probably, too, in the intuitional
+awareness of religious experience&mdash;that which the mind brings is bulkier
+if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest
+analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this
+machinery of apperception&mdash;humbling though its realization must be to
+the eager idealist&mdash;does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel
+us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the
+contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological
+puzzles; whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual
+experiences we should otherwise miss, because it gives to us the means
+of interpreting them. Pure immediacy, as such, is almost ungraspable by
+us. As man, not as pure spirit, the High Priest entered the Holy of
+Holies: that is to say, he took to the en<a name="Page_107" id="Page_107" />counter of the Infinite the
+finite machinery of sense. This limitation is ignored by us at our
+peril. The great mystics, who have sought to strip off all image and
+reach&mdash;as they say&mdash;the Bare Pure Truth, have merely become inarticulate
+in their effort to tell us what it was that they knew. &quot;A light I cannot
+measure, goodness without form!&quot; exclaims Jacopone da Todi.<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83" /><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> &quot;The
+Light of the <i>World</i>&mdash;the Good <i>Shepherd</i>,&quot; says St. John, bringing a
+richly furnished poetic consciousness to the vision of God; and at once
+gives us something on which to lay hold.</p>
+
+<p>Generally speaking, it is only in so far as we bring with us a plan of
+the universe that we can make anything of it; and only in so far as we
+bring with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire for Him, can we
+apprehend Him&mdash;so true is it that we do, indeed, behold that which we
+are, find that which we seek, receive that for which we ask. Feeling,
+thought, and tradition must all contribute to the full working out of
+religious experience. The empty soul facing an unconditioned Reality may
+achieve freedom but assuredly achieves nothing else: for though the
+self-giving of Spirit is abundant, we control our own powers of
+reception. This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind with the
+noblest possible thoughts about God, refusing unworthy and narrow
+conceptions, and keeping alight the fire of His love. We shall find that
+<a name="Page_108" id="Page_108" />which we seek: hence a richly stored religious consciousness, the lofty
+conceptions of the truth seeker, the vision of the artist, the boundless
+charity and joy in life of the lover of his kind, really contribute to
+the fulness of the spiritual life; both on its active and on its
+contemplative side. As the self reaches the first degrees of the
+prayerful or recollected state, memory-elements, released from the
+competition of realistic experience, enter the foreconscious field.
+Among these will be the stored remembrances of past meditations,
+reading, and experiences, all giving an affective tone conducive to new
+and deeper apprehensions. The pure in heart see God, because they bring
+with them that radiant and undemanding purity: because the storehouse of
+ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter,
+is free from conflicting desires and images, perfectly controlled by
+this feeling-tone.</p>
+
+<p>It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports, from
+the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic
+overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral
+purgation, as the beginning of all personal spiritual life. Man does
+not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher
+levels of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard; complexes of
+which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces
+which they enchain. He must, then, examine without flinching his
+impulsive life, and know what is in his <a name="Page_109" id="Page_109" />heart, before he is in a
+position to change it. &quot;The light which shows us our sins,&quot; says George
+Fox, &quot;is the light that heals us.&quot; All those repressed cravings, those
+quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust
+into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the
+surface and, in the language of psychology, &quot;abreacted&quot;; in the language
+of religion, confessed. The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges
+on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of
+repressing it. The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the
+hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their
+elements brought up into consciousness and faced: and only the self
+which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.
+It is a process of spiritual hygiene.</p>
+
+<p>Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the
+cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives,
+of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge. But
+the emotional colour of this process when it is undertaken in the full
+conviction of the power and holiness of that life-force which we have
+not used as well as we might, and with a humble and loving consciousness
+of our deficiency, our falling short, will be totally different from the
+feeling state of those who conceive themselves to be searching for the
+merely animal sources of their mental and spiritual life. &quot;Meekness in
+itself,&quot; says &quot;The <a name="Page_110" id="Page_110" />Cloud of Unknowing,&quot; &quot;is naught else but a true
+knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is. For surely whoso might
+verily see and feel himself as he is, he should verily be meek.
+Therefore swink and sweat all that thou canst and mayst for to get thee
+a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that
+soon after that thou shalt have a true knowing and feeling of God as he
+is.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84" /><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a></p>
+
+<p>The essence, then, of repentance and purification of character consists
+first in the identification, and next in the sublimation of our
+instinctive powers and tendencies; their detachment from egoistic
+desires and dedication to new purposes. We should not starve or repress
+the abounding life within us; but, relieving it of its concentration on
+the here-and-now, give its attention and its passion a wider circle of
+interest over which to range, a greater love to which it can consecrate
+its growing powers. We do not yet know what the limit of such
+sublimation may be. But we do know that it is the true path of life's
+advancement, that already we owe to it our purest loves, our loveliest
+visions, and our noblest deeds. When such feeling, such vision and such
+act are united and transfigured in God, and find in contact with His
+living Spirit the veritable sources of their power; then, man will have
+resolved his inner conflict, developed his true potentialities, and live
+a harmonious because a spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111" />We end, therefore, upon this conception of the psyche as the living
+force within us; a storehouse of ancient memories and animal tendencies,
+yet plastic, adaptable, ever pressing on and ever craving for more life
+and more love. Only the life of reality, the life rooted in communion
+with God, will ever satisfy that hungry spirit, or provide an adequate
+objective for its persistent onward push.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62" /><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> Ennead IV. 8. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63" /><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 53.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64" /><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> Boehme, &quot;The Way to Christ,&quot; Pt. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65" /><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> Unamuno has not hesitated to base the whole of religion on
+the instinct of self-preservation: but this must I think be regarded as
+an exaggerated view. See &quot;The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in
+Peoples,&quot; Caps. 3 and 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66" /><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> Boehme: &quot;Six Theosophic Points,&quot; p. 98.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67" /><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing,&quot; Cap. 36.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68" /><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> E. Gardner: &quot;St. Catherine of Siena,&quot; p. 20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69" /><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> &quot;Life of St. Teresa,&quot; by Herself, Cap. 30.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70" /><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> &quot;Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law&quot; p. 59.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71" /><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> Jacopone da Todi, Lauda 90.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72" /><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> &quot;Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law,&quot; p. 123.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73" /><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;Amor tu se'quel ama<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">donde lo cor te ama.&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+&mdash;Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 81.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74" /><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> Cf. Watts: &quot;Echo Personalities,&quot; for several illustrations
+of this law.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75" /><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> Livingstone: &quot;Mary Slessor of Calabar,&quot; p. 131.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76" /><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing,&quot; Cap, 40.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77" /><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> &quot;And very often did He say unto me, 'Bride and daughter,
+sweet art thou unto Me, I love thee better than any other who is in the
+valley of Spoleto.'&quot; (&quot;The Divine Consolations of Blessed Angela of
+Foligno,&quot; p. 160.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78" /><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> &quot;The Spirit,&quot; edited by B.H. Streeter, p. 93.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79" /><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> Cf. B. Russell: &quot;The Analysis of Mind,&quot; Cap. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80" /><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> Op. cit., Cap. 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81" /><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> &quot;Cloud of Unknowing,&quot; Cap. 37.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82" /><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> Ruysbroeck: &quot;The Sparkling Stone,&quot; Cap. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83" /><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> Lauda 91.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84" /><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> Op. cit., Cap. 13.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV" /><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112" />CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</p>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>(II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION</p>
+
+
+<p>In the last chapter we considered what the modern analysis of mind had
+to tell us about the nature of the spiritual life, the meaning of sin
+and of salvation. We now go on to another aspect of this subject:
+namely, the current conception of the unconscious mind as a dominant
+factor of our psychic life, and of the extent and the conditions in
+which its resources can be tapped, and its powers made amenable to the
+direction of the conscious mind. Two principal points must here be
+studied. The first is the mechanism of that which is called autistic
+thinking and its relation to religious experience: the second, the laws
+of suggestion and their bearing upon the spiritual life. Especially must
+we consider from this point of view the problems which are resumed under
+the headings of prayer, contemplation, and grace. We shall find
+ourselves compelled to examine the nature of meditation and
+recollection, as spiritual persons have always practised them; and, to
+give, if we can, a psychological account of many of their classic
+conceptions and <a name="Page_113" id="Page_113" />activities. We shall therefore be much concerned with
+those experiences which are often called mystical, but which I prefer to
+call in general contemplative and intuitive; because they extend, as we
+shall find, without a break from the simplest type of mental prayer, the
+most general apprehensions of the Spirit, to the most fully developed
+examples of religious mono-ideism. To place all those intuitions and
+perceptions of which God or His Kingdom are the objects in a class apart
+from all other intuitions and perceptions, and call them &quot;mystical,&quot; is
+really to beg the question from the start. The psychic mechanisms
+involved in them are seen in action in many other types of mental
+activity; and will not, in my opinion, be understood until they are
+removed from the category of the supernatural, and studied as the
+movements of the one spirit of life&mdash;here directed towards a
+transcendent objective. And further we must ever keep in mind, since we
+are now dealing with specific spiritual experiences, deeply exploring
+the contemplative soul, that though psychology can criticize these
+experiences, and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff&mdash;can tell
+us, too, a good deal about the machinery by which we lay hold of them,
+and the best way to use it&mdash;it cannot explain the experiences, pronounce
+upon their Object, or reduce that Object to its own terms.</p>
+
+<p>We may some day have a valid psychology of religion, though we are far
+from it yet: but when <a name="Page_114" id="Page_114" />we do, it will only be true within its own system
+of reference. It will deal with the fact of the spiritual life from one
+side only. And as a discussion of the senses and their experience
+explains nothing about the universe by which these senses are impressed,
+so all discussion of spiritual faculty and experience remains within the
+human radius and neither invalidates nor accounts for the spiritual
+world. When the psychologist has finished telling us all that he knows
+about the rules which govern our mental life, and how to run it best, he
+is still left face to face with the mystery of that life, and of that
+human power of surrender to Spiritual Reality which is the very essence
+of religion. Humility remains, therefore, not only the most becoming but
+also the most scientific attitude for investigators in this field. We
+must, then, remember the inevitably symbolic nature of the language
+which we are compelled to use in our attempt to describe these
+experiences; and resist all temptation to confuse the handy series of
+labels with which psychology has furnished us, with the psychic unity to
+which they will be attached.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent discoveries in the mental
+region will turn out to be that which is gradually revealing to us the
+extent and character of the unconscious mind; and the possibility of
+tapping its resources, bending its plastic shape to our own mould. It
+seems as though the laws of its being are at last beginning to be
+under<a name="Page_115" id="Page_115" />stood; giving a new content to the ancient command &quot;Know thyself.&quot;
+We are learning that psycho-therapy, which made such immense strides
+during the war, is merely one of the directions in which this knowledge
+may be used, and this control exercised by us. That regnancy of spirit
+over matter towards which all idealists must look, is by way of coming
+at least to a partial fulfilment in this control of the conscious over
+the unconscious, and thus over the bodily life. Such control is indeed
+an aspect of our human freedom, of the creative power which has been put
+into our hands. In all this religion must be interested: because, once
+more, it is the business of religion to regenerate the whole man and win
+him for Reality.</p>
+
+<p>If we could get rid of the idea that the unconscious is a separate, and
+in some sort hostile or animal entity set over against the conscious
+mind; and realize that it is, simply, our whole personality, with the
+exception of the scrap that happens at any moment to be in
+consciousness&mdash;then, perhaps, we should more easily grasp the importance
+of exploring and mobilizing its powers. As it is, most of us behave like
+the owners of a well-furnished room, who ignore every aspect of it
+except the window looking out upon the street. This we keep polished,
+and drape with the best curtains that we can afford. But the room upon
+which we sedulously turn our backs contains all that we have inherited,
+all that we have accumulated, many tools which are <a name="Page_116" id="Page_116" />rusting for want of
+use; machinery too which, left to itself, may function satisfactorily,
+or may get out of order and work to results that we neither desire nor
+dream. The room is twilit. Only by the window is a little patch of
+light. Beyond this there is a fringe of vague, fluctuating, sometimes
+prismatic radiance: an intermediate region, where the images and things
+which most interest us have their place, just within range, or the
+fringe of the field of consciousness. In the darkest corners the
+machinery that we do not understand, those possessions of which we are
+least proud, and those pictures we hate to look at, are hidden away.</p>
+
+<p>This little parable represents, more or less, that which psychology
+means by the conscious, foreconscious, and unconscious regions of the
+psyche. It must not be pressed, or too literally interpreted; but it
+helps us to remember the graded character of our consciousness, its
+fluctuating level, and the fact that, as well as the outward-looking
+mind which alone we usually recognize, there is also the psychic matrix
+from which it has been developed, the inward-looking mind, caring for a
+variety of interests of which we hardly, as we say, think at all. We
+know as yet little about this mysterious psychic whole: the inner nature
+of which is only very incompletely given to us in the fluctuating
+experiences of consciousness. But we do know that it, too, receives at
+least a measure of the light and the messages coming in by the window of
+our wits: that it <a name="Page_117" id="Page_117" />is the home of memory instinct and habit, the source
+of conduct, and that its control and modification form the major part of
+the training of character. Further, it is sensitive, plastic, accessible
+to impressions, and unforgetting.</p>
+
+<p>Consider now that half-lit region which is called the foreconscious
+mind; for this is of special interest to the spiritual life. It is, in
+psychological language, the region of autistic as contrasted with
+realistic thought.<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85" /><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> That is to say, it is the agent of reverie and
+meditation; it is at work in all our brooding states, from day-dream to
+artistic creation. Such autistic thought is dominated not by logic or
+will, but by feeling. It achieves its results by intuition, and has its
+reasons which the surface mind knows not of. Here, in this
+fringe-region&mdash;which alone seems fully able to experience adoration and
+wonder, or apprehend the values we call holiness, beauty or love&mdash;is the
+source of that intuition of the heart to which the mystic owes the love
+which is knowledge, and the knowledge which is love. Here is the true
+home of inspiration and invention. Here, by a process which is seldom
+fully conscious save in its final stages, the poet's creations are
+prepared, and thence presented in the form of inspiration to the reason;
+which&mdash;if he be a great artist&mdash;criticizes them, before they are given
+as poems to the world. Indeed, in all man's apprehensions of the
+transcendental these two states of the psyche <a name="Page_118" id="Page_118" />must co-operate if he is
+to realize his full powers: and it is significant that to this
+foreconscious region religion, in its own special language, has always
+invited him to retreat, if he would know his own soul and thus commune
+with his God. Over and over again it assures him under various
+metaphors, that he must turn within, withdraw from the window, meet the
+inner guest; and such a withdrawal is the condition of all
+contemplation.</p>
+
+<p>Consider the opening of Jacob Boehme's great dialogue on the
+Supersensual Life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Scholar said to his Master: How may I come to the supersensual
+life, that I may see God and hear Him speak?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;His Master said: When thou canst throw thyself for a moment into that
+where no creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Scholar said: Is that near at hand or far off?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Master said: It is in thee, if thou canst for a while cease from
+all thinking and willing, thou shalt hear the unspeakable words of God.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Scholar said: How can I hear when I stand still from thinking and
+willing?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Master said: When thou standest still from the thinking and willing
+of self, then the eternal hearing, seeing and speaking will be revealed
+in thee.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86" /><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a></p>
+
+<p>In this passage we have a definite invitation to <a name="Page_119" id="Page_119" />retreat from
+volitional to affective thought: from the window to the quiet place
+where &quot;no creature dwelleth,&quot; and in Patmore's phrase &quot;the night of
+thought becomes the light of perception.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87" /><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> This fringe-region or
+foreconscious is in fact the organ of contemplation, as the realistic
+outward looking mind is the organ of action. Most men go through life
+without conceiving, far less employing, the rich possibilities which are
+implicit in it. Yet here, among the many untapped resources of the self,
+lie our powers of response to our spiritual environment: powers which
+are kept by the tyrannical interests of everyday life below the
+threshold of full consciousness, and never given a chance to emerge.
+Here take place those searching experiences of the &quot;inner life&quot; which
+seem moonshine or morbidity to those who have not known them.</p>
+
+<p>The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious
+experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found
+to have expected this experience to be given to them without any
+deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. They have lived from
+childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have
+never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences
+with any other world than that of sense. Yet all normal men and women
+possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the
+transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty <a name="Page_120" id="Page_120" />or love. In
+some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is
+latent and must be developed in the right way. In others again it may
+exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic outlook; gathering
+way until it claims its rights at last in a psychic storm. Its
+emergence, however achieved, is a part&mdash;and for our true life, by far
+the most important part&mdash;of that outcropping and overflowing into
+consciousness of the marginal faculties which is now being recognized as
+essential to all artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too,
+a large part in the regulation of mental and bodily health.</p>
+
+<p>All the great religions have implicitly understood&mdash;though without
+analysis&mdash;the vast importance of these spiritual intuitions and
+faculties lying below the surface of the everyday mind; and have
+perfected machinery tending to secure their release and their training.
+This is of two kinds: first, religious ceremonial, addressing itself to
+corporate feeling; next the discipline of meditation and prayer, which
+educates the individual to the same ends, gradually developing the
+powers of the foreconscious region, steadying them, and bringing them
+under the control of the purified will. Without some such education,
+widely as its details may vary, there can be no real living of the
+spiritual life.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;A going out into the life of sense<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Prevented the exercise of earnest realization.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88" /><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121" />Psychologists sometimes divide men into the two extreme classes of
+extroverts and introverts. The extrovert is the typical active; always
+leaning out of the window and setting up contacts with the outside
+world. His thinking is mainly realistic. That is to say, it deals with
+the data of sense. The introvert is the typical contemplative,
+predominantly interested in the inner world. His thinking is mainly
+autistic, dealing with the results of intuition and feeling, working
+these up into new structures and extorting from them new experiences. He
+is at home in the foreconscious, has its peculiar powers under control;
+and instinctively obedient to the mystic command to sink into the ground
+of the soul, he leans towards those deep wells of his own being which
+plunge into the unconscious foundations of life. By this avoidance of
+total concentration on the sense world&mdash;though material obtained from it
+must as a matter of fact enter into all, even his most &quot;spiritual&quot;
+creations&mdash;he seems able to attend to the messages which intuition picks
+up from other levels of being. It is significant that nearly all
+spiritual writers use this very term of introversion, which psychology
+has now adopted as the most accurate that it can find, in a favourable,
+indeed laudatory, sense. By it they intend to describe the healthy
+expansion of the inner life, the development of the soul's power of
+attention to the spiritual, which is characteristic of those real men
+and women of prayer whom Ruysbroeck describes as:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122" />
+<span>&quot;Gazing inward with an eye uplifted and open to the Eternal Truth<br /></span>
+<span>Inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and in utter peace.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89" /><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is certain that no one who wholly lacks this power of retreat from
+the surface, and has failed thus to mobilize his foreconscious energies,
+can live a spiritual life. This is why silence and meditation play so
+large a part in all sane religious discipline. But the ideal state, a
+state answering to that rhythm of work and prayer which should be the
+norm of a mature spirituality, is one in which we have achieved that
+mental flexibility and control which puts us in full possession of our
+autistic <i>and</i> our realistic powers; balancing and unifying the inner
+and the outer world.</p>
+
+<p>This being so, it is worth while to consider in more detail the
+character of foreconscious thought.</p>
+
+<p>Foreconscious thinking, as it commonly occurs in us, with its unchecked
+illogical stream of images and ideas, moving towards no assigned end,
+combined in no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call day-dream.
+But where a definite wish or purpose, an <i>end</i>, dominates this reverie
+and links up its images and ideas into a cycle, we get in combination
+all the valuable properties both of affective and of directed thinking;
+although the reverie or contemplation place in the fringe-region of our
+mental life, and in apparent freedom from the control of the con<a name="Page_123" id="Page_123" />scious
+reason. The object of recollection and meditation, which are the first
+stages of mental prayer, is to set going such a series and to direct it
+towards an assigned end: and this first inward-turning act and
+self-orientation are voluntary, though the activities which they set up
+are not. &quot;You must know, my daughters,&quot; says St. Teresa, &quot;that this is
+no supernatural act but depends on our will; and that therefore we can
+do it, with that ordinary assistance of God which we need for all our
+acts and even for our good thoughts.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90" /><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a></p>
+
+<p>Consider for a moment what happens in prayer. I pass over the simple
+recitation of verbal prayers, which will better be dealt with when we
+come to consider the institutional framework of the spiritual life. We
+are now concerned with mental prayer or orison; the simplest of those
+degrees of contemplation which may pass gradually into mystical
+experience, and are at least in some form a necessity of any real and
+actualized spiritual life. Such prayer is well defined by the mystics,
+as &quot;a devout intent directed to God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91" /><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> What happens in it? All
+writers on the science of prayer observe, that the first necessity is
+Recollection; which, in a rough and ready way, we may render as
+concentration, or perhaps in the special language of psychology as
+&quot;contention.&quot; The mind is called in from external interests and
+distractions, one by one the avenues <a name="Page_124" id="Page_124" />of sense are closed, till the hunt
+of the world is hardly perceived by it. I need not labour this
+description, for it is a state of which we must all have experience: but
+those who wish to see it described with the precision of genius, need
+only turn to St. Teresa's &quot;Way of Perfection.&quot; Having achieved this, we
+pass gradually into the condition of deep withdrawal variously called
+Simplicity or Quiet; a state in which the attention is quietly and
+without effort directed to God, and the whole self as it were held in
+His presence. This presence is given, dimly or clearly, in intuition.
+The actual prayer used will probably consist&mdash;again to use technical
+language&mdash;of &quot;affective acts and aspirations&quot;; short phrases repeated
+and held, perhaps expressing penitence, humility, adoration or love, and
+for the praying self charged with profound significance.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If we would intentively pray for getting of good,&quot; says &quot;The Cloud of
+Unknowing,&quot; &quot;let us cry either with word or with thought or with desire,
+nought else nor on more words but this word God.... Study thou not for
+no words, for so shouldst thou never come to thy purpose nor to this
+work, for it is never got by study, but all only by grace.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92" /><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a></p>
+
+<p>Now the question naturally arises, how does this recollected state, this
+alogical brooding on a spiritual theme, exceed in religions value the
+orderly <a name="Page_125" id="Page_125" />saying of one's prayers? And the answer psychology suggests is,
+that more of us, not less, is engaged in such a spiritual act: that not
+only the conscious attention, but the foreconscious region too is then
+thrown open to the highest sources of life. We are at last learning to
+recognize the existence of delicate mental processes which entirely
+escape the crude methods of speech. Reverie as a genuine thought process
+is beginning to be studied with the attention it deserves, and new
+understanding of prayer must result. By its means powers of perception
+and response ordinarily latent are roused to action; and thus the whole
+life is enriched. That faculty in us which corresponds, not with the
+busy life of succession but with the eternal sources of power, gets its
+chance. &quot;Though the soul,&quot; says Von H&uuml;gel, &quot;cannot abidingly abstract
+itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself
+in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of direct
+preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and simplification
+to the soul.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93" /><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a></p>
+
+<p>True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet surrender to reality, &quot;is
+rest to the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body;
+nourishment and refreshment.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94" /><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a> Psychology endorses the constant
+statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one need hope to live
+a spiritual life who cannot find a little time each day for this retreat
+from the window, <a name="Page_126" id="Page_126" />this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen &quot;with
+the forces of the soul,&quot; as Ruysbroeck puts it, &quot;gathered into unity of
+the Spirit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95" /><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> Under these conditions, and these only, the intuitive,
+creative, artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the highest
+ends: and in these powers rather than the rational our best chance of
+apprehending eternal values abides, &quot;Taste and <i>see</i> that the Lord is
+sweet.&quot; &quot;Be still! be still! and <i>know</i> that I am God!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activities are of such
+paramount interest to the spiritual life, we may before we go on glance
+at one or two of its characteristics. And first we notice that the fact
+that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge in the mental and
+contemplative type of prayer explains why it is that even the most
+devout persons are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst
+engaged in it. Very often, they are utterly unable to keep their
+attention fixed; and the reason of this is, that conscious attention and
+thought are not the faculties primarily involved. What is involved, is
+reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to depart from its assigned
+end and drift into mere day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or
+some intruding image starts a new train of associations. The religious
+mind is distressed by this constant failure to look steadily at that
+which alone it wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that
+<a name="Page_127" id="Page_127" />the machinery used is affective, and obedient to the rise and fall of
+feeling rather than the control of the will. &quot;By love shall He be gotten
+and holden, by thought never.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next, consider for a moment the way in which the foreconscious does and
+must present its apprehensions to consciousness. Its cognitions of the
+spiritual are in the nature of pure immediacy, of uncriticized contacts:
+and the best and greatest of them seem to elude altogether that
+machinery of speech and image which has been developed through the life
+of sense. The well-known language of spiritual writers about the divine
+darkness or ignorance is an acknowledgment of this. God is &quot;known
+darkly.&quot; Our experience of Eternity is &quot;that of which nothing can be
+said.&quot; It is &quot;beyond feeling&quot; and &quot;beyond knowledge,&quot; a certitude known
+in the ground of the soul, and so forth. It is indeed true that the
+spiritual world is for the human mind a transcendent world, does differ
+utterly in kind from the best that the world of succession is able to
+give us; as we know once for all when we establish a contact with it,
+however fleeting. But constantly the foreconscious&mdash;which, as we shall
+do well to remember, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of the
+poem, and the creative phantasy&mdash;works up its transcendent intuitions in
+symbolic form. For this purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of
+speech, sometimes that of image. As our ordinary reveries constantly
+proceed by way of an interior conversa<a name="Page_128" id="Page_128" />tion or narrative, so the content
+of spiritual contemplation is often expressed in dialogue, in which
+memory and belief are fused with the fruit of perception. The &quot;Dialogue
+of St. Catherine of Siena,&quot; the &quot;Life of Suso,&quot; and the &quot;Imitation of
+Christ,&quot; all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed
+illustrations of it might be found in every school and period of
+religious literature.</p>
+
+<p>Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spontaneous forms of autistic
+thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their
+consciousness of direct communion with God. I need not point out how
+easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and
+Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their
+characteristic experience. &quot;Blessed is that soul,&quot; says &agrave; Kempis, &quot;that
+heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of
+consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and
+take no heed of the whisper of this world.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96" /><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a> Though St. John of the
+Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the
+most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such
+a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate
+presence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the
+contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as
+it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude
+thrown <a name="Page_129" id="Page_129" />open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have
+already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.</p>
+
+<p>Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the
+experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather
+than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the
+material. Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it
+is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in
+those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of
+those experiences. But many minds are, as it were, their own religious
+artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to
+their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes
+be for them that&mdash;to revert again to our original simile&mdash;the self turns
+from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the
+time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the
+room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this
+happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious
+day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout
+people who tend to visualization have probably known. When the break
+with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in
+which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.
+The Bible is full of examples of this. Good historic instances are the
+visions of Mechthild <a name="Page_130" id="Page_130" />of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first
+contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and
+emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the
+visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this
+type.<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97" /><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a></p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme
+types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is
+with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may
+live it. But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within
+limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is
+inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is
+neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as
+superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our
+neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic world of traditional
+piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial
+heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than
+the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy. We may be sure
+that both are more characteristic of the image-making and
+structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate
+and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value&mdash;or the value of
+any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived&mdash;abides wholly in
+<a name="Page_131" id="Page_131" />the content: the quality of the material thus worked up. The rich
+nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will
+express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a
+veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life. Its psychic
+structures&mdash;however logic may seek to discredit them&mdash;will convey
+spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak
+of illumination. The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the
+religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored. It
+is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the
+field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a
+revelation. The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with
+amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than
+ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the
+Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life. But the
+crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in
+from those visions and contacts, that intercourse? Is transcendental
+feeling involved in them? &quot;What fruits dost thou bring back from this
+thy vision?&quot; says Jacopone da Todi;<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98" /><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> and this remains the only real
+test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of
+contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and
+perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of <a name="Page_132" id="Page_132" />thought. In the
+second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking
+is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and
+actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of
+the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many
+choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its
+true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully
+performed. It is to this region that poetry, art and music&mdash;and even, if
+I dare say so, philosophy&mdash;make their fundamental appeal. No life is
+whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.</p>
+
+<p>We must now go on&mdash;and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful
+experience must lead us on&mdash;to the subject of suggestion, and its
+relation to the inner life. By suggestion of course is here meant, in
+conformity with current psychological doctrine, the process by which an
+idea enters the deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there becomes
+fruitful. Its real nature, and in consequence something of its
+far-reaching importance, is now beginning to be understood by us: a fact
+of great moment for both the study and the practice of the spiritual
+life. Since the transforming work of the Spirit must be done through
+man's ordinary psychic machinery and in conformity with the laws which
+govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of that machinery must
+serve the interests of religion, and show its teachers the way to
+success. <a name="Page_133" id="Page_133" />Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds. The first is
+hetero-suggestion, in which the self-realizing idea is received either
+wittingly or unwittingly from the outer world. During the whole of our
+conscious lives for good or evil we are at the mercy of such
+hetero-suggestions, which are being made to us at every moment by our
+environment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, a dominant
+factor in corporate religious exercises. The second type is
+auto-suggestion. In this, by means of the conscious mind, an idea is
+implanted in the unconscious and there left to mature. Thus do willingly
+accepted beliefs, religious, social, or scientific, gradually and
+silently permeate the whole being and show their results in character.</p>
+
+<p>A little reflection shows, however, that these two forms of suggestion
+shade into one another; and that no hetero-suggestion, however
+impressively given, becomes active in us until we have in some sort
+accepted it and transformed it into an auto-suggestion. Theology
+expresses this fact in its own special language, when it says that the
+will must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious. Thus the
+primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It stands, or should stand, at the
+door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and
+bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of
+the self.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the incoming suggestions.
+They allow uncriticized <a name="Page_134" id="Page_134" />beliefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred,
+anxiety or ill-health, free entrance. They fail to seize and affirm the
+ideas of power, renovation, joy. They would be more careful, did they
+grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted
+suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic
+deeps are plastic to ideas. Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily
+life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the
+suggestion of other peoples' feeling-states; and next under the conative
+form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their
+appearance, habits, deeds. All political creeds, panics, fashion and
+good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion. We are so
+accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the
+strangeness of the process: but it is now known to reach a degree
+previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.</p>
+
+<p>In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this
+psychic suggestibility have long been notorious. Obvious instances are
+those ecstatics&mdash;some of them true saints, some only religious
+invalids&mdash;whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced
+in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ. In less
+extreme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, together with that
+eager emotional desire to be united with the sufferings of the Redeemer
+which medi&aelig;val <a name="Page_135" id="Page_135" />religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole life
+of the contemplative; shaping the plastic mind, and often the body too,
+to its own mould. A good historic example of this law of religious
+suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a young girl, Julian
+prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a
+closer knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the prayer: but it worked
+below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was
+thirty the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be recognized in
+her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of
+that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of
+the Passion to which we owe the &quot;Revelations of Divine Love.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99" /><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a></p>
+
+<p>This is simply a striking instance of a process which is always taking
+place in every one of us, for good or evil. The deeper mind opens to all
+who knock; provided only that the new-comers be not the enemies of some
+stronger habit or impression already within. To suggestions which
+coincide with the self's desires or established beliefs it gives an easy
+welcome; and these, once within, always tend to self-realization. Thus
+the French Carmelite Th&eacute;r&egrave;se de l'Enfant-J&eacute;sus, once convinced that she
+was destined to be a &quot;victim of love,&quot; began that career of suffering
+which ended in her death <a name="Page_136" id="Page_136" />at the age of twenty-four.<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100" /><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> The lives of
+the Saints are full of incidents explicable on the same lines:
+exhibiting again and again the dramatic realization of traditional ideas
+or passionate desires. We see therefore that St. Paul's admonition
+&quot;Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
+things be of good report, think on these things&quot; is a piece of practical
+advice of which the importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it deals
+with the conditions under which man makes his own mentality.</p>
+
+<p>Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful agents either of
+self-destruction or of self-advancement which are within our grasp: and
+those who speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the certitudes of
+religious experience, as &quot;mere suggestion&quot; are unfortunate in their
+choice of an adjective. If then we wish to explore all those mental
+resources which can be turned to the purposes of the spiritual life,
+this is one which we must not neglect. The religious idea, rightly
+received into the mind and reinforced by the suggestion of regular
+devotional exercises, always tends to realize itself. &quot;Receive His
+leaven,&quot; says William Penn, &quot;and it will change thee, His medicine and
+it will cure thee. He is as infallible as free; without money and with
+certainty. Yield up the body, soul and spirit to Him that maketh all
+things new: new heaven and new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new
+works, a new <a name="Page_137" id="Page_137" />life and conversation.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101" /><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a> This is fine literature, but
+it is more important to us to realize that it is also good psychology:
+and that here we are given the key to those amazing regenerations of
+character which are the romance and glory of the religious life.
+Pascal's too celebrated saying, that if you will take holy water
+regularly you will presently believe, witnesses on another level to the
+same truth.</p>
+
+<p>Fears have been expressed that, by such an application of the laws of
+suggestion to religious experience, we shall reduce religion itself to a
+mere favourable subjectivism, and identify faith with suggestibility.
+But here the bearing of this series of facts on bodily health provides
+us with a useful analogy. Bodily health is no illusion. It does not
+consist in merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condition of
+well-being and of power; depending on the state of our tissues and
+correct balance and working of our physical and psychical life. And this
+correct and wholesome working will be furthered and steadied&mdash;or if
+broken may often be restored&mdash;by good suggestions; it may be disturbed
+by bad suggestions; because the controlling factor of life is mind, not
+chemistry, and mind is plastic to ideas. So too the life of the Spirit
+is a concrete fact; a real response to a real universe. But this
+concrete life of faith, with its growth and its experiences, its richly
+various working of one principle in every aspect of existence, its
+correspondences with the Eternal <a name="Page_138" id="Page_138" />World, its definitely ontological
+references, is lived here and now; in and through the self's psychic
+life, and indeed his bodily life too&mdash;a truth which is embodied in
+sacramentalism. Therefore, sharing as it does life's plastic character,
+it too is amenable to suggestion and can be helped or hindered by it. It
+is indeed characteristic of those in whom this life is dominant, that
+they are capable of receiving and responding to the highest and most
+vivifying suggestions which the universe in its totality pours in on us.
+This movement of response, often quietly overlooked, is that which makes
+them not spiritual hedonists but men and women of prayer. Grace&mdash;to give
+these suggestions of Spirit their conventional name&mdash;is perpetually
+beating in on us. But if it is to be inwardly realized, the Divine
+suggestion must be transformed by man's will and love into an
+auto-suggestion; and this is what seems to happen in meditation and
+prayer.</p>
+
+<p>Everything indeed points to a very close connection between what might
+be called the mechanism of prayer and of suggestion. To say this, is in
+no way to minimize the transcendental character of prayer. In both
+states there is a spontaneous or deliberate throwing open of the deeper
+mind to influences which, fully accepted, tend to realize themselves.
+Look at the directions given by all great teachers of prayer and
+contemplation; and these two acts, rightly performed, fuse one with the
+other, they are two aspects of the single act of communion <a name="Page_139" id="Page_139" />with God.
+Look at their insistence on a stilling and recollecting of the mind, on
+surrender, a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful: on the need
+of meek yielding to a greater inflowing power, and its regenerating
+suggestions. Then compare this with the method by which health-giving
+suggestions are made to the bodily life. &quot;In the deeps of the soul His
+word is spoken.&quot; Is not this an exact description of the inward work of
+the self-realizing idea of holiness, received in the prayer of quiet
+into the unconscious mind, and there experienced as a transforming
+power? I think that we may go even further than this, and say that
+grace, is, in effect, the direct suggestion of the spiritual affecting
+our soul's life. As we are commonly docile to the countless
+hetero-suggestions, some of them helpful, some weakening, some actually
+perverting, which our environment is always making to us; so we can and
+should be so spiritually suggestible that we can receive those given to
+us by all-penetrating Divine life. What is generally called sin,
+especially in the forms of self-sufficiency, lack of charity and the
+indulgence of the senses, renders us recalcitrant to these living
+suggestions of the Spirit. The opposing qualities, humility, love and
+purity, make us as we say accessible to grace.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Son,&quot; says the inward voice to Thomas &agrave; Kempis, &quot;My grace is precious,
+and suffereth not itself to be mingled with strange things nor earthly
+consolations. Wherefore it behoveth thee to cast away <a name="Page_140" id="Page_140" />impediments to
+grace, if thou willest to receive the inpouring thereof. Ask for thyself
+a secret place, love to dwell alone with thyself, seek confabulation of
+none other ... put the readiness for God before all other things, for
+thou canst not both take heed to Me and delight in things transitory....
+This grace is a light supernatural and a special gift of God, and a
+proper sign of the chosen children of God, and the earnest of
+everlasting health; for God lifteth up man from earthly things to love
+heavenly things, and of him that is fleshly maketh a spiritual
+man.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102" /><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> Could we have a more vivid picture than this of the
+conditions of withdrawal and attention under which the psyche is most
+amenable to suggestion, or of the inward transfiguration worked by a
+great self-realizing idea? Such transfiguration has literally on the
+physical plane caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to
+speak: and it seems to me that it is to be observed operating on highest
+levels in the work of salvation. When further &agrave; Kempis prays &quot;Increase
+in me more grace, that I may fulfil Thy word and make perfect mine own
+health&quot; is he not describing the right balance to be sought between our
+surrender to the vivifying suggestions of grace and our appropriation
+and manly use of them? This is no limp acquiescence and merely infantile
+dependence, but another aspect of the vital balance between the
+indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of
+<a name="Page_141" id="Page_141" />prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which,
+as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are &quot;receptive of God.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is, then, worth our while from the point of view of the spiritual
+life to inquire into the conditions in which a suggestion is most likely
+to be received and realized by us. These conditions, as psychologists
+have so far defined them, can be resumed under the three heads of
+quiescence, attention and feeling: outstanding characteristics, as I
+need not point out, of the state of prayer, all of which can be
+illustrated from the teaching and experience of the mystics.</p>
+
+<p>First, let us take <i>Quiescence</i>. In order fully to lay open the
+unconscious to the influence of suggested ideas, the surface mind must
+be called in from its responses to the outer world, or in religious
+language recollected, till the hum of that world is hardly perceived by
+it. The body must be relaxed, making no demands on the machinery
+controlling the motor system; and the conditions in general must be
+those of complete mental and bodily rest. Here is the psychological
+equivalent of that which spiritual writers call the Quiet: a state
+defined by one of them as &quot;a rest most busy.&quot; &quot;Those who are in this
+prayer,&quot; says St. Teresa, &quot;wish their bodies to remain motionless, for
+it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose their sweet
+peace.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103" /><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> Others say that in this state we &quot;stop the wheel of
+imagination,&quot; leave all that we can <a name="Page_142" id="Page_142" />think, sink into our nothingness or
+our ground. In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are &quot;inwardly abiding in
+simplicity and stillness and utter peace&quot;;<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104" /><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> and this is man's state
+of maximum receptivity. &quot;The best and noblest way in which thou mayst
+come into this work and life,&quot; says Meister Eckhart, &quot;is by keeping
+silence and letting God work and speak ... when we simply keep ourselves
+receptive we are more perfect than when at work.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105" /><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a></p>
+
+<p>But this preparatory state of surrendered quiet must at once be
+qualified by the second point: <i>Attention</i>. It is based upon the right
+use of the will, and is not a limp yielding to anything or nothing. It
+has an ordained deliberate aim, is a behaviour-cycle directed to an end;
+and this it is that marks out the real and fruitful quiet of the
+contemplative from the non-directed surrender of mere quietism.
+&quot;Nothing,&quot; says St. Teresa, &quot;is learnt without a little pains. For the
+love of God, sisters, account that care well employed that ye shall
+bestow on this thing.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106" /><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a></p>
+
+<p>The quieted mind must receive and hold, yet without discursive thought,
+the idea which it desires to realize; and this idea must interest and be
+real for it, so that attention is concentrated on it spontaneously. The
+more completely the idea absorbs us, the greater its transforming power:
+when interest wavers, the suggestion begins to lose ground. In <a name="Page_143" id="Page_143" />spite of
+her subsequent relapse into quietism Madame Guyon accurately described
+true quiet when she said, &quot;Our activity should consist in endeavouring
+to acquire and maintain such a state as may be most susceptible of
+divine impressions, most flexible to all the operations of the Eternal
+Word.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107" /><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> Such concentration can be improved by practice; hence the
+value of regular meditation and contemplation to those who are in
+earnest about the spiritual life, the quiet and steady holding in the
+mind of the thought which it is desired to realize.</p>
+
+<p>Psycho-therapists tell us that, having achieved quiescence, we should
+rapidly and rythmically, but with intention, repeat the suggestion that
+we wish to realize; and that the shorter, simpler and more general this
+verbal formula, the more effective it will be.<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108" /><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a> The spiritual aspect
+of this law was well understood by the medi&aelig;val mystics. Thus the author
+of &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing&quot; says to his disciple, &quot;Fill thy spirit with
+ghostly meaning of this word Sin, and without any special beholding unto
+any kind of sin, whether it be venial or deadly. And cry thus ghostly
+ever upon one: Sin! Sin! Sin! out! out! out! This ghostly cry is better
+learned of God by the proof than of any man by word. For it is best when
+it is in pure spirit, without special thought or any pronouncing of
+word. On the same manner shalt thou do with this little word God: and
+mean God all, and all God, so that nought work in <a name="Page_144" id="Page_144" />thy wit and in thy
+will but only God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109" /><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> Here the directions are exact, and such as any
+psychologist of the present day might give. So too, religious teachers
+informed by experience have always ascribed a special efficacy to &quot;short
+acts&quot; of prayer and aspiration: phrases repeated or held in the mind,
+which sum up and express the self's penitence, love, faith or adoration,
+and are really brief, articulate suggestions parallel in type to those
+which Baudouin recommends to us as conducive to bodily well-being.<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110" /><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a>
+The repeated affirmation of Julian of Norwich &quot;All shall be well! all
+shall be well! all shall be well!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111" /><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> fills all her revelations with
+its suggestion of joyous faith; and countless generations of Christians
+have thus applied to their soul's health those very methods by which we
+are now enthusiastically curing indigestion and cold in the head. The
+articulate repetition of such phrases increases their suggestive power;
+for the unconscious is most easily reached by way of the ear. This fact
+throws light on the immemorial insistence of all great religions on the
+peculiar value of vocal prayer, whether this be the <i>mantra</i> of the
+Hindu or the <i>dikr</i> of the Moslem; and explains the instinct which
+causes the Catholic Church to require from her priests the verbal
+repetition, not merely the silent reading of their daily office. Hence,
+too, there is real educative value, in such devotions as the rosary; and
+the Pro<a name="Page_145" id="Page_145" />testant Churches showed little psychological insight when they
+abandoned it. Such &quot;vain&quot; repetitions, however much the rational mind
+may dislike, discredit or denounce them, have power to penetrate and
+modify the deeper psychic levels; always provided that they conflict
+with no accepted belief, are weighted with meaning and desire, with the
+intent stretched towards God, and are not allowed to become merely
+mechanical&mdash;the standing danger alike of all verbal suggestion and all
+vocal prayer.</p>
+
+<p>Here we touch the third character of effective suggestion: <i>Feeling</i>.
+When the idea is charged with emotion, it is far more likely to be
+realized. War neuroses have taught us the dreadful potency of the
+emotional stimulus of fear; but this power of feeling over the
+unconscious has its good side too. Here we find psychology justifying
+the often criticized emotional element of religion. Its function is to
+increase the energy of the idea. The cool, judicious type of belief will
+never possess the life-changing power of a more fervid, though perhaps
+less rational faith. Thus the state of corporate suggestibility
+generated in a revival and on which the success of that revival depends,
+is closely related to the emotional character of the appeal which is
+made. And, on higher levels, we see that the transfigured lives and
+heroic energies of the great figures of Christian history all represent
+the realization of an idea of which the heart was an impassioned love of
+God, subduing to its purposes all the impulses <a name="Page_146" id="Page_146" />and powers of the inner
+man, &quot;If you would truly know how these things come to pass,&quot; said St.
+Bonaventura, &quot;ask it of desire not of intellect; of the ardours of
+prayer, not of the teaching of the schools.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112" /><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> More and more
+psychology tends to endorse the truth of these words.</p>
+
+<p>Quiescence, attention, and emotional interest are then the conditions of
+successful suggestion. We have further to notice two characteristics
+which have been described by the Nancy school of psychologists; and
+which are of some importance for those who wish to understand the
+mechanism of religious experience. These have been called the law of
+Unconscious Teleology, and the law of Reversed Effort.</p>
+
+<p>The law of unconscious teleology means that when an end has been
+effectively suggested to it, the unconscious mind will always tend to
+work towards its realization. Thus in psycho-therapeutics it is found
+that a general suggestion of good health made to the sick person is
+often enough. The doctor may not himself know enough about the malady to
+suggest stage by stage the process of cure. But he suggests that cure;
+and the necessary changes and adjustments required for its realization
+are made unconsciously, under the influence of the dynamic idea. Here
+the direction of &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing,&quot; &quot;Look that nothing live in
+thy working mind but a naked intent directed to God&quot;<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113" /><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a>&mdash;suggest<a name="Page_147" id="Page_147" />ing
+as it does to the psyche the ontological Object of faith&mdash;strikingly
+anticipates the last conclusions of science. Further, a fervent belief
+in the end proposed, a conviction of success, is by no means essential.
+Far more important is a humble willingness to try the method, give it a
+chance. That which reason may not grasp, the deeper mind may seize upon
+and realize; always provided that the intellect does not set up
+resistances. This is found to be true in medical practice, and religious
+teachers have always declared it to be true in the spiritual sphere;
+holding obedience, humility, and a measure of resignation, not spiritual
+vision, to be the true requisites for the reception of grace, the
+healing and renovation of the soul. Thus acquiescence in belief, and
+loyal and steady co-operation in the corporate religious life are often
+seen to work for good in those who submit to them; though these may
+lack, as they frequently say, the &quot;spiritual sense.&quot; And this happens,
+not by magic, but in conformity with psychological law.</p>
+
+<p>This tendency of the unconscious self to realize without criticism a
+suggested end lays on religious teachers the obligation of forming a
+clear and vital conception of the spiritual ideals which they wish to
+suggest, whether to themselves in their meditations or to others by
+their teaching: to be sure that they are wholesome, and really tend to
+fullness of life. It should also compel each of us to scrutinize those
+religious thoughts and images which we receive and <a name="Page_148" id="Page_148" />on which we allow
+our minds to dwell: excluding those that are merely sentimental, weak or
+otherwise unworthy, and holding fast the noblest and most beautiful that
+we can find. For these ideas, however generalized, will set up profound
+changes in the mind that receives them. Thus the wrong conception of
+self-immolation will be faithfully worked out by the unconscious&mdash;and
+has been too often in the past&mdash;in terms of misery, weakness, or
+disease. We remember how the idea of herself as a victim of love worked
+physical destruction in Th&eacute;r&egrave;se de L'Enfant J&eacute;sus: and we shall never
+perhaps know all the havoc wrought by the once fashionable doctrines of
+predestination and of the total depravity of human nature. All this
+shows how necessary it is to put hopeful, manly, constructive
+conceptions before those whom we try to help or instruct; constantly
+suggesting to them not the weak and sinful things that they are, but the
+living and radiant things which they can become.</p>
+
+<p>Further, this tendency of the received suggestion to work out its whole
+content for good or evil within the unconscious mind, shows the
+importance which we ought to attach to the tone of a religions service,
+and how close too many of our popular hymns are to what one might call
+psychological sin; stressing as they do a childish weakness love of
+shelter and petting, a neurotic shrinking from full human life, a morbid
+preoccupation with failure and guilt. Such hymns make devitalizing
+suggestions, adverse <a name="Page_149" id="Page_149" />to the health and energy of the spiritual life;
+and are all the more powerful because they are sung collectively and in
+rhythm, and are cast in an emotional mould.<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114" /><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> There was some truth in
+the accusation of the Indian teacher Ramakrishna, that the books of the
+Christians insisted too exclusively on sin. He said, &quot;He who repeats
+again and again 'I am bound! I am bound!' remains in bondage. He who
+repeats day and night 'I am a sinner! I am a sinner!' becomes a sinner
+indeed.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115" /><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a></p>
+
+<p>I go on to the law of Reversed Effort; a psychological discovery which
+seems to be of extreme importance for the spiritual life. Briefly this
+means, that when any suggestion has entered the unconscious mind and
+there become active, all our conscious and anxious resistances to it are
+not merely useless but actually tend to intensify it. If it is to be
+dislodged, this will not be accomplished by mere struggle but by the
+persuasive power of another and superior auto-suggestion. Further, in
+respect of any habit that we seek to establish, the more desperate our
+struggle and sense of effort, the smaller will be our success. In small
+matters we have all experienced the working of this law: in frustrated
+struggles to attend to that which does not interest <a name="Page_150" id="Page_150" />us, to check a
+tiresome cough, to keep our balance when learning to ride a bicycle. But
+it has also more important applications. Thus it indicates that a
+deliberate struggle to believe, to overcome some moral weakness, to keep
+attention fixed in prayer, will tend to frustration: for this anxious
+effort gives body to our imaginative difficulties and sense of
+helplessness, fixing attention on the conflict, not on the desired end.
+True, if this end is to be achieved the will must be directed to it, but
+only in the sense of giving steadfast direction to the desires and acts
+of the self, keeping attention orientated towards the goal. The pull of
+imaginative desire, not the push of desperate effort, serves us best.
+St. Teresa well appreciated this law and applied it to her doctrine of
+prayer. &quot;If your thought,&quot; she says to her daughters, &quot;runs after all
+the fooleries of the world, laugh at it and leave it for a fool and
+continue in your quiet ... if you seek by force of arms to bring it to
+you, you lose the strength which you have against it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116" /><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a></p>
+
+<p>This same principle is implicitly recognized by those theologians who
+declare that man can &quot;do nothing of himself,&quot; that mere voluntary
+struggle is useless, and regeneration comes by surrender to grace: by
+yielding, that is, to the inner urge, to those sources of power which
+flow in, but are not dragged in. Indications of its truth meet us
+everywhere in spiritual literature. Thus Jacob Boehme <a name="Page_151" id="Page_151" />says, &quot;Because
+thou strivest against that out of which thou art come, thou breakest
+thyself off with thy own willing from God's willing.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117" /><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> So too the
+constant invitations to let God work and speak, to surrender, are all
+invitations to cease anxious strife and effort and give the Divine
+suggestions their chance. The law of reversed effort, in fact, is valid
+on every level of life; and warns us against the error of making
+religion too grim and strenuous an affair. Certainly in all life of the
+Spirit the will is active, and must retain its conscious and steadfast
+orientation to God. Heroic activity and moral effort must form an
+integral part of full human experience. Yet it is clearly possible to
+make too much of the process of wrestling evil. An attention chiefly and
+anxiously concentrated on the struggle with sins and weaknesses, instead
+of on the eternal sources of happiness and power, will offer the
+unconscious harmful suggestions of impotence and hence tend to
+frustration. The early ascetics, who made elaborate preparations for
+dealing with temptations, got as an inevitable result plenty of
+temptations with which to deal. A sounder method is taught by the
+mystics. &quot;When thoughts of sin press on thee,&quot; says &quot;The Cloud of
+Unknowing,&quot; &quot;look over their shoulders seeking another thing, the which
+thing is God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118" /><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a></p>
+
+<p>These laws of suggestion, taken together, all seem <a name="Page_152" id="Page_152" />to point, one way.
+They exhibit the human self as living, plastic, changeful; perpetually
+modified by the suggestions pouring in on it, the experiences and
+intuitions to which it reacts. Every thought, prayer, enthusiasm, fear,
+is of importance to it. Nothing leaves it as it was before. The soul,
+said Boehme, stands both in heaven and in hell. Keep it perpetually busy
+at the window of the senses, feed it with unlovely and materialistic
+ideas, and those ideas will realize themselves. Give the contemplative
+faculty its chance, let it breathe at least for a few moments of each
+day the spiritual atmosphere of faith, hope and love, and the spiritual
+life will at least in some measure be realized by it.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85" /><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> On all this, cf. J. Varendonck, &quot;The Psychology of
+Day-dreams.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86" /><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> Jacob Boehme: &quot;The Way to Christ,&quot; Pt. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87" /><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> Patmore: &quot;The Rod, the Root and the Flower: Aurea Dicta,&quot;
+13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88" /><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Ruysbroeck: &quot;The Book of the XII B&eacute;guines,&quot; Cap. 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89" /><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> &quot;The Book of the XII B&eacute;guines,&quot; Cap. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90" /><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> &quot;The Way of Perfection,&quot; Cap. 29.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91" /><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing,&quot; Cap. 39.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92" /><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> <i>Ibid</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93" /><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> &quot;Eternal Life,&quot; p. 396.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94" /><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> Penn: &quot;No Cross, No Crown.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95" /><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> &quot;The Book of the XII B&eacute;guines,&quot; Cap, 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96" /><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. I</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97" /><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> Streeter and Appasamy: &quot;The Sadhu, a Study in Mysticism
+and Practical Religion,&quot; Pt. V.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98" /><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>Que frutti reducene de esta tua visione?<br /></span>
+<span>Vita ordinata en onne nazione.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+&mdash;Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 79.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99" /><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> Julian of Norwich: &quot;Revelations of Divine Love,&quot; Caps. 2,
+3, 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100" /><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> &quot;Soeur Th&eacute;r&egrave;se de l'Enfant-J&eacute;sus,&quot; Cap. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101" /><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> William Penn: &quot;No Cross, No Crown.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102" /><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 58.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103" /><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> &quot;Way of Perfection,&quot; Cap. 33.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104" /><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> &quot;The Book of the XII B&eacute;guines,&quot; Cap. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105" /><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> Meister Eckhart, Pred. I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106" /><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> &quot;The Way of Perfection,&quot; Cap. 29.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107" /><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> &quot;A Short and Easy Method of Prayer,&quot; Cap. 21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108" /><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> Baudouin: &quot;Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion,&quot; Pt. II, Cap
+6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109" /><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> Op. cit. Cap. 40.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110" /><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> Baudouin: &quot;Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion,&quot; loc. cit.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111" /><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> &quot;Revelations of Divine Love,&quot; Cap. 27.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112" /><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> &quot;De Itinerario Mentis in Deo,&quot; Cap. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113" /><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> Op. cit., Cap. 43.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114" /><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> Hymns of the Weary Willie type: e.g.
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;O Paradise, O Paradise<br /></span>
+<span>Who does not sigh for rest?&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+should never be sung in congregations where the average age is less than
+sixty. Equally unsuited to general use are those expressing
+disillusionment, anxiety, or impotence. Any popular hymnal will provide
+an abundance of examples.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115" /><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> Quoted by Pratt: &quot;The Religious Consciousness,&quot; Cap. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116" /><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> &quot;The Way of Perfection,&quot; Cap. 31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117" /><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> &quot;The Way to Christ,&quot; Pt. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118" /><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> Op. cit., Cap. 32.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V" /><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153" />CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT</p>
+
+
+<p>So far, in considering what psychology had to tell us about the
+conditions in which our spiritual life can develop, and the mental
+machinery it can use, we have been, deliberately, looking at men one by
+one. We have left on one side all those questions which relate to the
+corporate aspect of the spiritual life, and its expression in religious
+institutions; that is to say, in churches and cults. We have looked upon
+it as a personal growth and response; a personal reception of, and
+self-orientation to, Reality. But we cannot get away from the fact that
+this regenerate life does most frequently appear in history associated
+with, or creating for itself, a special kind of institution. Although it
+is impossible to look upon it as the appearance of a favourable
+variation within the species, it is also just as possible to look upon
+it as the formation of a new herd or tribe. Where the variation appears,
+and in its sense of newness, youth and vigour breaks away from the
+institution within which it has arisen, it generally becomes the nucleus
+about which a new group is formed. So that individualism and
+gre<a name="Page_154" id="Page_154" />gariousness are both represented in the full life of the Spirit; and
+however personal its achievement may seem to us, it has also a
+definitely corporate and institutional aspect.</p>
+
+<p>I now propose to take up this side of the subject, and try to suggest
+one or two lines of thought which may help us to discover the meaning
+and worth of such societies and institutions. For after all, some
+explanation is needed of these often strange symbolic systems, and often
+rigid mechanizations, imposed on the free responses to Eternal Reality
+which we found to constitute the essence of religious experience. Any
+one who has known even such direct communion with the Spirit as is
+possible to normal human nature must, if he thinks out the implications
+of his own experience, feel it to be inconsistent that this most
+universal of all acts should be associated by men with the most
+exclusive of all types of institution. It is only because we are so
+accustomed to this&mdash;taking churches for granted, even when we reject
+them&mdash;that we do not see how odd they really are: how curious it is that
+men do not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full of rules and
+regulations to enjoy the light of the sun in particular times and
+fashions, but do persistently set up such exclusives clubs full of rules
+and regulations, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God.</p>
+
+<p>When we look into history we see the life of the Spirit, even from its
+crudest beginnings, closely associated with two movements. First with
+the ten<a name="Page_155" id="Page_155" />dency to organize it in communities or churches, living under
+special sanctions and rules. Next, with the tendency of its greatest,
+most arresting personalities either to revolt from these organisms or to
+reform, rekindle them from within. So that the institutional life of
+religion persists through or in spite of its own constant tendency to
+stiffen and lose fervour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals
+which are occasioned by its greatest sons. Thus our Lord protested
+against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best
+of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against
+one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.
+This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional
+authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of
+all great historical faiths. In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in
+our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and
+denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led
+reforms within Islam. That which we are now concerned to discover is the
+necessity underlying this conflict: the extent in which the institution
+on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or
+opposes its free development. It is a truism that all such institutions
+tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize. Are they
+then, in spite of these adverse characters, to be looked on as
+essential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions <a name="Page_156" id="Page_156" />of the spiritual
+life in man; or can this spiritual life flourish in pure freedom?</p>
+
+<p>This question, often put in the crucial form, &quot;Did Jesus Christ intend
+to form a Church?&quot; is well worth asking. Indeed, it is of great pressing
+importance to those who now have the spiritual reconstruction of society
+at heart. It means, in practice: can men best be saved, regenerated, one
+by one, by their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, is
+the life of the Spirit best found and actualized through submission to
+tradition and contacts with other men&mdash;that is, in a group or church?
+And if in a group or church, what should the character of this society
+be? But we shall make no real movement towards solving this problem,
+unless we abandon both the standpoint of authority, and that of na&iuml;ve
+religious individualism; and consent to look at it as a part of the
+general problem of human society, in the light of history, of
+psychology, and of ethics.</p>
+
+<p>I think we may say without exaggeration that the general modern
+judgment&mdash;not, of course, the clerical or orthodox judgment&mdash;is adverse
+to institutionalism; at least as it now exists. In spite of the enormous
+improvement which would certainly be visible, were we to compare the
+average ecclesiastical attitude and average Church service in this
+country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense that religion
+involves submission to the rules and discipline of a closed
+society&mdash;that definite spiritual gains are attached to spiritual
+incorporation&mdash;that <a name="Page_157" id="Page_157" />church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a
+normal and necessary part of the routine of a good life: all this has
+certainly ceased to be general amongst us. If we include the whole
+population, and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true both of
+so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries. Professor Pratt
+has lately described 80 per cent. of the population of the United States
+as being &quot;unchurched&quot;; and all who worked among our soldiers at the
+front were struck by the paradox of the immense amount of natural
+religion existing among them, combined with almost total alienation from
+religious institutions. Those, too, who study and care for the spiritual
+life seem most often to conceive it in the terms of William James's
+well-known definition of religion as &quot;the feelings, acts and experiences
+of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves
+to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the Divine.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119" /><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a></p>
+
+<p>Such a life of the Spirit&mdash;and the majority of educated men would
+probably accept this description of it&mdash;seems little if at all
+conditioned by Church membership. It speaks in secret to its Father in
+secret; and private devotion and self-discipline seem to be all it
+needs. Yet looking at history, we see that this conception, this
+completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, this one-by-one
+achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruit<a name="Page_158" id="Page_158" />ful in the
+past. Where it seems so to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each
+great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul
+achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and
+contemporaries.<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120" /><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a> All great spiritual achievement, like all great
+artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however
+much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the
+racial past. If fulfills rather than destroys; and unless its free
+movement towards novelty, fresh levels of pure experience, be thus
+balanced by the stability which is given us by our hoarded traditions
+and formed habits, it will degenerate into eccentricity and fail of its
+full effect. Although nothing but first-hand discovery of and response
+to spiritual values is in the end of any use to us, that discovery and
+that response are never quite such a single-handed affair as we like to
+suppose. Memory and environment, natural and cultural, play their part.
+And the next most natural and fruitful movement after such a personal
+discovery of abiding Reality, such a transfiguration of life, is always
+back towards our fellow-men; to learn more from them, to unite with
+them, to help them,&mdash;anyhow to reaffirm our solidarity with them. The
+great men and women of the Spirit, then, either use their new power and
+joy to restore existing institutions to fuller vitality, as did the
+successive regenerators of the <a name="Page_159" id="Page_159" />monastic life, such as St. Bernard and
+St. Teresa and many Sufi saints; or they form new groups, new organisms
+which they can animate, as did St. Paul, St. Francis, Kabir, Fox,
+Wesley, Booth. One and all, they feel that the full robust life of the
+Spirit demands some incarnation, some place in history and social
+outlet, and also some fixed discipline and tradition.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, not only the history of the soul, but that of all full human
+achievement, as studied in great creative personalities, shows us that
+such achievement has always two sides. (1) There is the solitary vision
+or revelation, and personal work in accordance with that vision. The
+religious man's direct experience of God and his effort to correspond
+with it; the artist's lonely and intense apprehension of beauty, and
+hard translation of it; the poet's dream and its difficult expression in
+speech; the philosopher's intuition of reality, hammered into thought.
+These are personal immediate experiences, and no human soul will reach
+its full stature unless it can have the measure of freedom and
+withdrawal which they demand. But (2) there are the social and
+historical contacts which are made by all these creative types with the
+past and with the present; all the big rich thick stream of human
+history and effort, giving them, however little they may recognize it,
+the very initial concepts with which they go to their special contact
+with reality, and which colour it; supporting them and demanding from
+them again <a name="Page_160" id="Page_160" />their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the
+present too. Thus the artist, as, well as his solitary hours of
+contemplation and effort, ought to have his times alike of humble study
+of the past and of intercourse with other living artists; and great and
+enduring art forms more often arise within a school, than in complete
+independence of tradition. It seems, then, that the advocates of
+corporate and personal religion are both, in a measure, right: and that
+once again a middle path, avoiding both extremes of simplification,
+keeps nearest to the facts of life. We have no reason for supposing that
+these principles, which history shows us, have ceased to be operative:
+or that we can secure the best kind of spiritual progress for the race
+by breaking with the past and the institutions in which it is conserved.
+Institutions are in some sort needful if life's balance between
+stability and novelty, and our links with history and our fellow-men,
+are to be preserved; and if we are to achieve such a fullness both of
+individual and of corporate life on highest levels as history and
+psychology recommend to us.</p>
+
+<p>The question of this institutional side of religion and what we should
+demand from it falls into two parts, which will best be treated
+separately. First, that which concerns the character and usefulness of
+the group-organization or society: the Church. Secondly, that which
+relates to its peculiar practices: the Cult. We must enquire under each
+head what are their necessary characters, their essential gifts <a name="Page_161" id="Page_161" />to the
+soul, and what their dangers and limitations.</p>
+
+<p>First, then, the Church. What does a Church really do for the
+God-desiring individual; the soul that wants to live a full, complete
+and real life, which has &quot;felt in its solitude&quot; the presence and
+compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other of the forms of
+religious experience?</p>
+
+<p>I think we can say that the Church or institution gives to its loyal
+members:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(1) Group-consciousness.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(2) Religious union, not only with its contemporaries</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">but with the race, that is with</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">history. This we may regard as an extension</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">into the past&mdash;and so an enrichment&mdash;of</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">that group-consciousness.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(3) Discipline; and with discipline a sort of</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">spiritual grit, which carries our fluctuating</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">souls past and over the inevitably recurring</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">periods of slackness, and corrects subjectivism.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(4) It gives Culture, handing on the discoveries</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">of the saints.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In so far as the free-lance gets any of these four things, he gets them
+ultimately, though indirectly, from some institutional source.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand the institution, since it represents the element of
+stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give,
+direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty,
+<a name="Page_162" id="Page_162" />freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its
+dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such
+freshness of discovery; the tendency to exalt the corporate and stable
+and discount the mobile and individual. Its natural instinct will be for
+exclusivism, the club-idea, conservatism and cosiness; it will, if left
+to itself, revel in the middle-aged atmosphere and exhibit the
+middle-aged point of view.</p>
+
+<p>We can now consider these points in greater detail: and first that of
+the religious group-consciousness which a church should give its
+members. This is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that
+group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life. History
+showed us the tendency of all spiritual movements to embody themselves,
+if not in churches at least in some group-form; the paradox of each
+successive revolt from a narrow or decadent institutionalism forming a
+group in its turn, or perishing when its first fervour died. But this
+social impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of master and
+disciples, valuable though they may be, do not fully exhibit all that is
+meant or done by a church. True, the Church is or should be at each
+moment of its career such a living spiritual society or household of
+faith. It is, essentially, a community of persons, who have or should
+have a common sentiment&mdash;belief in, and reverence for, their God&mdash;and a
+common defined aim, the furtherance of the spiritual life under the
+special religious sanc<a name="Page_163" id="Page_163" />tions which they accept. But every sect, every
+religious order or guild, every class-meeting, might claim this much;
+yet none of these can claim to be a church.</p>
+
+<p>A church is far more than this. In so far as it is truly alive, it is a
+real organism, as distinguished from a crowd or collection of persons
+with a common purpose. It exhibits on the religious plane the ruling
+characters of such organized life: that is to say, the development of
+tradition and complex habits, the differentiation of function, the
+docility to leadership, the conservation of values, or carrying forward
+of the past into the present. It is, like the State, embodied history;
+and as such lives with its own life, a life transcending and embracing
+that of the individual souls of which it is built. And here, in its
+combined social and historic character, lie the sources alike of its
+enormous importance for human life and of its inevitable defects.</p>
+
+<p>Professor McDougall, in his discussion of national groups,<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121" /><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a> has laid
+down the conditions which are necessary to the development of such a
+true organic group life as is seen in a living church. These are: first,
+continuity of existence, involving the development of a body of
+traditions, customs and practices&mdash;that is, for religion, a Cultus.
+Next, an authoritative organization through which custom and belief can
+be transmitted&mdash;that is, a Hierarchy, order of ministers, or its
+equivalent. <a name="Page_164" id="Page_164" />Third, a conscious common interest, belief, or idea&mdash;Creed.
+Last, the existence of antagonistic groups or conditions, developing
+loyalty or keenness. These characters&mdash;continuity, authority, common
+belief and loyalty&mdash;which are shown, as he says, in their completeness
+in a patriot army, are I think no less marked features of a living
+spiritual society. Plain examples are the primitive Christian
+communities, the great religious orders in their flourishing time, the
+Society of Friends. They are on the whole more fully evident in the
+Catholic than in the Protestant type of church. But I think that we may
+look upon them, in some form or another, as essential to any
+institutional framework which shall really help the spiritual life in
+man.</p>
+
+<p>We find ourselves, then, committed to the picture of a church or
+spiritual institution which is in essence Liturgic, Ecclesiastical,
+Dogmatic, and Militant, as best fulfilling the requirements of group
+psychology. Four decidedly indigestible morsels for the modern mind.
+Yet, group-feeling demands common expression if it is to be lifted from
+notion to fact. Discipline requires some authority, and some devotion to
+it. Culture involves a tradition handed on. And these, we said, were the
+chief gifts which the institution had to give to its members. We may
+therefore keep them in mind, as representing actual values, and warning
+us that neither history nor psychology encourages the belief that an
+amiable fluidity serves the highest pur<a name="Page_165" id="Page_165" />poses of life. Some common
+practice and custom, keeping the individual in line with the main
+tendencies of the group, providing rails on which the instinctive life
+can run and machinery by which fruitful suggestions can be spread. Some
+real discipline and humbling submission to rule. Some traditional and
+theological standard. Some missionary effort and enthusiasm. For these
+four things we must find place in any incorporation of the spiritual
+life which is to have its full effect upon the souls of men. And as a
+matter of fact, the periodical revolts against churches and
+ecclesiasticism, are never against societies in which all these
+characteristics are still alive; but against those which retain and
+exaggerate formal tradition and authority, whilst they have lost zest
+and identity of aim.</p>
+
+<p>A real Church has therefore something to give to, and something to
+demand from each of its members, and there is a genuine loss for man in
+being unchurched. Because it endures through a perpetual process of
+discarding and renewal, those members will share the richness and
+experience of a spiritual life far exceeding their own time-span; a
+truth which is enshrined in the beautiful conception of the Communion of
+Saints. They enter a group consciousness which reinforces their own in
+the extent to which they surrender to it; which surrounds them with
+favourable suggestions and gives the precision of habit to their
+instinct for Eternity. The special atmosphere, the hoarded beauty, the
+<a name="Page_166" id="Page_166" />evocative yet often archaic symbolism, of a Gothic Cathedral, with its
+constant reminiscences of past civilizations and old levels of culture,
+its broken fragments and abandoned altars, its conservation of eternal
+truths&mdash;the intimate union in it of the sublime and homely, the
+successive and abiding aspects of reality&mdash;make it the most fitting of
+all images of the Church, regarded as the spiritual institution of
+humanity. And the perhaps undue conservatism commonly associated with
+Cathedral circles represents too the chief reproach which can be brought
+against churches&mdash;their tendency to preserve stability at the expense of
+novelty, to crystallize, to cling to habits and customs which no longer
+serve a useful end. In this a church is like a home; where old bits of
+furniture have a way of hanging on, and old habits, sometimes absurd,
+endure. Yet both the home and the church can give something which is
+nowhere else obtainable by us, and represent values which it is perilous
+to ignore. When once the historical character of reality is fully
+grasped by us, we see that some such organization through which achieved
+values are conserved and carried forward, useful habits are learned and
+practised, the direct intuitions of genius, the prophet's revelation of
+reality are interpreted and handed on, is essential to the spiritual
+continuity of the race; and that definite churchmanship of some sort, or
+its equivalent, must be a factor in the spiritual reconstruction of
+society. <a name="Page_167" id="Page_167" />As, other things being equal, a baby benefits enormously by
+being born within the social framework rather than in the illusory
+freedom of &quot;pure&quot; nature; so the growth of the soul is, or should be,
+helped and not hindered by the nurture it receives from the religious
+society in which it is born. Only indeed by attachment, open or virtual,
+through life or through literature, to some such group can the new soul
+link itself with history, and so participate in the hoarded spiritual
+values of humanity. Thus even a general survey of life inclines us at
+least to some appreciation of the principle laid down by Baron von H&uuml;gel
+in &quot;Eternal Life&quot;&mdash;namely, that &quot;souls who live an heroic spiritual life
+<i>within</i> great religious traditions and institutions, attain to a rare
+volume and vividness of religious insight, conviction and
+reality&quot;<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122" /><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a>&mdash;seldom within reach of the contemplative, however ardent,
+who walks by himself.</p>
+
+<p>History has given one reason for this; psychology gives another. These
+souls, living it is true with intensity their own life towards God,
+share and are bathed in the group consciousness of their church; as
+members of a family, distinct in temperament, share and are modified by
+the group consciousness of the home. The mental process of the
+individual is profoundly affected when he thus thinks and acts as a
+member of a group. Suggestibility is then enormously increased; and we
+know <a name="Page_168" id="Page_168" />how much suggestion means to us. Moreover, suggestions emanating
+from the group always take priority of those of the outside world: for
+man is a gregarious animal, intensely sensitive to the mentality of the
+herd.<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123" /><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a> The Mind of the Church is therefore a real thing. The
+individual easily takes colour from it and the tradition it embodies,
+tends to imitate his fellow-members: and each such deed and thought is a
+step taken in the formation of habit, and leaves him other than he was
+before.</p>
+
+<p>To say this is not to discredit church-membership as placing us at the
+mercy of emotional suggestion, reducing spontaneity to custom, and
+lessening the energy and responsibility of the individual soul towards
+God. On the contrary, right group suggestion reinforces, stimulates,
+does not stultify such individual action. If the prayerful attitude of
+my fellow worshippers helps me to pray better, surely it is a very mean
+kind of conceit on my part which would prompt me to despise their help,
+and refuse to acknowledge Creative Spirit acting on me through other
+men? It is one of the most beautiful features of a real and living
+corporate religion, that within it ordinary people at all levels help
+each other to be a little more supernatural than would have been alone.
+I do not now speak of individuals possessing special zeal and special
+aptitude; though, as the lives of the Saints assure us, even the best of
+these fluctuate, and need social <a name="Page_169" id="Page_169" />support at times. Anyhow such persons
+of special spiritual aptitude, as life is now, are as rare as persons of
+special aptitude in other walks of life. But that which we seek for the
+life of to-day and of the future, is such a planning of it as shall give
+all men their spiritual chance. And it is abundantly clear upon all
+levels of life, that men are chiefly formed and changed by the power of
+suggestion, sympathy and imitation; and only reach full development when
+assembled in groups, giving full opportunity for the benevolent action
+of these forces. So too in the life of the Spirit, incorporation plays a
+part which nothing can replace. Goodness and devotion are more easily
+caught than taught; by association in groups, holy and strong
+souls&mdash;both living and dead&mdash;make their full gift to society, weak,
+undeveloped, and arrogant souls receive that of which they are in need.
+On this point we may agree with a great ecclesiastical scholar of our
+own day that &quot;the more the educated and intellectual partake with
+sympathy of heart in the ordinary devotions and pious practices of the
+poor, the higher will they rise in the religion of the Spirit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124" /><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a></p>
+
+<p>Yet this family life of the ideal religious institution, with its
+reasonable and bracing discipline, its gift of shelter, its care for
+tradition, its habit-formation and group consciousness&mdash;all this is
+given, as we may as well acknowledge, at the price which is exacted by
+all family life; namely, mutual accommo<a name="Page_170" id="Page_170" />dation and sacrifice, place made
+for the childish, the dull, the slow, and the aged, a toning-down of the
+somewhat imperious demands of the entirely efficient and clear-minded, a
+tolerance of imperfection. Thus for these efficient and clear-minded
+members there is always, in the church as in the family, a perpetual
+opportunity of humility, self-effacement, gentle acceptance; of exerting
+that love which must be joined to power and a sound mind if the full
+life of the Spirit is to be lived. In the realm of the supernatural this
+is a solid gain; though not a gain which we are very quick to appreciate
+in our vigorous youth. Did we look upon the religious institution not as
+an end in itself, but simply as fulfilling the function of a
+home&mdash;giving shelter and nurture, opportunity of loyalty and mutual
+service on one hand, conserving stability and good custom on the
+other&mdash;then, we should better appreciate its gifts to us, and be more
+merciful to its necessary defects. We should be tolerant to its
+inevitable conservatism, its tendency to encourage dependence and
+obedience to distrust individual initiative. We should no longer expect
+it to provide or specially to approve novelty and freedom, to be in the
+van of life's forward thrust. For this we must go not to the
+institution, which is the vehicle of history; but to the adventurous,
+forward moving soul, which is the vehicle of progress&mdash;to the prophet,
+not to the priest. These two great figures, the Keeper and the Revealer,
+which are prominent in every historical re<a name="Page_171" id="Page_171" />ligion, represent the two
+halves of the fully-lived spiritual life. The progress of man depends
+both on conserving and on exploring: and any full incorporation of that
+life which will serve man's spiritual interests now, must find place for
+both.</p>
+
+<p>Such an application of the institutional idea to present needs is
+required, in fact, to fulfil at least four primary conditions:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(1) It must give a social life that shall develop group consciousness in
+respect of our eternal interests and responsibilities: using for this
+real discipline, and the influences of liturgy and creed.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Yet it must not so standardize and socialize this life as to leave
+no room for personal freedom in the realm of Spirit: for those
+&quot;experiences of men in their solitude&quot; which form the very heart of
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>(3) It must not be so ring-fenced, so exclusive, so wholly conditioned
+by the past, that the voice of the future, that is of the prophet giving
+fresh expression to eternal truths, cannot clearly be heard in it; not
+only from within its own borders but also from outside. But</p>
+
+<p>(4) On the other hand, it must not be so contemptuous of the past and
+its priceless symbols that it breaks with tradition, and so loses that
+very element of stability which it is its special province to preserve.</p>
+
+<p>I go on now to the second aspect of institutional religion: Cultus.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172" />We at once make the transition from Church to Cultus, when we ask
+ourselves: how does, how can, the Church as an organized and enduring
+society do its special work of creating an atmosphere and imparting a
+secret? How is the traditional deposit of spiritual experience handed
+on, the individual drawn into the stream of spiritual history and held
+there? Remember, the Church exists to foster and hand on, not merely the
+moral life, the life of this-world perfection; but the spiritual life in
+all its mystery and splendour&mdash;the life of more than this-world
+perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this,
+not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct
+contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of
+men, who <i>do</i> need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that
+it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and
+imitation.</p>
+
+<p>All organized churches find themselves committed sooner or later to an
+organized cultus. It may be rudimentary. It may reach a high pitch of
+&aelig;sthetic and symbolic perfection. But even the successive rebels against
+dead ceremony are found as a rule to invent some ceremony in their turn.
+They learn by experience the truth that men most easily form religious
+habits and tend, to have religious experiences when they are assembled
+in groups, and caused to perform the same acts. This is so because as we
+have already seen, the human psyche is <a name="Page_173" id="Page_173" />plastic to the suggestions made
+to it; and this suggestibility is greatly increased when it is living a
+gregarious life as a member of a united congregation or flock, and is
+engaged in performing corporate acts. The soldiers' drill is essential
+to the solidarity of the army, and the religious service in some form
+is&mdash;apart from all other considerations&mdash;essential to the solidarity of
+the Church.</p>
+
+<p>We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the
+psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious
+ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man: or that one
+of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the
+threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind. As
+the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her
+sleeping child<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125" /><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a> so the Church takes her children at their moment of
+least resistance, and suggests to them all that she desires them to be.
+It is interesting to note how perfectly adapted the rituals of historic
+Christianity are to this end, of provoking the emergence of the
+intuitive mind and securing a state of maximum suggestibility. The more
+complex and solemn the ritual, the more archaic and universal the
+symbols it employs, so much the more powerful&mdash;for those natures able to
+yield to it&mdash;the suggestion becomes. Music, rhythmic chanting, symbolic
+gesture, the solemn periods of recited prayer, are all contributory to
+<a name="Page_174" id="Page_174" />this, effect In churches of the Catholic type every object that meets
+the eye, every scent, every attitude that we are encouraged to assume,
+gives us a push in the same direction if we let it do its rightful work.
+For other temperaments the collective, deliberate, and really ceremonial
+silence of the Quakers&mdash;the hush of the waiting mind, the unforced
+attitude of expectation, the abstraction from visual image&mdash;works to the
+same end. In either case, the aim is the production of a special
+group-consciousness; the reinforcing of languid or undeveloped
+individual feeling and aptitude by the suggestion of the crowd. This,
+and its result, is seen of course in its crudest form in revivalism: and
+on higher levels, in such elaborate dramatic ceremonies as those which
+are a feature of the Catholic celebrations of Holy Week. But the nice
+warm devotional feeling with which what is called a good congregation
+finishes the singing of a favourite hymn belongs to the same order of
+phenomena. The rhythmic phrases&mdash;not as a rule very full of meaning or
+intellectual appeal&mdash;exercise a slightly hypnotic effect on the
+analyzing surface-mind; and induce a condition of suggestibility open to
+all the influences of the place and of our fellow worshippers. The
+authorized translation of Ephesians v. 19: &quot;<i>speaking to yourselves</i> in
+psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,&quot; whatever we may think of its
+accuracy does as it stands describe one of the chief functions of
+religious services of the &quot;hearty congregational&quot; sort. We do speak <a name="Page_175" id="Page_175" />to
+ourselves&mdash;our deeper, and more plastic selves&mdash;in our psalms and hymns;
+so too in the common recitation, especially the chanting, of a creed. We
+administer through these rhythmic affirmations, so long as we sing them
+with intention, a powerful suggestion to ourselves and every one else
+within reach. We gather up in them&mdash;or should do&mdash;the whole tendency of
+our worship and aspiration, and in the very form in which it can most
+easily sink in. This lays a considerable responsibility on those who
+choose psalms and hymns for congregational singing; for these can as
+easily be the instruments of fanatical melancholy and devitalizing, as
+of charitable life-giving and constructive ideas.</p>
+
+<p>In saying all this I do not seek to discredit religious ceremony; either
+of the na&iuml;ve or of the sophisticated type. On the contrary, I think that
+in effecting this change in our mental tone and colour, in prompting
+this emergence of a mood which, in the mass of men, is commonly
+suppressed, these ceremonies do their true work. They should stimulate
+and give social expression to that mood of adoration which is the very
+heart of religion; helping those who cannot be devotional alone to
+participate in the common devotional feeling. If, then, we desire to
+receive the gifts which corporate worship can most certainly make to us,
+we ought to yield ourselves without resistance or criticism to its
+influence; as we yield ourselves to the influence of a great work of
+art. That influence is able to tune <a name="Page_176" id="Page_176" />us up, at least to a fleeting
+awareness of spiritual reality; and each such emergence of
+transcendental feeling is to the good. It is true that the objects which
+immediately evoke this feeling will only be symbolic; but after all, our
+very best conceptions of God are bound to be that. We do not, or should
+not, demand scientific truth of them. Their business is rather to give
+us poetry, a concrete artistic intuition of reality, and to place us in
+the mood of poetry. The great thing is, that by these corporate liturgic
+practices and surrenders, we can prevent that terrible freezing up of
+the deep wells of our being which so easily comes to those who must lead
+an exacting material or intellectual life. We keep ourselves supple; the
+spiritual faculties are within reach, and susceptible to education.</p>
+
+<p>Organized ceremonial religion insists upon it, that at least for a
+certain time each day or week we shall attend to the things of the
+Spirit. It offers us its suggestions, and shuts off as well as it can
+conflicting suggestions: though, human as we are, the mere appearance of
+our neighbours is often enough to bring these in. Nothing is more
+certain than this: first that we shall never know the spiritual world
+unless we give ourselves the chance of attending to it, clear a space
+for it in our busy lives; and next, that it will not produce its real
+effect in us, unless it penetrates below the conscious surface into the
+deeps of the instinctive mind, and moulds this in accordance with the
+regnant idea. If we <a name="Page_177" id="Page_177" />are to receive the gifts of the cultus, we on our
+part must bring to it at the very least what we bring to all great works
+of art that speak to us: that is to say, attention, surrender,
+sympathetic emotion. Otherwise, like all other works of art, it will
+remain external to us. Much of the perfectly sincere denunciation and
+dislike of religious ceremony which now finds frequent utterance comes
+from those who have failed thus to do their share. They are like the
+hasty critics who dismiss some great work of art because it is not
+representative, or historically accurate; and so entirely miss the
+&aelig;sthetic values which it was created to impart.</p>
+
+<p>Consider a picture of the Madonna. Minds at different levels may find in
+this pure representation, Bible history, theology, &aelig;sthetic
+satisfaction, spiritual truth. The peasant may see in it the portrait of
+the Mother of God, the critic a phase in artistic evolution; whilst the
+mystic may pass through it to new contacts with the Spirit of life. We
+shall receive according to the measure of what we bring. Now consider
+the parallel case of some great dramatic liturgy, rich with the meanings
+which history has poured into it. Take, as an example which every one
+can examine for themselves, the Roman Mass. Different levels of mind
+will find here magic, theology, deep mystery, the commemoration under
+archaic symbols of an event. But above and beyond all these, they can
+find the solemn incorporated <a name="Page_178" id="Page_178" />emotion, of the Christian Church, and a
+liturgic recapitulation of the movement of the human soul towards
+fullness of life: through confession and reconciliation to adoration and
+intercession&mdash;that is, to charity&mdash;and thence to direct communion with
+and feeding on the Divine World.</p>
+
+<p>To the mind which refuses to yield to it, to move with its movement, but
+remains in critical isolation, the Mass like all other ceremonies will
+seem external, dead, unreal; lacking in religious content. But if we do
+give ourselves completely and unselfconsciously to the movement of such
+a ceremony, at the end of it we may not have learnt anything, but we
+have lived something. And when we remember that no experience of our
+devotional life is lost, surely we may regard it as worth while to
+submit ourselves to an experience by which, if only for a few minutes,
+we are thus lifted to richer levels of life and brought into touch with
+higher values? We have indeed only to observe the enrichment of life so
+often produced in those who thus dwell meekly and without inner conflict
+in the symbolic world of ceremonial religion, and accept its discipline
+and its gifts, to be led at least to a humble suspension of judgment as
+to its value. A whole world of spiritual experience separates the humble
+little church mouse rising at six every morning to attend a service
+which she believes to be pleasing to a personal God, from the
+philosopher who meditates on the Absolute in a comfortable <a name="Page_179" id="Page_179" />armchair;
+and no one will feel much doubt as to which side the advantage lies.</p>
+
+<p>Here we approach the next point. The cultus, with its liturgy and its
+discipline, exists for and promotes the repetition of acts which are
+primarily the expression of man's instinct for God; and by these&mdash;or any
+other repeated acts&mdash;our ductile instinctive life is given a definite
+trend. We know from Semon's researches<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126" /><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> that the performance of any
+given act by a living creature influences all future performances of
+similar acts. That is to say, memory combines with each fresh stimulus
+to control our reaction to it. &quot;In the case of living organisms,&quot; says
+Bertrand Russell, &quot;practically everything that is distinctive both of
+their physical and mental behaviour is bound up with this persistent
+influence of the past&quot;: and most actions and responses &quot;can only be
+brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the history
+of the organism as part of the causes of the present response.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127" /><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a> The
+phenomena of apperception, in fact, form only one aspect of a general
+law. As that which we have perceived conditions what we can now
+perceive, so that which we have done conditions what we shall do. It
+therefore appears that in spite of angry youthful revolts or mature
+sophistications, early religious training, and especially repeated
+religious <i>acts</i>, are likely to influence <a name="Page_180" id="Page_180" />the whole of our future
+lives. Though all they meant to us seems dead or unreal, they have
+retreated to the dark background of consciousness and there live on. The
+tendency which they have given persists; we never get away from them. A
+church may often seem to lose her children, as human parents do; but in
+spite of themselves they retain her invisible seal, and are her children
+still. In nearly all conversions in middle life, or dramatic returns
+from scepticism to traditional belief, a large, part is undoubtedly
+played by forgotten childish memories and early religious discipline,
+surging up and contributing their part to the self's new apprehensions
+of Reality.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, the cultus did nothing else, it would do these two highly
+important things. It would influence our whole present attitude by its
+suggestions, and our whole future attitude through unconscious memory of
+the acts which it demands. But it does more than this. It has as perhaps
+its greatest function the providing of a concrete artistic expression
+for our spiritual perceptions, adorations and desires. It links the
+visible with the invisible, by translating transcendent fact into
+symbolic and even sensuous terms. And for this reason men, having bodies
+no less surely than spirits, can never afford wholly to dispense with
+it. Hasty transcendentalists often forget this; and set us spiritual
+standards to which the race, so long as it is <a name="Page_181" id="Page_181" />anchored to this planet
+and to the physical order, cannot conform.</p>
+
+<p>A convert from agnosticism with whom I was acquainted, was once
+receiving religious instruction from a devout and simple-minded nun.
+They were discussing the story of the Annunciation, which presented some
+difficulties to her. At last she said to the nun, &quot;Well, anyhow, I
+suppose that one is not obliged to believe that the Blessed Virgin was
+visited by a solid angel, dressed in a white robe?&quot; To this the nun
+replied doubtfully, &quot;No, dear, perhaps not. But still, you know, he
+would have to wear <i>something</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now here, as it seems to me, we have a great theological truth in a few
+words. The elusive contacts and subtle realities of the world of spirit
+have got to wear something, if we are to grasp them at all. Moreover, if
+the mass of men are to grasp them ever so little, they must wear
+something which is easily recognized by the human eye and human heart;
+more, by the primitive, half-conscious folk-soul existing in each one of
+us, stirring in the depths and reaching out in its own way towards God.
+It is a delicate matter to discuss religious symbols. They are like our
+intimate friends: though at the bottom of our hearts we may know that
+they are only human, we hate other people to tell us so. And, even as
+the love of human beings in its most perfect state passes beyond its
+immediate object, is <a name="Page_182" id="Page_182" />transfigured, and merged in the nature of all
+love; so too, the devotion which a purely symbolic figure calls forth
+from the ardently religious nature&mdash;whether this figure be the divine
+Krishna of Hinduism, the Buddhist's Mother of Mercy, the S&#363;fi's
+Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian piety which are
+familiar to all of us&mdash;this devotion too passes beyond its immediate
+goal and the relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized. It is
+characteristic of the primitive mind that it finds a difficulty about
+universals, and is most at home with particulars. The success of
+Christianity as a world-religion largely abides in the way in which it
+meets this need. It is notorious that the person of Jesus, rather than
+the Absolute God, is the object of average Protestant devotion. So too
+the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach God through and in
+his special saint, or even a special local form of the Madonna. This is
+the inevitable corollary of the psychic level at which he lives; and to
+speak contemptuously of his &quot;superstition&quot; is wholly beside the point.
+Other great faiths have been compelled by experience to meet need of a
+particular object on which the primitive religious consciousness can
+fasten itself: conspicuous examples being the development within
+Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and within pore Brahminism of
+Krishna worship. Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that the
+life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently <a name="Page_183" id="Page_183" />from our simplest human
+impulses and needs. Yet, since the Universal, the Idea, is manifested in
+each such particular, we need not refuse to allow that the mass of men
+do thus enjoy&mdash;in a way that their psychic level makes natural to
+them&mdash;their own measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of God;
+and already live according to their measure a spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>These objects of religious cultus, then, and the whole symbolic
+faith-world which is built up of them, with its angels and demons, its
+sharply defined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications which
+embody certain attributes of God for us, the purity and gentleness of
+the Mother, the simplicity and infinite possibility of the Child, the
+divine self-giving of the Cross;&mdash;more, the Lamb, the Blood and the Fire
+of the revivalists, the oil and water, bread and wine, of a finished
+Sacramentalism&mdash;all these may be regarded as the vestures placed by man,
+at one stage or another of his progress, on the freely-given but
+ineffable spiritual fact. Like other clothes, they have now become
+closely identified with that which wears them. And we strip them off at
+our own peril: for this proceeding, grateful as it may be to our
+intellects, may leave us face to face with a mystery which we dare not
+look at, and cannot grasp.</p>
+
+<p>So, cultus has done a mighty thing for humanity, in evolving and
+conserving the system of symbols through which the Infinite and Eternal
+can be in <a name="Page_184" id="Page_184" />some measure expressed. The history of these symbols goes
+back, as we now know, to the infancy of the race, and forward to the
+last productions of the religious imagination; all of which bear the
+image of our past They are like coins, varying in beauty, and often of
+slight intrinsic value; but of enormous importance for our spiritual
+currency, because accepted as the representatives of a real wealth. In
+its symbols, the cultus preserves all the past levels of religious
+response achieved by the race; weaving them into the fabric of religion,
+and carrying them forward into the present. All the instinctive
+movements of the primitive mind; its fear of the invisible, its
+self-subjection, its trust in ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices,
+its tendency to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy off
+the unknown, to set up magicians and mediators, are represented in it.
+Its function is racial more than individual. It is the art-work of the
+folk-soul in the religious sphere. Here man's inveterate creative
+faculty seizes on the raw material given him by religious-intuition, and
+constructs from it significant shapes. We misunderstand, then, the whole
+character of religious symbolism if we either demand rationality from
+it, or try to adapt its imagery to the lucid and probably mistaken
+conclusions of the sophisticated, modern mind.</p>
+
+<p>We are learning to recognize these primitive and racial elements in
+popular religion, and to endure their presence with tolerance; because
+they are nec<a name="Page_185" id="Page_185" />essary, and match a level of mental life which is still
+active in the race. This more primitive life emerges to dominate all
+crowds&mdash;where the collective mental level is inevitably lower than that
+of the best individuals immersed in it&mdash;and still conditions many of our
+beliefs and deeds. There is the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine
+powers; which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, insists on
+regarding as somehow hostile to us and wanting to be bought off. There
+is the whole idea and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more than
+the big apples and vegetable marrows of the harvest festival be involved
+in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be
+persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by
+famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases
+can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further
+the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical
+efficacy which some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites,
+shrines, liturgic formul&aelig; and religious objects; others, to the texts of
+their scriptures.<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128" /><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> These things, and others like them, are not only
+significant survivals from the past. They also represent the religious
+side of something that continues active in us at present. Since, then,
+it should clearly be the <a name="Page_186" id="Page_186" />object of all spiritual endeavor to win the
+whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in
+language that they understand, we should not too hurriedly despise or
+denounce these things. Far better that our primitive emotions, with
+their vast store of potential energy, should be won for spiritual
+interests on the only terms which they can grasp, than that they should
+be left to spend themselves on lower objects.</p>
+
+<p>If therefore the spiritual or the regenerate life is not likely to
+prosper without some incorporation in institutions, some definite link
+with the past, it seems also likely to need for its full working-out and
+propaganda the symbols and liturgy of a cultus. Here again, the right
+path will be that of fulfilment, not of destruction; a deeper
+investigation of the full meaning of cultus, the values it conserves and
+the needs it must meet, a clearer and humbler understanding of our human
+limitations. We must also clearly realize as makers of the future, that
+as the Church has its special dangers of conservatism, cosiness,
+intolerance, a checking of initiative, the domestic tendency to enclose
+itself and shirk reality; so the cultus has also its special dangers, of
+which the chief are perhaps formalism, magic, and spiritual sloth.
+Receiving and conserving as it does all the successive deposits of
+racial experience, it is the very home of magic: of the archaic tendency
+to attribute words and deeds, special power to a priestly caste, <a name="Page_187" id="Page_187" />and to
+make of itself the essential mediator between Creative Spirit and the
+soul. Further, using perpetually as it does and must symbols of the most
+archaic sort, directly appealing to the latent primitive in each of us,
+it offers us a perpetual temptation to fall back into something below
+our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always
+at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to
+traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back
+into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the
+way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty
+congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting owner to the
+revivalists' penitent-bench.</p>
+
+<p>But on the other hand, Creative Spirit is not merely conservative. The
+Lord and Giver of Life presses forward, and perpetually brings novelty
+to birth; and in so far as we are dedicated to Him, we must not make an
+unconditional surrender to psychic indolence, or to the pull-back of the
+religious past. We may not, as Christians, accept easy emotions in the
+place of heroic and difficult actualizations: make external religion an
+excuse for dodging reality, immerse ourselves in an exquisite dream, or
+tolerate any real conflict between old cultus and actual living faith. A
+most delicate discrimination is therefore demanded from us; the striking
+of a balance between the rightful conservatism of the cultus and the
+rightful independence of the soul. Yet, this is <a name="Page_188" id="Page_188" />not to justify even in
+the most advanced a wholesale iconoclasm. Time after time, experience
+has proved that the attempt to approach God &quot;without means,&quot; though it
+may seem to describe the rare and sacred moments of the personal life of
+the Spirit, is beyond the power of the mass of men; and even those who
+do achieve it are, as it were, most often supported from behind by
+religious history and the religious culture of their day. I do not think
+it can be doubted that the right use of cultus does-increase religious
+sensitiveness. Therefore here the difficult task of the future must be
+to preserve and carry forward its essential elements, all the symbolic
+significance, all the incorporated emotion, which make it one of man's
+greatest works of art; whilst eliminating those features which are, in
+the bad sense, conventional and no longer answer to experience or
+communicate life.</p>
+
+<p>Were we truly reasonable human beings, we should perhaps provide openly
+and as a matter of course within the Christian frame widely different
+types of ceremonial religion, suited to different levels of mind and
+different developments of the religious consciousness. To some extent
+this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism,
+revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. But these varying
+types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the
+complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in
+the relative though <a name="Page_189" id="Page_189" />none in the absolute sense. Did we more openly
+acknowledge the character of that life, the historic Churches would no
+longer invite the sophisticated to play down to their own primitive
+fantasies; to sing meaningless hymns and recite vindictive psalms, or
+lull themselves by the recitation of litany or rosary which, admirable
+as the instruments of suggestion, are inadequate expressions of the
+awakened spiritual life. On the one hand, they would not require the
+simple to express their corporate religious feeling in Elizabethan
+English or Patristic Latin; on the other, expect the educated to accept
+at face-value symbols of which the unreal character is patent to them.
+Nor would they represent these activities as possessing absolute value
+in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>To join in simplicity and without criticism in the common worship,
+humbly receiving its good influences, is one thing. This is like the
+drill of the loyal soldier; welding him to his neighbours, giving him
+the corporate spirit and forming in him the habits he needs. But to stop
+short at that drill, and tell the individual that drill is the essence
+of his life and all his duty, is another thing altogether. It confuses
+means and end; destroys the balance between liberty and law. If the
+religious institution is to do its real work in furthering the life of
+the Spirit, it must introduce a more rich variety into its methods; and
+thus educate souls of every type not only to be members of the group but
+also to grow up to the full richness of the personal life. <a name="Page_190" id="Page_190" />It must
+offer them&mdash;as indeed Catholicism does to some extent already&mdash;both easy
+emotion and difficult mystery; both dramatic ceremony and ceremonial
+silence. It must also give to them all its hoarded knowledge of the
+inner life of prayer and contemplation, of the remaking of the moral
+nature on supernatural levels: all the gold that there is in the deposit
+of faith. And it must not be afraid to impart that knowledge in modern
+terms which all can understand. All this it can and will do if its
+members sufficiently desire it: which means, if those who care intensely
+for the life of the Spirit accept their corporate responsibilities. In
+the last resort, criticism of the Church, of Christian institutionalism,
+is really criticism of ourselves. Were we more spiritually alive, our
+spiritual homes would be the real nesting places of new life. That which
+the Church is to us is the result of all that we bring to, and ask from,
+history: the impact of our present and its past.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119" /><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> William James: &quot;The Varieties of Religious Experience,&quot;
+p. 31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120" /><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> On this point compare Von H&uuml;gel: &quot;Essays and Addresses on
+the Philosophy of Religion,&quot; pp. 230 et seq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121" /><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> W. McDougall: &quot;The Group Mind,&quot; Cap. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122" /><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> Von H&uuml;gel &quot;Eternal Life,&quot; p. 377.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123" /><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> Cf. Trotter: &quot;Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124" /><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> Dom Cuthbert Butler in the &quot;Hibbert Journal,&quot; 1906, p.
+502.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125" /><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> Baudouin: &quot;Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion,&quot; Cap. VII.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126" /><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> Cf. R. Semon: &quot;Die Mneme.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127" /><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> Bertrand Russell: &quot;The Analysis of Mind,&quot; p. 78.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128" /><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> A quaint example of this occurred in a recent revival,
+where the exclamation &quot;We believe in the Word of God from cover to
+cover, Alleluia!&quot; received the fervent reply, &quot;And the covers too!&quot;</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI" /><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191" />CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL</p>
+
+
+<p>In the last three chapters we have been concerned, almost exclusively,
+with those facts of psychic life and growth, those instruments and
+mechanizations, which bear upon or condition our spiritual life. But
+these wanderings in the soul's workshops, and these analyses of the
+forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of
+that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life. I wish
+now to come out of the workshop, and try to see this spiritual life as
+the individual man may and should achieve it, from another angle of
+approach.</p>
+
+<p>What are we to regard as the heart of spirituality? When we have
+eliminated the accidental characters with which varying traditions have
+endowed it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its
+possessor from the best, most moral citizen or devoted altruist? Why do
+the Christian saint, Indian <i>rishi,</i> Buddhist <i>arhat,</i> Moslem <i>S&#363;fi,</i>
+all seem to us at bottom men of one race, living under different
+sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact? This life, which they show
+in its various perfections, includes it is true the ethical life, but
+cannot be <a name="Page_192" id="Page_192" />equated with it. Wherein do its differentia consist? We are
+dealing with the most subtle of realities and have only the help of
+crude words, developed for other purposes than this. But surely we come
+near to the truth, as history and experience show it to us, when we say
+again that the spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest
+beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life that means God in all
+His richness, immanent and transcendent: the whole response to the
+Eternal and Abiding of which any one man is capable, expressed in and
+through his this-world life. It requires then an objective vision or
+certitude, something to aim at; and also a total integration of the
+self, its dedication to that aim. Both terms, vision and response, are
+essential to it.</p>
+
+<p>This definition may seem at first sight rather dull. It suggests little
+of that poignant and unearthly beauty, that heroism, that immense
+attraction, which really belong to the spiritual life. Here indeed we
+are dealing with poetry in action: and we need not words but music to
+describe it as it really is. Yet all the forms, all the various beauties
+and achievements of this life of the Spirit, can be resumed as the
+reactions of different temperaments to the one abiding and inexhaustibly
+satisfying Object of their love. It is the answer made by the whole
+supple, plastic self, rational and instinctive, active and
+contemplative, to any or all of those objective experiences of religion
+which we considered in the first <a name="Page_193" id="Page_193" />chapter; whether of an encompassing
+and transcendent Reality, of a Divine Companionship or of Immanent
+Spirit. Such a response we must believe to be itself divinely actuated.
+Fully made, it is found on the one hand to call forth the most heroic,
+most beautiful, most tender qualities in human nature; all that we call
+holiness, the transfiguration of mere ethics by a supernatural
+loveliness, breathing another air, satisfying another standard, than
+those of the temporal world. And on the other hand, this response of the
+self is repaid by a new sensitiveness and receptivity, a new influx of
+power. To use theological language, will is answered by grace: and as
+the will's dedication rises towards completeness the more fully does new
+life flow in. Therefore it is plain that the smallest and humblest
+beginning of such a life in ourselves&mdash;and this inquiry is useless
+unless it be made to speak to our own condition&mdash;will entail not merely
+an addition to life, but for us too a change in our whole scale of
+values, a self-dedication. For that which we are here shown as a
+possible human achievement is not a life of comfortable piety, or the
+enjoyment of the delicious sensations of the armchair mystic. We are
+offered, it is true, a new dower of life; access to the full
+possibilities of human nature. But only upon terms, and these terms
+include new obligations in respect of that life; compelling us, as it
+appears, to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual refusal to
+sink back into the next-best, to slide <a name="Page_194" id="Page_194" />along a gentle incline. The
+spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe
+distance from the Fire of Love. It demands, indeed, very often things so
+hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman: immensely
+generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant
+purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means a complete conquest of life's
+perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance
+of hardship and pain. And if we ask how this can be, what it is that
+makes possible such enhancement of human will and of human courage, the
+only answer seems to be that of the Johannine Christ: that it does
+consist in a more abundant life.</p>
+
+<p>In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding
+of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its
+general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely
+physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral
+conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full
+integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in
+fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and
+for the new ideals. There was something of the penitent, something of
+the contemplative, and something of the apostle in every man or woman
+who thus grew to their full stature and realized all their latent
+possibilities. But above all there was a fortitude, an all-round power
+of tackling existence, which comes <a name="Page_195" id="Page_195" />from complete indifference to
+personal suffering or personal success. And further, psychology showed
+us, that those workings and readjustments which we saw preparing this
+life of the Spirit, were in line with those which prepare us for
+fullness of life on other levels: that is to say the harnessing of the
+impulsive nature to the purposes chosen by consciousness, the resolving
+of conflicts, the unification of the whole personality about one's
+dominant interest. These readjustments were helped by the deliberate
+acceptance of the useful suggestions of religion, the education of the
+foreconscious, the formation of habits of charity and prayer.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest and most real of living writers on this subject, Baron von
+H&uuml;gel, has given us another definition of the personal spiritual life
+which may fruitfully be compared with this. It must and shall, he says,
+exhibit rightful contact with and renunciation of the Particular and
+Fleeting; and with this ever seeks and finds the Eternal&mdash;deepening and
+incarnating within its own experience this &quot;transcendent
+Otherness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129" /><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> Nothing which we are likely to achieve can go beyond
+this profound saying. We see how many rich elements are contained in it:
+effort and growth, a temper both social and ascetic, a demand for and a
+receiving of power. True, to some extent it restates the position at
+which we arrived in the first chapter: but we now wish to examine <a name="Page_196" id="Page_196" />more
+thoroughly into that position and discover its practical applications.
+Let us then begin by unpacking it, and examining its chief characters
+one by one.</p>
+
+<p>If we do this, we find that it demands of us:&mdash;(1) Rightful contact with
+the Particular and Fleeting. That is, a willing acceptance of all
+this-world tasks, obligations, relations, and joys; in fact, the Active
+Life of Becoming in its completeness.</p>
+
+<p>(2) But also, a certain renunciation of that Particular and Fleeting. A
+refusal to get everything out of it that we can for ourselves, to be
+possessive, or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a sense of
+detachment or asceticism; of further destiny and obligation for the soul
+than complete earthly happiness or here-and-now success.</p>
+
+<p>(3) And with this ever&mdash;not merely in hours of devotion&mdash;to seek and
+find the Eternal; penetrating our wholesome this-world action through
+and through with the very spirit of contemplation.</p>
+
+<p>(4) Thus deepening and incarnating&mdash;bringing in, giving body to, and in
+some sense exhibiting by means of our own growing and changing
+experience&mdash;that transcendent Otherness, the fact of the Life of the
+Spirit in the here-and-now.</p>
+
+<p>The full life of the Spirit, then, is once more declared to be active,
+contemplative, ascetic and apostolic; though nowadays we express these
+abiding human dispositions in other and less formidable terms. If we
+translate them as work, prayer, self-discipline <a name="Page_197" id="Page_197" />and social service they
+do not look quite so bad. But even so, what a tremendous programme to
+put before the ordinary human creature, and how difficult it looks when
+thus arranged! That balance to be discovered and held between due
+contact with this present living world of time, and due renunciation of
+it. That continual penetration of the time-world with the spirit of
+Eternity.</p>
+
+<p>But now, in accordance with the ruling idea which has occupied us in
+this book, let us arrange these four demands in different order. Let us
+put number three first: &quot;ever seeking and finding the Eternal.&quot;
+Conceive, at least, that we do this really, and in a practical way. Then
+we discover that, placed as we certainly are in a world of succession,
+most of the seeking and finding has got to be done there; that the times
+of pure abstraction in which we touch the non-successive and
+supersensual must be few. Hence it follows that the first and second
+demands are at once fully met; for, if we are indeed faithfully seeking
+and finding the Eternal whilst living&mdash;as all sane men and women must
+do&mdash;in closest contact with the Particular and Fleeting, our acceptances
+and our renunciations will be governed by this higher term of
+experience. And further, the transcendent Otherness, perpetually
+envisaged by us as alone giving the world of sense its beauty, reality
+and value, will be incarnated and expressed by us in this sense-life,
+and thus ever more completely tasted and known. It will be drawn by us,
+as best we can, <a name="Page_198" id="Page_198" />and often at the cost of bitter struggle, into the
+limitations of humanity; entincturing our attitude and our actions. And
+in the degree in which we thus appropriate it, it will be given out by
+us again to other men.</p>
+
+<p>All this, of course, says again that which men have been constantly told
+by those who sought to redeem them from their confusions, and show them
+the way to fullness of life. &quot;Seek first the Kingdom of God,&quot; said
+Jesus, &quot;and all the rest shall be added to you.&quot; &quot;Love,&quot; said St.
+Augustine, &quot;and <i>do</i> what you like&quot;; &quot;Let nothing,&quot; says Thomas &agrave;
+Kempis, &quot;be great or high or acceptable to thee but purely God&quot;;<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130" /><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a>
+and Kabir, &quot;Open your eyes of love, and see Him who pervades this world!
+consider it well, and know that this is your own country.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131" /><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a> &quot;Our
+whole teaching,&quot; says Boehme, &quot;is nothing else than how man should
+kindle in himself God's light-world.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132" /><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a> I do not say that such a
+presentation of it makes the personal spiritual life any easier: nothing
+does that. But it does make its central implicit rather clearer, shows
+us at once its difficulty and its simplicity; since it depends on the
+consistent subordination of every impulse and every action to one
+regnant aim and interest&mdash;in other words, the unification of the whole
+self round one centre, the highest conceivable by man. Each of man's
+behaviour-cycles is always directed towards some end, <a name="Page_199" id="Page_199" />of which he may
+or may not be vividly conscious. But in that perfect unification of the
+self which is characteristic of the life of Spirit, all his behaviour is
+brought into one stream of purpose, and directed towards one
+transcendent end. And this simplification alone means for him a release
+from conflicting wishes, and so a tremendous increase of power.</p>
+
+<p>If then we admit this formula, &quot;ever seeking and finding the
+Eternal&quot;&mdash;which is of course another rendering of Ruysbroeck's &quot;aiming
+at God&quot;&mdash;as the prime character of a spiritual life, the secret of human
+transcendence; what are the agents by which it is done?</p>
+
+<p>Here, men and women of all times and all religions, who have achieved
+this fullness of life, agree in their answer: and by this answer we are
+at once taken away from dry philosophic conceptions and introduced into
+the very heart of human experience. It is done, they say, on man's part
+by Love and Prayer: and these, properly understood in their
+inexhaustible richness, joy, pain, dedication and noble simplicity,
+cover the whole field of the spiritual life. Without them, that life is
+impossible; with them, if the self be true to their implications, some
+measure of it cannot be escaped. I said, Love and Prayer properly
+understood: not as two movements of emotional piety, but as fundamental
+human dispositions, as the typical attitude and action which control
+man's growth into greater <a name="Page_200" id="Page_200" />reality. Since then they are of such primary
+importance to us, it will be worth while at this stage to look into them
+a little more closely.</p>
+
+<p>First, Love: that over-worked and ill-used word, often confused on the
+one hand with passion and on the other with amiability. If we ask the
+most fashionable sort of psychologist what love is, he says that it is
+the impulse urging us towards that end which is the fulfilment of any
+series of deeds or &quot;behaviour-cycle&quot;; the psychic thread, on which all
+the apparently separate actions making up that cycle are strung and
+united. In this sense love need not be fully conscious, reach the level
+of feeling; but it <i>must</i> be an imperative, inward urge. And if we ask
+those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say
+that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul
+towards its Source;<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133" /><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a> which impels every living thing to pursue the
+most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of
+self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God. Love is
+for them much more than its emotional manifestations. It is &quot;the
+ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things&quot;&mdash;no less.
+This definition, which I take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas
+Aquinas,<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134" /><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> would be agreeable to the most modern psychologist; he
+might give the hidden steersman of the psyche in its perpetual movement
+towards nov<a name="Page_201" id="Page_201" />elty a less beautiful and significant name. &quot;This indwelling
+Love,&quot; says Plotinus, &quot;is no other than the Spirit which, as we are
+told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several
+nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular soul,
+strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Love, the
+guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its being.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135" /><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a></p>
+
+<p>Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at whatever level it be
+experienced, the psychic craving, the urgent spirit within us pressing
+out to life, is always <i>one;</i> and that the sublimation of this vital
+craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regeneration? There, in
+our instinctive nature&mdash;which, as we know, makes us the kind of animal
+we are&mdash;abides that power of loving which is, really, the power of
+living; the cause of our actions, the controlling factor in our
+perceptions, the force pressing us into any given type of experience,
+turning aside for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater
+vigour. Each level of the universe makes solicitations to this power:
+the worlds of sense, of thought, of beauty, and of action. According to
+the degree of our development, the trend of the conscious will, is our
+response; and according to that response will be our life. &quot;The world to
+which a man turns himself,&quot; says Boehme, &quot;and in which he produces
+fruit, the same is lord in him, and this world becomes manifest in
+him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136" /><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202" />From all this it becomes clear what the love of God is; and what St.
+Augustine meant when he said that all virtue&mdash;and virtue after all means
+power not goodness&mdash;lay in the right ordering of love, the conscious
+orientation of desire. Christians, on the authority of their Master,
+declare that such love of God requires all that they have, not only of
+feeling, but also of intellect and of power; since He is to be loved
+with heart and mind and strength. Thought and action on highest levels
+are involved in it, for it means, not religious emotionalism, but the
+unflickering orientation of the whole self towards Him, ever seeking and
+finding the Eternal; the linking up of all behaviour on that string, so
+that the apparently hard and always heroic choices which are demanded,
+are made at last because they are inevitable. It is true that this
+dominant interest will give to our lives a special emotional colour and
+a special kind of happiness; but in this, as in the best, deepest,
+richest human love, such feeling-tone and such happiness&mdash;though in some
+natures of great beauty and intensity&mdash;are only to be looked upon as
+secondary characters, and never to be aimed at.</p>
+
+<p>When St. Teresa said that the real object of the spiritual marriage was
+&quot;the incessant production of work, work,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_137_137" id="FNanchor_137_137" /><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a> I have no doubt that many
+of her nuns were disconcerted; especially the type of ease-loving
+conservatives whom she and her intimates were accustomed to refer to as
+the pussy-cats. But <a name="Page_203" id="Page_203" />in this direct application to religious experience
+of St. Thomas' doctrine of love, she set up an ideal of the spiritual
+life which is as valid at the present day in the entanglements of our
+social order, as it was in the enclosed convents of sixteenth-century
+Spain. Love, we said, is the cause of action. It urges and directs our
+behaviour, conscious and involuntary, towards an end. The mother is
+irresistibly impelled to act towards her child's welfare, the ambitious
+man towards success, the artist towards expression of his vision. All
+these are examples of behaviour, love-driven towards ends. And religious
+experience discloses to us a greater more inclusive end, and this vital
+power of love as capable of being used on the highest levels,
+regenerated, directed to eternal interests; subordinating behaviour,
+inspiring suffering, unifying the whole self and its activities,
+mobilizing them for this transcendental achievement. This generous love,
+to go back to the quotation from Baron von H&uuml;gel which opened our
+inquiry, will indeed cause the behaviour it controls to exhibit both
+rightful contact with and renunciation of the particular and fleeting;
+because in and through this series of linked deeds it is uniting with
+itself all human activities, and in and through them is seeking and
+finding its eternal end. So, in that rightful bringing-in of novelty
+which is the business of the fully living soul, the most powerful agent
+is love, understood as the controlling factor of behaviour, the
+sublimation and union of will <a name="Page_204" id="Page_204" />and desire. &quot;Let love,&quot; says Boehme, &quot;be
+the life of thy nature. It killeth thee not, but quickeneth thee
+according to its life, and then thou livest, yet not to thy own will but
+to its will: for thy will becometh its will, and then thou art dead to
+thyself but alive to God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_138_138" id="FNanchor_138_138" /><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a> There is the true, solid and for us most
+fruitful doctrine of divine union, unconnected with any rapture, trance,
+ecstasy or abnormal state of mind: a union organic, conscious, and
+dynamic with the Creative Spirit of Life.</p>
+
+<p>If we now go on to ask how, specially, we shall achieve this union in
+such degree as is possible to each one of us; the answer must be, that
+it will be done by Prayer. If the seeking of the Eternal is actuated by
+love, the finding of it is achieved through prayer. Prayer, in
+fact&mdash;understood as a life or state, not an act or an asking&mdash;is the
+beginning, middle and end of all that we are now considering. As the
+social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the
+spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual
+world. And such humble yet ardent contact with the spiritual
+world&mdash;opening up to its suggestions our impulses, our reveries, our
+feelings, our most secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts-is
+the essence of prayer, understood in its widest sense. No more than
+surrender or love can prayer be reduced to &quot;one act.&quot; Those who seek to
+sublimate it into &quot;pure&quot; contemplation are as lim<a name="Page_205" id="Page_205" />ited at one end of the
+scale, as those who reduce it to articulate petition are at the other.
+It contains in itself a rich variety of human reactions and experiences.
+It opens the door upon an unwalled world, in which the self truly lives
+and therefore makes widely various responses to its infinitely varying
+stimuli. Into that world the self takes, or should take, its special
+needs, aptitudes and longings, and matches them against its apprehension
+of Eternal Truth. In this meeting of the human heart with all that it
+can apprehend of Reality, not adoration alone but unbounded contrition,
+not humble dependence alone but joy, peace and power, not rapture alone
+but mysterious darkness, must be woven into the fabric of love. In this
+world the soul may sometimes wander as if in pastures, sometimes is
+poised breathless and intent. Sometimes it is fed by beauty, sometimes
+by most difficult truth, and experiences the extremes of riches and
+destitution, darkness and light. &quot;It is not,&quot; says Plotinus, &quot;by
+crushing the Divine into a unity but by displaying its exuberance, as
+the Supreme Himself has displayed it, that we show knowledge of the
+might of God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139" /><a href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thus, by that instinctive and warmly devoted direction of its behaviour
+which is love, and that willed attention to and communion with the
+spiritual world which is prayer, all the powers of the self are united
+and turned towards the seeking and find<a name="Page_206" id="Page_206" />ing of the Eternal. It is by
+complete obedience to this exacting love, doing difficult and unselfish
+things, giving up easy and comfortable things&mdash;in fact by living, living
+hard on the highest levels&mdash;that men more and more deeply feel,
+experience, and enter into their spiritual life. This is a fact which
+must seem rather awkward to those who put forward pathological
+explanations of it. And on the other hand it is only by constant
+contacts with and recourse to the energizing life of Spirit, that this
+hard vocation can be fulfilled. Such a power of reference to Reality, of
+transcending the world of succession and its values, can be cultivated
+by us; and this education of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of
+the discipline of prayer. True, it is only in times of recollection or
+of great emotion that this profound contact is fully present to
+consciousness. Yet, once fully achieved and its obligations accepted by
+us, it continues as a grave melody within our busy outward acts: and we
+must by right direction of our deepest instincts so find and feel the
+Eternal all the time, if indeed we are to actualize and incarnate it all
+the time. From this truth of experience, religion has deduced the
+doctrine of grace, and the general conception of man as able to do
+nothing of himself. This need hardly surprise us. For equally on the
+physical plane man can do nothing of himself, if he be cut off from his
+physical sources of power: from food to eat, and air to breathe.
+Therefore the fact that his spiritual life too is de<a name="Page_207" id="Page_207" />pendent upon the
+life-giving atmosphere that penetrates him, and the heavenly food which
+he receives, makes no fracture in his experience. Thus we are brought
+back by another path to the fundamental need for him, in some form, of
+the balanced active and contemplative life.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of this, many people seem to take it for granted that if a man
+believes in and desires to live a spiritual life, he can live it in
+utter independence of spiritual food. He believes in God, loves his
+neighbour, wants to do good, and just goes ahead. The result of this is
+that the life of the God-fearing citizen or the Social Christian, as now
+conceived and practised, is generally the starved life. It leaves no
+time for the silence, the withdrawal, the quiet attention to the
+spiritual, which is essential if it is to develop all its powers. Yet
+the literature of the Spirit is full of warnings on this subject.
+<i>Taste</i> and see that the Lord is sweet. They that wait upon the Lord
+shall renew their <i>strength</i>. In quietness and confidence shall be your
+<i>strength</i>. These are practical statements; addressed, not to
+specialists but to ordinary men and women, with a normal psycho-physical
+make-up. They are literally true now, or can be if we choose. They do
+not involve any peculiar training, or unnatural effort. A sliding scale
+goes from the simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to that
+complete self-loss and complete self-finding, which is called the
+transforming union of the saint; <a name="Page_208" id="Page_208" />and somewhere in this series, every
+human soul can find a place.</p>
+
+<p>If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to receive what St.
+Augustine called the food of the full-grown, to find and feel the
+Eternal, we must give time and place to it in our lives. I emphasize
+this, because its realization seems to me to be a desperate modern need;
+a need exhibited supremely in our languid and ineffectual spirituality,
+but also felt in the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of
+the artist, the reformer and the teacher. St. John of the Cross says in
+one of his letters: &quot;What is wanting is not writing or talking&mdash;there is
+more than enough of that&mdash;but, silence and action. For silence joined to
+action produces recollection, and gives the spirit a marvellous
+strength.&quot; Such recollection, such a gathering up of our interior forces
+and retreat of consciousness to its &quot;ground,&quot; is the preparation of all
+great endeavour, whatever its apparent object may be. Until we realize
+that it is better, more useful, more productive of strength, to spend,
+let us say, the odd ten minutes in the morning in feeling and finding
+the Eternal than in flicking the newspaper&mdash;that this will send us off
+to the day's work properly orientated, gathered together, recollected,
+and really endowed with new power of dealing with circumstance&mdash;we have
+not begun to live the life of the Spirit, or grasped the practical
+connection between such a daily discipline and the power of doing our
+best work, whatever it may be.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209" />I will illustrate this from a living example: that of the Sadhu Sundar
+Singh. No one, I suppose, who came into personal contact with the Sadhu,
+doubted that they were in the presence of a person who was living, in
+the full sense, the spiritual life. Even those who could not accept the
+symbols in which he described his experience and asked others to share
+it, acknowledged that there had been worked in him a great
+transformation; that the sense of the abiding and eternal went with him
+everywhere, and flowed out from him, to calm and to correct our feverish
+lives. He fully satisfies in his own person the demands of Baron von
+H&uuml;gel's definition: both contact with and renunciation of the Particular
+and Fleeting, seeking and finding of the Eternal, incarnating within his
+own experience that transcendent Otherness. Now the Sadhu has discovered
+for himself and practises as the condition of his extraordinary
+activity, power and endurance, just that balance of life which St.
+Benedict's rule ordained. He is a wandering missionary, constantly
+undertaking great journeys, enduring hardship and danger, and practising
+the absolute poverty of St. Francis. He is perfectly healthy, strong,
+extraordinarily attractive, full of power. But this power he is careful
+to nourish. His irreducible minimum is two hours spent in meditation and
+wordless communication with God at the beginning of each day. He prefers
+three or four hours when work permits; and a long period of prayer and
+<a name="Page_210" id="Page_210" />meditation always precedes his public address. If forced to curtail or
+hurry these hours of prayer, he feels restless and unhappy, and his
+efficiency is reduced. &quot;Prayer,&quot; he says, &quot;is as important as breathing;
+and we never say we have no time to breathe.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140" /><a href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a></p>
+
+<p>All this has been explained away by critics of the muscular Christian
+sort, who say that the Sadhu's Christianity is of a typically Eastern
+kind. But this is simply not true. It were much better to acknowledge
+that we, more and more, are tending to develop a typically Western kind
+of Christianity, marked by the Western emphasis on doing and Western
+contempt for being; and that if we go sufficiently far on this path we
+shall find ourselves cut off from our source. The Sadhu's Christianity
+is fully Christian; that is to say, it is whole and complete. The power
+in which he does his works is that in which St. Paul carried through his
+heroic missionary career, St. Benedict formed a spiritual family that
+transformed European culture, Wesley made the world his parish,
+Elizabeth Fry faced the Newgate criminals. It is idle to talk of the
+revival of a personal spiritual life among ourselves, or of a spiritual
+regeneration of society&mdash;for this can only come through the individual
+remaking of each of its members&mdash;unless we are willing, at the sacrifice
+of some personal convenience, to make a place and time for these acts of
+recollec<a name="Page_211" id="Page_211" />tion; this willing and loving&mdash;and even more fruitful, the more
+willing and loving&mdash;communion with, response to Reality, to God. It is
+true that a fully lived spiritual life involves far more than this. But
+this is the only condition on which it will exist at all.</p>
+
+<p>Love then, which is a willed tendency to God; prayer, which is willed
+communion with and experience of Him; are the two prime essentials in
+the personal life of the Spirit. They represent, of course, only our
+side of it and our obligation. This love is the outflowing response to
+another inflowing love, and this prayer the appropriation of a
+transcendental energy and grace. As the &quot;German Theology&quot; reminds us, &quot;I
+cannot do the work without God, and God may not or will not without
+me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141" /><a href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> And by these acts alone, faithfully carried through, all their
+costly demands fulfilled, all their gifts and applications accepted
+without resistance and applied to each aspect of life, human nature can
+grow up to its full stature, and obtain access to all its sources of
+power.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this personal inward life of love and prayer shall not be too
+solitary. As it needs links with cultus and so with the lives of its
+fellows, it also needs links with history and so with the living past.
+These links are chiefly made by the individual through his reading; and
+such reading&mdash;such access to humanity's hoarded culture and
+experience&mdash;<a name="Page_212" id="Page_212" />has always been declared alike by Christian and
+non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper helps of the spiritual
+life. Though H&ouml;ffding perhaps exaggerates when he reminds us that
+medi&aelig;val art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in their
+books, and suggests that such brooding study directly induces
+contemplative states,<a name="FNanchor_142_142" id="FNanchor_142_142" /><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a> yet it is true that the soul gains greatly
+from such communion with, and meek learning from, its cultural
+background. Ever more and more as it advances, it will discover within
+that background the records of those very experiences which it must now
+so poignantly relive; and which seem to it, as his own experience seems
+to every lover, unique. There it can find, without any betrayal of its
+secret, the wholesome assurance of its own normality; standards of
+comparison; companionship, alike in its hours of penitence, of light,
+and of deprivation. Yet such fruitful communion with the past is not the
+privilege of an aristocratic culture. It is seen in its perfection in
+many simple Christians who have found in the Bible all the spiritual
+food they need. The great literature of the Spirit tells its secrets to
+those alone who thus meet it on its own ground. Not only the works of
+Thomas &agrave; Kempis, of Ruysbroeck, or of St. Teresa, but also the Biblical
+writers&mdash;and especially, perhaps, the Psalms and the Gospels&mdash;are read
+wholly anew by us at each stage of our advance. Comparative study of
+<a name="Page_213" id="Page_213" />Hindu and Moslem writers proves that this is equally true of the great
+literatures of other faiths.<a name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143" /><a href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a> Beginners may find in all these
+infinite stimulus, interest, and beauty. But to the mature soul they
+become road-books, of which experience proves the astonishing
+exactitude; giving it descriptions which it can recognize and directions
+that it needs, and constituting a steady check upon individualism.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us look at the emergence of this life which we have been
+considering, and at the typical path which it will or may follow, in an
+ordinary man or woman of our own day. Not a saint or genius, reaching
+heroic levels; but a member of that solid wholesome spiritual population
+which ought to fill the streets of the City of God. We noticed when we
+were studying its appearance in history, that often this life begins in
+a sort of restlessness, a feeling that there is something more in
+existence, some absolute meaning, some more searching obligation, that
+we have not reached. This dissatisfaction, this uncertainty and hunger,
+may show itself in many different forms. It may speak first to the
+intellect, to the moral nature, to the social conscience, even to the
+artistic faculty; or, directly, to the heart. Anyhow, its abiding
+quality is a sense of contraction, of limitation; a feeling of something
+more that we could stretch out to, and achieve, and be. Its impulsion is
+always in one <a name="Page_214" id="Page_214" />direction; to a finding of some wider and more enduring
+reality, some objective for the self's life and love. It is a seeking of
+the Eternal, in some form. I allow that thanks to the fog in which we
+live muffled, such a first seeking, and above all such a finding of the
+Eternal is not for us a very easy thing. The sense of quest, of
+disillusion, of something lacking, is more common among modern men than
+its resolution in discovery. Nevertheless the quest does mean that there
+is a solution: and that those who are persevering must find it in the
+end. The world into which our desire is truly turned, is somehow
+revealed to us. The revelation, always partial and relative, is of
+course conditioned by our capacity, the character of our longing and the
+experiences of our past. In spiritual matters we behold that which we
+are: here following, on higher levels, the laws which govern &aelig;sthetic
+apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>So, dissatisfied with its world-view and realizing that it is
+incomplete, the self seeks at first hand, though not always with clear
+consciousness of its nature, the Reality which is the object of
+religion. When it finds this Reality, the discovery, however partial, is
+for it the overwhelming revelation of an objective Fact; and it is swept
+by a love and awe which it did not know itself to possess. And now it
+sees; dimly, yet in a sufficiently disconcerting way, the Pattern in the
+Mount; the rich complex of existence as it were transmuted, full of
+charity and <a name="Page_215" id="Page_215" />beauty, governed by another series of adjustments. Life
+looks different to it. As Fox said, &quot;Creation gives out another smell
+than before.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_144_144" id="FNanchor_144_144" /><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a> There is only one thing more disconcerting than this,
+and that is seeing the pattern actualized in a fellow human being:
+living face to face with human sanctity, in its great simplicity and
+supernatural love, joy, peace. For, when we glimpse Eternal Beauty in
+the universe, we can say with the hero of &quot;Callista,&quot; &quot;It is beyond me!&quot;
+But, when we see it transfiguring human character, we know that it is
+not beyond the power of the race. It is here, to be had. Its existence
+as a form of life creates a standard, and lays an obligation on us all.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose then that the self, urged by this new pressure, accepts the
+obligation and measures itself by the standard. It then becomes apparent
+that this Fact which it sought for and has seen is not merely added to
+its old universe, as in medi&aelig;val pictures Paradise with its circles
+over-arches the earth. This Reality is all-penetrating and has
+transfigured each aspect of the self's old world. It now has a new and
+most exacting scale of values, which demand from it a new series of
+adjustments; ask it&mdash;and with authority&mdash;to change its life.</p>
+
+<p>What next? The next thing, probably, is that the self finds itself in
+rather a tight place. It is wedged into a physical order that makes
+innumerable calls on it, and innumerable suggestions to it: <a name="Page_216" id="Page_216" />which has
+for years monopolized its field of consciousness and set up habits of
+response to its claims. It has to make some kind of a break with this
+order, or at least with its many attachments thereto; and stretch to the
+wider span demanded by the new and larger world. And further, it is in
+possession of a complex psychic life, containing many insubordinate
+elements, many awkward bequests from a primitive past. That psychic life
+has just received the powerful and direct suggestion of the Spirit; and
+for the moment, it is subdued to that suggestion. But soon it begins to
+experience the inevitable conflict between old habits, and new
+demands&mdash;between a life lived in the particular and in the universal
+spirit&mdash;and only through complete resolution of that conflict will it
+develop its full power. So the self quickly realizes that the
+theologian's war between Nature and Grace is a picturesque way of
+stating a real situation; and further that the demand of all religions
+for a change of heart&mdash;that is, of the deep instinctive nature&mdash;is the
+first condition of a spiritual life. And hence, that its hands are
+fairly full. It is true that an immense joy and hope come with it to
+this business of tackling imperfection, of adjusting itself to the newly
+found centre of life. It knows that it is committed to the forward
+movement of a Power, which may be slow but which nothing can gainsay.
+Nevertheless the first thing that power demands from it is courage; and
+the next an unremitting vigorous effort. <a name="Page_217" id="Page_217" />It will never again be able to
+sink back cosily into its racial past. Consciousness of disharmony and
+incompleteness now brings the obligation to mend the disharmony and
+achieve a fresh synthesis.</p>
+
+<p>This is felt with a special sharpness in the moral life, where the
+irreconcilable demands of natural self-interest and of Spirit assume
+their most intractable shape. Old habits and paths of discharge which
+have almost become automatic must now, it seems, be abandoned. New
+paths, in spite of resistances, must be made. Thus it is that
+temptation, hard conflict, and bewildering perplexities usher in the
+life of the Spirit. These are largely the results of our biological past
+continuing into our fluctuating half-made present; and they point
+towards a psychic stability, an inner unity we have not yet attained.</p>
+
+<p>This realization of ourselves as we truly are&mdash;emerging with difficulty
+from our animal origin, tinctured through and through with the
+self-regarding tendencies and habits it has imprinted on us&mdash;this
+realization or self-knowledge, is Humility; the only soil in which the
+spiritual life can germinate. And modern man with his great horizons,
+his ever clearer vision of his own close kinship with life's origin, his
+small place in the time-stream, in the universe, in God's hand, the
+relative character of his best knowledge and achievement, is surely
+everywhere being persuaded to this royal virtue. Recognition of this his
+true creaturely status, with its ob<a name="Page_218" id="Page_218" />ligations&mdash;the only process of pain
+and struggle needed if the demands of generous love are ever to be
+fulfilled in him and his many-levelled nature is to be purified and
+harmonized and develop all its powers&mdash;this is Repentance. He shows not
+only his sincerity, but his manliness and courage by his acceptance of
+all that such repentance entails on him; for the healthy soul, like the
+healthy body, welcomes some trial and roughness and is well able to bear
+the pains of education. Psychologists regard such an education,
+harmonizing the rational or ideal with the instinctive life&mdash;the change
+of heart which leaves the whole self working together without inner
+conflict towards one objective&mdash;as the very condition of a full and
+healthy life. But it can only be achieved in its perfection by the
+complete surrender of heart and mind to a third term, transcending alike
+the impulsive and the rational. The life of the Spirit in its supreme
+authority, and its identification with the highest interests of the
+race, does this: harnessing man's fiery energies to the service of the
+Light.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, in the rich, new life on which the self enters, one strand
+must be that of repentance, catharsis, self-conquest; a complete
+contrition which is the earnest of complete generosity, uncalculated
+response. And, dealing as we are now with average human nature, we can
+safely say that the need for such ever-renewed self-scrutiny and
+self-purgation will never in this life be left behind. For sin <a name="Page_219" id="Page_219" />is a
+fact, though a fact which we do not understand; and now it appears and
+must evermore remain an offence against love, hostile to this intense
+new attraction, and marring the self's willed tendency towards it.</p>
+
+<p>The next strand we may perhaps call that of Recollection: for the
+recognizing and the cure of imperfection depends on the compensating
+search for the Perfect and its enthronement as the supreme object of our
+thought and love. The self, then, soon begins to feel a strong impulsion
+to some type of inward withdrawal and concentration, some kind of
+prayer; though it may not use this name or recognize the character of
+its mood. As it yields to this strange new drawing, such recollection
+grows easier. It finds that there is a veritable inner world, not merely
+of phantasy, but of profound heart-searching experience; where the soul
+is in touch with another order of realities and knows itself to be an
+inheritor of Eternal Life. Here unique things happen. A power is at
+work, and new apprehensions are born. And now for the first time the
+self discovers itself to be striking a balance between this inner and
+the outer life, and in its own small way&mdash;but still, most
+fruitfully&mdash;enriching action with the fruits of contemplation. If it
+will give to the learning of this new art&mdash;to the disciplining and
+refining of this affective thought&mdash;even a fraction of the diligence
+which it gives to the learning of a new game, it will find itself repaid
+by a progressive <a name="Page_220" id="Page_220" />purity of vision, a progressive sense of assurance, an
+ever-increasing delicacy of moral discrimination and demand.
+Psychologists, as we have seen, divide men into introverts and
+extroverts; but as a matter of fact we must regard both these extreme
+types as defective. A whole man should be supple in his reactions both
+to the inner and to the outer world.</p>
+
+<p>The third strand in the life of the Spirit, for this normal self which
+we are considering; must be the disposition of complete Surrender. More
+and more advancing in this inner life, it will feel the imperative
+attraction of Reality, of God; and it must respond to this attraction
+with all the courage and generosity of which it is capable. I am trying
+to use the simplest and the most general language, and to avoid
+emotional imagery: though it is here, in telling of this perpetually
+renewed act of self-giving and dedication, that spiritual writers most
+often have recourse to the language of the heart. It is indeed in a
+spirit of intensest and humble adoration that generous souls yield
+themselves to the drawing of that mysterious Beauty and unchanging Love,
+with all that it entails. But the form which the impulse to surrender
+takes will vary with the psychic make-up of the individual. To some it
+will come as a sense of vocation, a making-over of the will to the
+purposes of the Kingdom; a type of consecration which may not be overtly
+religious, but may be concerned with the <a name="Page_221" id="Page_221" />self-forgetting quest of
+social excellence, of beauty, or of truth. By some it will be felt as an
+illumination of the mind, which now discerns once for all true values,
+and accepting these, must uphold and strive for them in the teeth of all
+opportunism. By some&mdash;and these are the most blessed&mdash;as a breaking and
+re-making of the heart. Whatever the form it takes, the extent in which
+the self experiences the peace, joy and power of living at the level of
+Spirit will depend on the completeness and singlemindedness of this, its
+supreme act of self-simplification. Any reserves, anything in its
+make-up which sets up resistances&mdash;and this means generally any form of
+egotism&mdash;will mar the harmony of the process. And on the other hand,
+such a real simplification of the self's life as is here
+demanded&mdash;uniting on one object, the intellect, will and feeling too
+often split among contradictory attractions&mdash;is itself productive of
+inner harmony and increased power: productive too of that noble
+endurance which counts no pain too much in the service of Reality.</p>
+
+<p>Here then we come to the fact, valid for every level of spiritual life,
+which lies behind all the declarations concerning surrender, self-loss,
+dying to live, dedication, made by writers on this theme. All involve a
+relaxing of tension, letting ourselves go without reluctance in the
+direction in which we are most profoundly drawn; a cessation of our
+struggles with the tide, our kicks against the pricks that spur <a name="Page_222" id="Page_222" />us on.
+The inward aim of the self is towards unification with a larger life; a
+mergence with Reality which it may describe under various contradictory
+symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but which it feels to be
+the fulfilment of existence. It has learnt&mdash;though this knowledge may
+not have passed beyond the stage of feeling&mdash;that the universe is one
+simple texture, in which all things have their explanation and their
+place. Combing out the confusions which enmesh it, losing its sham and
+separate life and finding its true life there, it will know what to love
+and how to act. The goal of this process, which has been called entrance
+into the freedom of the Will of God, is the state described by the
+writer of the &quot;German Theology&quot; when he said &quot;I would fain be to the
+Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145" /><a href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a> For such a
+declaration not only means a willed and skilful working for God, a
+practical siding with Perfection, becoming its living tool, but also
+close union with, and sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual
+order: a feeding on and using of its power, its very life blood;
+complete docility to its inward direction, abolition of separate desire.
+The surrender is therefore made not in order that we may become limp
+pietists, but in order that we may receive more energy and do better
+work: by a humble self-subjection more perfectly helping forward the
+thrust of the Spirit and the primal human business of in<a name="Page_223" id="Page_223" />carnating the
+Eternal here and now. Its justification is in the arduous but untiring,
+various but harmonious, activities that flow from it: the enhancement of
+life which it entails. It gives us access to our real sources of power;
+that we may take from them and, spending generously, be energized anew.</p>
+
+<p>So the cord on which those events which make up the personal life of the
+Spirit are to be strung is completed, and we see that it consists of
+four strands. Two are dispositions of the self; Penitence and Surrender.
+Two are activities; inward Recollection and outward Work. All four make
+stern demands on its fortitude and goodwill. And each gives strength to
+the rest: for they are not to be regarded as separate and successive
+states, a discrete series through which we must pass one by one, leaving
+penitence behind us when we reach surrendered love; but as the variable
+yet enduring and inseparable aspects of one rich life, phases in one
+complete and vital effort to respond more and more closely to Reality.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, perhaps, is less monotonous than the personal life of the
+Spirit. In its humility and joyous love, its adoration and its industry,
+it may find self-expression in any one of the countless activities of
+the world of time. It is both romantic and austere, both adventurous and
+holy. Full of fluctuation and unearthly colour, it yet has its dark
+patches as well as its light. Since perfect proof of the supersensual is
+beyond the span of human conscious<a name="Page_224" id="Page_224" />ness, the element of risk can never
+be eliminated: we are obliged in the end to trust the universe and live
+by faith. Therefore the awakened soul must often suffer perplexity,
+share to the utmost the stress and anguish of the physical order; and,
+chained as it is to a consciousness accustomed to respond to that order,
+must still be content with flashes of understanding and willing to bear
+long periods of destitution when the light is veiled.</p>
+
+<p>The further it advances the more bitter will these periods of
+destitution seem to it. It is not from the real men and women of the
+Spirit that we hear soft things about the comfort of faith. For the true
+life of faith gives everything worth having and takes everything worth
+offering: with unrelenting blows it welds the self into the stuff of the
+universe, subduing it to the universal purpose, doing away with the
+flame of separation. Though joy and inward peace even in desolation are
+dominant marks of those who have grown up into it, still it offers to
+none a succession of supersensual delights. The life of the Spirit
+involves the sublimation of that pleasure-pain rhythm which is
+characteristic of normal consciousness, and if for it pleasure becomes
+joy, pain becomes the Cross. Toil, abnegation, sacrifice, are therefore
+of its essence; but these are not felt as a heavy burden, because they
+are the expression of love. It entails a willed tension and choice, a
+noble power of refusal, which are not entirely covered by being &quot;in tune
+with the Infinite.&quot; <a name="Page_225" id="Page_225" />As our life comes to maturity we discover to our
+confusion that human ears can pick up from the Infinite many
+incompatible tunes, but cannot hear the whole symphony. And the melody
+confided to our care, the one which we alone perhaps can contribute and
+which taxes our powers to the full, has in it not only the notes of
+triumph but the notes of pain. The distinctive mark therefore is not
+happiness but vocation: work demanded and power given, but given only on
+condition that we spend it and ourselves on others without stint. These
+propositions, of course, are easily illustrated from history: but we can
+also illustrate them in our own persons if we choose.</p>
+
+<p>Should we choose this, and should life of the Spirit be achieved by
+us&mdash;and it will only be done through daily discipline and attention to
+the Spiritual, a sacrifice of comfort to its interests, following up the
+intuition which sets us on the path&mdash;what benefits may we as ordinary
+men expect it to bring to us and to the community that we serve? It will
+certainly bring into life new zest and new meaning; a widening of the
+horizon and consciousness of security; a fresh sense of joys to be had
+and of work to be done. The real spiritual consciousness is positive and
+constructive in type: it does not look back on the past sins and
+mistakes of the individual or of the community, but in its other-world
+faith and this-world charity is inspired by a forward-moving spirit of
+hope. Seeking alone the honour <a name="Page_226" id="Page_226" />of Eternal Beauty, and because of its
+invulnerable sense of security, it is adventurous. The spiritual man and
+woman can afford to take desperate chances, and live dangerously in the
+interests of their ideals; being delivered from the many unreal fears
+and anxieties which commonly torment us, and knowing the unimportance of
+possessions and of so-called success. The joy which waits on
+disinterested love and the confidence which follows surrender, cannot
+fail them. Moreover, the inward harmony and assurance, the consciousness
+of access to that Spirit who is in a literal sense &quot;health's eternal
+spring&quot; means a healing of nervous miseries, and invigoration of the
+usually ill-treated mind and body, and so an all-round increase in
+happiness and power.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering,
+gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.&quot; This, said St. Paul,
+who knew by experience the worlds of grace and of nature, is what a
+complete man ought to be like. Compare this picture of an equable and
+fully harmonized personality with that of a characteristic neurasthenic,
+a bored sensualist, or an embittered worker, concentrated on the
+struggle for a material advantage: and consider that the central
+difference between these types of human success and human failure abides
+in the presence or absence of a spiritual conception of life. We do not
+yet know the limits of the upgrowth into power and happiness which
+com<a name="Page_227" id="Page_227" />plete and practical surrender to this conception can work in us; or
+what its general triumph might do for the transformation of the world.
+And it may even be that beyond the joy and renewal which come from
+self-conquest and unification, a level of spiritual life most certainly
+open to all who will really work for it; and beyond that deeper insight,
+more widespreading love, and perfection of adjustment to the
+here-and-now which we recognize and reverence as the privilege of the
+pure in heart&mdash;beyond all these, it may be that life still reserves for
+man another secret and another level of consciousness; a closer
+identification with Reality, such as eye hath not seen, or ear heard.</p>
+
+<p>And note, that this spiritual life which we have here considered is not
+an aristocratic life. It is a life of which the fundamentals are given
+by the simplest kinds of traditional piety, and have been exhibited over
+and over again by the simplest souls. An unconditional self-surrender to
+the Divine Will, under whatever symbols it may be thought of; for we
+know that the very crudest of symbols is often strong enough to make a
+bridge between the heart and the Eternal, and so be a vehicle of the
+Spirit of Life. A little silence and leisure. A great deal of
+faithfulness, kindness, and courage. All this is within the reach of
+anyone who cares enough for it to pay the price.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129" /><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> This doctrine is fully worked out in the last two
+sections of &quot;Eternal Life.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130" /><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> De Imit. Christi, Bk. II, Cap. 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131" /><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> &quot;Six Theosophic Points,&quot; p. 75.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132" /><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> &quot;One Hundred Poems of Kabir,&quot; p. 78.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133" /><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> Cl. Ruysbroeck: &quot;The Mirror of Eternal Salvation,&quot; Cap.
+VIII</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134" /><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> &quot;In Librum B. Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus
+commentaria.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135" /><a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> Ennead III. 5, 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136" /><a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> Boehme: &quot;Six Theosophic Points,&quot; p. 75.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137" /><a href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> &quot;The Interior Castle&quot;; Seventh Habitation, Cap. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138" /><a href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> Boehme; &quot;The Way to Christ,&quot; Pt. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139" /><a href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> Ennead II. 9. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140" /><a href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> &quot;Streeter and Appasamy: The Sadhu,&quot; pp. 98, 100 et seq.,
+213.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141" /><a href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> &quot;Theologia Germanica,&quot; Cap. III.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142" /><a href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> H&ouml;ffding, &quot;The Philosophy of Religion,&quot; III, B.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143" /><a href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> There are, for instance, several striking instances in
+the Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144" /><a href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> &quot;Fox's Journal,&quot; Vol. I, Cap. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145" /><a href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> &quot;Theologia Germanica,&quot; Cap. 10.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII" /><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228" />CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION</p>
+
+
+<p>In the past six chapters we have been considering in the main our own
+position, and how, here in the present, we as adults may actualize and
+help on the spiritual life in ourselves. But our best hope of giving
+Spirit its rightful, full expression within the time-world lies in the
+future. It is towards that, that those who really care must work.
+Anything which we can do towards persuading into better shape our own
+deformed characters, compelling our recalcitrant energy into fresh
+channels, is little in comparison with what might be achieved in the
+plastic growing psychic life of children did we appreciate our full
+opportunity and the importance of using it. This is why I propose now to
+consider one or two points in the relation of education to the spiritual
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Since it is always well, in a discussion of this kind, to be quite clear
+about the content of the words with which we deal, I will say at once,
+that by Education I mean that deliberate adjustment of the whole
+environment of a growing creature, which surrounds it with the most
+favourable influences and educes all its powers; giving it the most
+helpful conditions for <a name="Page_229" id="Page_229" />its full growth and development. Education
+should be the complete preparation of the young thing for fullness of
+life; involving the evolution and the balanced training of all its
+faculties, bodily, mental and spiritual. It should train and refine
+senses, instincts, intellect, will and feeling; giving a world-view
+based on real facts and real values and encouraging active
+correspondence therewith. Thus the educationist, if he be convinced, as
+I think most of us must be, that all isn't quite right with the world of
+mankind, has the priceless opportunity of beginning the remaking of
+humanity from the right end. In the child he has a little, supple thing,
+which can be made into a vital, spiritual thing; and nothing again will
+count so much for it as what happens in these its earliest years. To
+start life straight is the secret of inward happiness: and to a great
+extent, the secret of health and power.</p>
+
+<p>That conception of man upon which we have been working, and which
+regards his psychic life on all its levels as the manifold expressions
+of one single energy or urge in the depths of his being, a life-force
+seeking fulfilment, has obvious and important applications in the
+educational sphere. It indicates that the fundamental business of
+education is to deal with this urgent and untempered craving, discipline
+it, and direct it towards interests of permanent value: helping it to
+establish useful habits, removing obstacles in its path, blocking the
+side channels down which it might run. Especially is it the task of such
+edu<a name="Page_230" id="Page_230" />cation, gradually to disclose to the growing psyche those spiritual
+correspondences for which the religious man and the idealist must hold
+that man's spirit was made. Such an education as this has little in
+common with the mere crude imparting of facts. It represents rather the
+careful and loving induction of the growing human creature into the rich
+world of experience; the help we give it in the great business of
+adjusting itself to reality. It operates by means of the moulding
+influences of environment, the creation of habit. Suggestion, not
+statement, is its most potent instrument; and such suggestion begins for
+good or ill at the very dawn of consciousness. Therefore the child whose
+infancy is not surrounded by persons of true outlook is handicapped from
+the start; and the training in this respect of the parents of the future
+is one of the greatest services we can render to the race.</p>
+
+<p>We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile
+impressions: how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop
+underground, and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poisoning the
+body and the mind of the adult. But here good is at least as potent as
+ill. What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil;
+a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for
+good. Moreover, we can bury good seed in the unconscious minds of
+children and reasonably look forward to the fruit. Babyish prayers,
+simple hymns, trace whilst the mind is duc<a name="Page_231" id="Page_231" />tile the paths in which
+feelings shall afterwards tend to flow; and it is only in maturity that
+we realize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps afterwards
+abandoned beliefs and deeds. So the veritable education of the Spirit
+begins at once, in the cradle, and its chief means will be the
+surroundings within which that childish spirit first develops its little
+awareness of the universe; the appeals which are made to its instincts,
+the stimulations of its life of sense. The first factor of this
+education is the family: the second the society within which that family
+is formed.</p>
+
+<p>Though we no longer suppose it to possess innate ideas, the baby has
+most surely innate powers, inclinations and curiosities, and is reaching
+out in every direction towards life. It is brimming with will power,
+ready to push hard into experience. The environment in which it is
+placed and the responses which the outer world makes to it&mdash;and these
+surroundings and responses in the long run are largely of our choosing
+and making&mdash;represent either the helping or thwarting of its tendencies,
+and the sum total of the directions in which its powers can be exercised
+and its demands satisfied: the possibilities, in fact, which life puts
+before it. We, as individuals and as a community, control and form part
+of this environment. Under the first head, we play by influence or
+demeanour a certain part in the education of every child whom we meet.
+Under the second head, by acquiescence in the social order, we ac<a name="Page_232" id="Page_232" />cept
+responsibility for the state of life in which it is born. The child's
+first intimations of the spiritual must and can only come to it through
+the incarnation of Spirit in its home and the world that it knows. What,
+then, are we doing about this? It means that the influences which shape
+the men and women of the future will be as wholesome and as spiritual as
+we ourselves are: no more, no less. Tone, atmosphere are the things
+which really matter; and these are provided by the group-mind, and
+reflect its spiritual state.</p>
+
+<p>The child's whole educational opportunity is contained in two factors;
+the personality it brings and the environment it gets. Generations of
+educationists have disputed their relative importance: but neither party
+can deny that the most fortunate nature, given wrongful or insufficient
+nurture, will hardly emerge unharmed. Even great inborn powers atrophy
+if left unused, and exceptional ability in any direction may easily
+remain undeveloped if the environment be sufficiently unfavourable: a
+result too often achieved in the domain of the spiritual life. We must
+have opportunity and encouragement to try our powers and inclinations,
+be helped to understand their nature and the way to use them, unless we
+are to begin again, each one of us, in the Stone Age of the soul. So
+too, even small powers may be developed to an astonishing degree by
+suitable surroundings and wise education&mdash;witness the results obtained
+by the expert training of <a name="Page_233" id="Page_233" />defective children&mdash;and all this is as
+applicable to the spiritual as to the mental and bodily life. That life
+is quick to respond to the demands made on it: to take every opportunity
+of expression that comes its way. If you make the right appeal to any
+human faculty, that faculty will respond, and begin to grow. Thus it is
+that the slow quiet pressure of tradition, first in the home and then in
+the school, shapes the child during his most malleable years. We,
+therefore, are surely bound to watch and criticize the environment, the
+tradition, the customs we are instrumental in providing for the infant
+future: to ask ourselves whether we are <i>sure</i> the tradition is right,
+the conventions we hand on useful, the ideal we hold up complete. The
+child, whatever his powers, cannot react to something which is not
+there; he can't digest food that is not given to him, use faculties for
+which no objective is provided. Hence the great responsibility of our
+generation, as to providing a complete, balanced environment <i>now</i>, a
+fully-rounded opportunity of response to life physical, mental and
+spiritual, for the generation preparing to succeed us. Such education as
+this has been called a preparation for citizenship. But this conception
+is too narrow, unless the citizenship be that of the City of God; and
+the adjustments involved be those of the spirit, as well as of the body
+and the mind.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer, whom one would hardly accuse of being a spiritual
+philosopher, was accustomed to <a name="Page_234" id="Page_234" />group the essentials of a right
+education under four heads:<a name="FNanchor_146_146" id="FNanchor_146_146" /><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a></p>
+
+<p>First, he said, we must teach self-preservation in all senses: how to
+keep the body and the mind healthy and efficient, how to be
+self-supporting, how to protect oneself against external dangers and
+encroachments.</p>
+
+<p>Next, we must train the growing creature in its duties towards the life
+of the future: parenthood and its responsibilities, understood in the
+widest sense.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly; we must prepare it to take its place in the present as a member
+of the social order into which it is born.</p>
+
+<p>Last: we must hand on to it all those refinements of life which the past
+has given to us&mdash;the hoarded culture of the race.</p>
+
+<p>Only if we do these four things thoroughly can we dare to call ourselves
+educators in the full sense of the word.</p>
+
+<p>Now, turning to the spiritual interests of the child:&mdash;and unless we are
+crass materialists we must believe these interests to exist, and to be
+paramount&mdash;what are we doing to further them in these four fundamental
+directions? First, does the average good education train our young
+people in spiritual self-preservation? Does it send them out equipped
+with the means of living a full and efficient spiritual life? Does it
+furnish them with a health-giving <a name="Page_235" id="Page_235" />type of religion; that is, a solid
+hold on eternal realities, a view of the universe capable of
+withstanding hostile criticism, of supporting them in times of
+difficulty and of stress? Secondly, does it give them a spiritual
+outlook in respect of their racial duties, fit them in due time to be
+parents of other souls? Does it train them to regard humanity, and their
+own place in the human life-stream, from this point of view? This point
+is of special importance, in view of the fact that racial and biological
+knowledge on lower levels is now so generally in the possession of boys
+and girls; and is bound to produce a distorted conception of life,
+unless the spirit be studied by them with at least the same respectful
+attention that is given to the flesh. Thirdly, what does our education
+do towards preparing them to solve the problems of social and economic
+life in a spiritual sense&mdash;our only reasonable chance of extracting the
+next generation from the social muddle in which we are plunged to-day?
+Last, to what extent do we try to introduce our pupils into a full
+enjoyment of their spiritual inheritance, the culture and tradition of
+the past?</p>
+
+<p>I do not deny that there are educators&mdash;chiefly perhaps educators of
+girls&mdash;who can give favourable answers to all these questions. But they
+are exceptional, the proportion of the child population whom they
+influence is small, and frequently their proceedings are looked
+upon&mdash;not without some justice&mdash;as eccentric. If then in all these
+depart<a name="Page_236" id="Page_236" />ments our standard type of education stops short of the spiritual
+level, are not we self-convicted as at best theoretical believers in the
+worth and destiny of the human soul?</p>
+
+<p>Consider the facts. Outside the walls of definitely religious
+institutions&mdash;where methods are not always adjusted to the common stuff
+and needs of contemporary human life&mdash;it does not seem to occur to many
+educationists to give the education of the child's soul the same expert
+delicate attention so lavishly bestowed on the body and the intellect.
+By expert delicate attention I do not mean persistent religious
+instruction; but a skilled and loving care for the growing spirit,
+inspired by deep conviction and helped by all the psychological
+knowledge we possess. If we look at the efforts of organized religion we
+are bound to admit that in thousands of rural parishes, and in many
+towns too, it is still possible to grow from infancy to old age as a
+member of church or chapel without once receiving any first-hand
+teaching on the powers and needs of the soul or the technique of prayer;
+or obtaining any more help in the great religious difficulties of
+adolescence than a general invitation to believe, and trust God.
+Morality&mdash;that is to say correctness of response to our neighbour and
+our temporal surroundings&mdash;is often well taught.
+Spirituality&mdash;correctness of response to God and our eternal
+surroundings&mdash;is most often ignored. A peculiar British bashfulness
+seems to stand in the <a name="Page_237" id="Page_237" />way of it. It is felt that we show better taste
+in leaving the essentials of the soul's development to chance, even that
+such development is not wholly desirable or manly: that the atrophy of
+one aspect of &quot;man's made-trinity&quot; is best. I have heard one eminent
+ecclesiastic maintain that regular and punctual attendance at morning
+service in a mood of non-comprehending loyalty was the best sort of
+spiritual experience for the average Englishman. Is not that a statement
+which should make the Christian teachers who are responsible for the
+average Englishman, feel a little bit uncomfortable about the type which
+they have produced? I do not suggest that education should encourage a
+feverish religiosity; but that it ought to produce balanced men and
+women, whose faculties are fully alert and responsive to all levels of
+life. As it is, we train Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in the principles of
+honour and chivalry. Our Bible-classes minister to the hungry spirit
+much information about the journeys of St. Paul (with maps). But the
+pupils are seldom invited or assisted to <i>taste</i>, and see that the Lord
+is sweet.</p>
+
+<p>Now this indifference means, of course, that we do not as educators, as
+controllers of the racial future, really believe in the spiritual
+foundations of our personality as thoroughly and practically we believe
+in its mental and physical manifestations. Whatever the philosophy or
+religion we profess may be, it remains for us in the realm of idea, not
+<a name="Page_238" id="Page_238" />in the realm of fact. In practice, we do not aim at the achievement of
+a spiritual type of consciousness as the crown of human culture. The
+best that most education does for our children is only what the devil
+did for Christ. It takes them up to the top of a high mountain and shows
+them all the kingdoms of this world; the kingdom of history, the kingdom
+of letters, the kingdom of beauty, the kingdom of science. It is a
+splendid vision, but unfortunately fugitive: and since the spirit is not
+fugitive, it demands an objective that is permanent. If we do not give
+it such an objective, one of two things must happen to it. Either it
+will be restless and dissatisfied, and throw the whole life out of key;
+or it will become dormant for lack of use, and so the whole life will be
+impoverished, its best promise unfulfilled. One line leads to the
+neurotic, the other to the average sensual man, and I think it will be
+agreed that modern life produces a good crop of both these kind of
+defectives.</p>
+
+<p>But if we believe that the permanent objective of the spirit is God&mdash;if
+He be indeed for us the Fountain of Life and the sum of Reality&mdash;can we
+acquiesce in these forms of loss? Surely it ought to be our first aim,
+to make the sense of His universal presence and transcendent worth, and
+of the self's responsibility to Him, dominant for the plastic youthful
+consciousness confided to our care: to introduce that consciousness into
+a world which is really a theocracy and encourage its aptitude for
+<a name="Page_239" id="Page_239" />generous love? If educationists do not view such a proposal with
+favour, this shows how miserable and distorted our common conception of
+God has become; and how small a part it really plays in our practical
+life. Most of us scramble through that practical life, and are prepared
+to let our children scramble too, without any clear notions of that
+hygiene of the soul which has been studied for centuries by experts; and
+few look upon this branch of self-knowledge as something that all men
+may possess who will submit to education and work for its achievement.
+Thus we have degenerated from the medi&aelig;val standpoint; for then at least
+the necessity of spiritual education was understood and accepted, and
+the current psychology was in harmony with it. But now there is little
+attempt to deepen and enlarge the spiritual faculties, none to encourage
+their free and natural development in the young, or their application to
+any richer world of experience than the circle of pious images with
+which &quot;religious education&quot; generally deals. The result of this is seen
+in the rawness, shallowness and ignorance which characterize the
+attitude of many young adults to religion. Their beliefs and their
+scepticism alike are often the acceptance or rejection of the obsolete.
+If they be agnostics, the dogmas which they reject are frequently
+theological caricatures. If they be believers, both their religious
+conceptions and their prayers are found on investigation still to be of
+an infantile kind, totally un<a name="Page_240" id="Page_240" />related to the interests and outlook of
+modern men.</p>
+
+<p>Two facts emerge from the experience of all educationists. The first is,
+that children are naturally receptive and responsive; the second, that
+adolescents are naturally idealistic. In both stages, the young human
+creature is full of interests and curiosities asking to be satisfied, of
+energies demanding expression; and here, in their budding, thrusting
+life&mdash;for which we, by our choice of surroundings and influence, may
+provide the objective&mdash;is the raw material out of which the spiritual
+humanity of the future might be made. The child has already within it
+the living seed wherein all human possibilities are contained; our part
+is to give the right soil, the shelter, and the watering-can. Spiritual
+education therefore does not consist in putting into the child something
+which it has not; but in educing and sublimating that which it has&mdash;in
+establishing habits, fostering a trend of growth which shall serve it
+well in later years. Already, all the dynamic instincts are present, at
+least in germ; asking for an outlet. The will and the emotions, ductile
+as they will never be again, are ready to make full and ungraduated
+response to any genuine appeal to enthusiasm. The imagination will
+accept the food we give, if we give it in the right way. What an
+opportunity! Nowhere else do we come into such direct contact with the
+plastic stuff of life; never again shall we have at our disposal such a
+fund of emotional energy.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241" />In the child's dreams and fantasies, in its eager hero-worship&mdash;later,
+in the adolescent's fervid friendships or devoted loyalty to an adored
+leader&mdash;we see the search of the living growing creature for more life
+and love, for an enduring object of devotion. Do we always manage or
+even try to give it that enduring object, in a form it can accept? Yet
+the responsibility of providing such a presentation of belief as shall
+evoke the spontaneous reactions of faith and love&mdash;for no compulsory
+idealism ever succeeds&mdash;is definitely laid on the parent and the
+teacher. It is in the enthusiastic imitation of a beloved leader that
+the child or adolescent learns best. Were the spiritual life the most
+real of facts to us, did we believe in it as we variously believe in
+athletics, physical science or the arts, surely we should spare no
+effort to turn to its purposes these priceless qualities of youth? Were
+the mind's communion with the Spirit of God generally regarded as its
+natural privilege and therefore the first condition of its happiness and
+health, the general method and tone of modern education would inevitably
+differ considerably from that which we usually see: and if the life of
+the Spirit is to come to fruition, here is one of the points at which
+reformation must begin. When we look at the ordinary practice of modern
+&quot;civilized&quot; Europe, we cannot claim that any noticeable proportion of
+our young people are taught during their docile and impressionable years
+the nature and discipline of their <a name="Page_242" id="Page_242" />spiritual faculties, in the open and
+common-sense way in which they are taught languages, science, music or
+gymnastics. Yet it is surely a central duty of the educator to deepen
+and enrich to the fullest extent possible his pupil's apprehension of
+the universe; and must not all such apprehension move towards the
+discovery of that universe as a spiritual fact?</p>
+
+<p>Again, in how many schools is the period of religious and idealistic
+enthusiasm which so commonly occurs in adolescence wisely used,
+skilfully trained, and made the foundation of an enduring spiritual
+life? Here is the period in which the relation of master and pupil is or
+may be most intimate and most fruitful; and can be made to serve the
+highest interests of life. Yet, no great proportion of those set apart
+to teach young people seem to realize and use this privilege.</p>
+
+<p>I am aware that much which I am going to advocate will sound fantastic;
+and that the changes involved may seem at first sight impossible to
+accomplish. It is true that if these changes are to be useful, they must
+be gradual. The policy of the &quot;clean sweep&quot; is one which both history
+and psychology condemn. But it does seem to me a good thing to envisage
+clearly, if we can, the ideal towards which our changes should lead. A
+garden city is not Utopia. Still, it is an advance upon the Victorian
+type of suburb and slum; and we should not <a name="Page_243" id="Page_243" />have got it if some men had
+not believed in Utopia, and tried to make a beginning here and now.
+Already in education some few have tried to make such a beginning and
+have proved that it is possible if we believe in it enough: for faith
+can move even that mountainous thing, the British parental mind.</p>
+
+<p>Our task&mdash;and I believe our most real hope for the future&mdash;is, as we
+have already allowed, to make the idea of God dominant for the plastic
+youthful consciousness: and not only this, but to harmonize that
+conception, first with our teachings about the physical and mental sides
+of life, and next with the child's own social activities, training body,
+mind and spirit together that they may take each their part in the
+development of a whole man, fully responsive to a universe which is at
+bottom a spiritual fact. Such training to be complete must, as we have
+seen, begin in the nursery and be given by the atmosphere and
+opportunities of the home. It will include the instilling of childish
+habits of prayer and the fostering of simple expressions of reverence,
+admiration and love. The subconscious knowledge implicit in such
+practice must form the foundation, and only where it is present will
+doctrine and principle have any real meaning for the child. Prayer must
+come before theology, and kindness, tenderness and helpfulness before
+ethics.</p>
+
+<p>But we have now to consider the child of school age, coming&mdash;too often
+without this, the only ade<a name="Page_244" id="Page_244" />quate preparation&mdash;into the teacher's hands.
+How is he to be dealt with, and the opportunities which he presents used
+best?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;When I see a right man,&quot; said Jacob Boehme, &quot;there I see three worlds
+standing.&quot; Since our aim should be to make &quot;right men&quot; and evoke in them
+not merely a departmental piety but a robust and intelligent
+spirituality, we ought to explain in simple ways to these older children
+something at least of that view of human nature on which our training is
+based. The religious instruction given in most schools is divided, in
+varying proportions, between historical or doctrinal teaching and
+ethical teaching. Now a solid hold both on history and on morals is a
+great need; but these are only realized in their full importance and
+enter completely into life when they are seen within the spiritual
+atmosphere, and already even in childhood, and supremely in youth, this
+atmosphere can be evoked. It does not seem to occur to most teachers
+that religion contains anything beyond or within the two departments of
+historical creed and of morals: that, for instance, the greatest
+utterances of St. John and St. Paul deal with neither, but with
+attainable levels of human life, in which a new and fuller kind of
+experience was offered to mankind. Yet surely they ought at least to
+attempt to tell their pupils about this. I do not see how Christians at
+any rate can escape the obligation, or shuffle out of it by saying that
+they do not know how it can be done. Indeed, all <a name="Page_245" id="Page_245" />who are not
+thorough-going materialists must regard the study of the spiritual life
+as in the truest sense a department of biology; and any account of man
+which fails to describe it, as incomplete. Where the science of the body
+is studied, the science of the soul should be studied too. Therefore, in
+the upper forms at least, the psychology of religious experience in its
+widest sense, as a normal part of all full human existence, and the
+connection of that experience with practical life, as it is seen in
+history, should be taught. If it is done properly it will hold the
+pupil's interest, for it can be made to appeal to those same mental
+qualities of wonder, curiosity and exploration which draw so many boys
+and girls to physical science. But there should be no encouragement of
+introspection, none of the false mystery or so-called reverence with
+which these subjects are sometimes surrounded, and above all no spirit
+of exclusivism.</p>
+
+<p>The pupil should be led to see his own religion as a part of the
+universal tendency of life to God. This need not involve any reduction
+of the claims made on him by his own church or creed; but the emphasis
+should always be on the likeness rather than the differences of the
+great religions of the world. Moreover, higher education cannot be
+regarded as complete unless the mind be furnished with some <i>rationale</i>
+of its own deepest experiences, and a harmony be established between
+impulse and thought. Advanced pupils should, then, be given a simple and
+<a name="Page_246" id="Page_246" />general philosophy of religion, plainly stated in language which
+relates it with the current philosophy of life. This is no counsel of
+perfection. It has been done, and can be done again. It is said of
+Edward Caird, that he placed his pupils &quot;from the beginning at a point
+of view whence the life of mankind could be contemplated as one
+movement, single though infinitely varied, unerring though wandering,
+significant yet mysterious, secure and self-enriching although tragical.
+There was a general sense of the spiritual nature of reality and of the
+rule of mind, though what was meant by spirit or mind was hardly asked.
+There was a hope and faith that outstripped all save the vaguest
+understanding but which evoked a glad response that somehow God was
+immanent in the world and in the history of all mankind, making it
+sane.&quot; And the effect of this teaching on the students was that &quot;they
+received the doctrine with enthusiasm, and forgot themselves in the
+sense of their partnership in a universal enterprise.&quot;[1] Such teaching
+as this is a real preparation for citizenship, an introduction to the
+enduring values of the world.</p>
+
+<p>[1 Jones and Muirhead: &quot;Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird,&quot; pp. 64,
+65.]</p>
+
+<p>Every human being, as we know, inevitably tends to emphasize some
+aspects of that world, and to ignore others: to build up for himself a
+relative universe. The choices which determine the universe of maturity
+are often made in youth; then the foun<a name="Page_247" id="Page_247" />dations are laid of that
+apperceiving mass which is to condition all the man's contacts with
+reality. We ought, therefore, to show the universe to our young people
+from such an angle and in such a light, that they tend quite simply and
+without any objectionable intensity to select, emphasize and be
+interested in its spiritual aspect. For this purpose we must never try
+to force our own reading of that universe upon them; but respect on the
+one hand their often extreme sensitiveness and on the other the
+infinitely various angles of approach proper to our infinitely various
+souls. We should place food before them and leave them to browse. Only
+those who have tried this experiment know what such an enlargement of
+the horizon and enrichment of knowledge means to the eager, adolescent
+mind: how prompt is the response to any appeal which we make to its
+nascent sense of mystery. Yet whole schools of thought on these subjects
+are cheerfully ignored by the majority of our educationists; hence the
+unintelligent and indeed babyish view of religion which is harboured by
+many adults, even of the intellectual class.</p>
+
+<p>Though the spiritual life has its roots in the heart not in the head,
+and will never be brought about by merely academic knowledge; yet, its
+beginnings in adolescence are often lost, because young people are
+completely ignorant of the meaning of their own experiences, and the
+universal character of those needs and responses which they dimly feel
+stirring within <a name="Page_248" id="Page_248" />them. They are too shy to ask, and no one ever tells
+them about it in a business-like and unembarrassing way. This infant
+mortality in the spiritual realm ought not to be possible. Experience of
+God is the greatest of the rights of man, and should not be left to
+become the casual discovery of the few. Therefore prayer ought to be
+regarded as a universal human activity, and its nature and difficulties
+should be taught, but always in the sense of intercourse rather than of
+mere petition: keeping in mind the doctrine of the mystics that &quot;prayer
+in itself properly is not else but a devout intent directed unto
+God.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147" /><a href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> We teach concentration for the purposes of study; but too
+seldom think of applying it to the purposes of prayer. Yet real prayer
+is a difficult art; which, like other ways of approaching Perfect
+Beauty, only discloses its secrets to those who win them by humble
+training and hard work. Shall we not try to find some method of showing
+our adolescents their way into this world, lying at our doors and
+offered to us without money and without price?</p>
+
+<p>Again, many teachers and parents waste the religious instinct and
+emotional vigour which are often so marked in adolescence, by allowing
+them to fritter themselves upon symbols which cannot stand against
+hostile criticism: for instance, some of, the more sentimental and
+anthropomorphic aspects of Christian devotion. Did we educate those
+instincts, <a name="Page_249" id="Page_249" />show the growing creature their meaning, and give them an
+objective which did not conflict with the objectives of the developing
+intellect and the will, we should turn their passion into power, and lay
+the foundations of a real spiritual life. We must remember that a good
+deal of adolescent emotion is diverted by the conditions of school-life
+from its obvious and natural objective. This is so much energy set free
+for other uses. We know how it emerges in hero-worship or in ardent
+friendships; how it reinforces the social instinct and produces the
+team-spirit, the intense devotion to the interests of his own gang or
+group which is rightly prominent in the life of many boys. The teacher
+has to reckon with this funded energy and enthusiasm, and use it to
+further the highest interests of the growing child. By this I do not
+mean that he is to encourage an abnormal or emotional concentration on
+spiritual things. Most of the impulses of youth are wholesome, and
+subserve direct ends. Therefore, it is not by taking away love,
+self-sacrifice, admiration, curiosity, from their natural objects that
+we shall serve the best interests of spirituality: but, by enlarging the
+range over which these impulses work&mdash;impulses, indeed, which no human
+object can wholly satisfy, save in a sacramental sense. Two such natural
+tendencies, specially prominent in childhood, are peculiarly at the
+disposal of the religious teacher: and should be used by him to the
+full. It is in the sublimation of the instinct of comradeship <a name="Page_250" id="Page_250" />that the
+social and corporate side of the spiritual life takes its rise, and in
+closest connection with this impulse that all works of charity should be
+suggested and performed. And on the individual side, all that is best,
+safest and sweetest in the religious instinct of the child can be
+related to a similar enlargement of the instinct of filial trust and
+dependence. The educator is therefore working within the two most
+fundamental childish qualities, qualities provoked and fostered by all
+right family life, with its relation of love to parents, brothers,
+sisters and friends; and may gently lead out these two mighty impulses
+to a fulfilment which, at maturity, embrace God and the whole world. The
+wise teacher, then, must work with the instincts, not against them:
+encouraging all kindly social feelings, all vigorous self-expression,
+wonder, trustfulness, love. Recognizing the paramount importance of
+emotion&mdash;for without emotional colour no idea can be actual to us, and
+no deed thoroughly and vigorously performed&mdash;yet he must always be on
+his guard against blocking the natural channels of human feeling, and
+giving them the opportunity of exploding under pious disguises in the
+religious sphere.</p>
+
+<p>Here it is that the danger of too emotional a type of religious training
+comes in. Sentimentalism of all kinds is dangerous and objectionable,
+especially in the education of girls, whom it excites and debilitates.
+Boys are more often merely alienated by <a name="Page_251" id="Page_251" />it. In both cases, the method
+of presentation which regards the spiritual life simply as a normal
+aspect of full human life is best. No artificial barrier should be set
+up between the sacred and the profane. The passion for truth and the
+passion for God should be treated as one: and that pursuit of knowledge
+for its own sake, those adventurous explorations of the mind, in which
+the more intelligent type of adolescent loves to try his growing powers,
+ought to be encouraged in the spiritual sphere as elsewhere. The results
+of research into religious origins should be explained without
+reservation, and no intellectual difficulty should be dodged. The
+putting-off method of meeting awkward questions, now generally
+recognized as dangerous in matters of natural history, is just as
+dangerous in the religious sphere. No teacher who is afraid to state his
+own position with perfect candour should ever be allowed to undertake
+this side of education; nor any in whom there is a marked cleavage
+between the standard of conduct and the standard of thought. The healthy
+adolescent is prompt to perceive inconsistency and unsparing in its
+condemnation.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, a most careful discrimination is daily becoming more
+necessary, in the teaching of traditional religion of a supernatural and
+non-empirical type. Many of its elements must no doubt be retained by
+us, for the child-mind demands firm outlines and examples and imagery
+drawn from the world of sense. Yet grave dangers are attached <a name="Page_252" id="Page_252" />to it.
+On, the one hand an exclusive reliance on tradition paves the way for
+the disillusion which is so often experienced towards the end of
+adolescence, when it frequently causes a violent reaction to
+materialism. On the other hand it exposes us to a risk which we
+particularly want to avoid: that of reducing the child's nascent
+spiritual life to the dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies
+wishes that outward life leaves unfulfilled. Many pious people,
+especially those who tell us that their religion is a &quot;comfort&quot; to them,
+go through life in a spiritual day-dream of this kind. Concrete life has
+starved them of love, of beauty, of interest&mdash;it has given them no
+synthesis which satisfies the passionate human search for meaning&mdash;and
+they have found all this in a dream-world, made from the materials of
+conventional piety. If religion is thus allowed to become a ready-made
+day-dream it will certainly interest adolescents of a certain sort. The
+naturally introverted type will become meditative; whilst their
+opposites, the extroverted or active type, will probably tend to be
+ritualistic. But here again we are missing the essence of spiritual
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Our aim should be to induce, in a wholesome way, that sense of the
+spiritual in daily experience which the old writers called the
+consciousness of the of God. The monastic training in spirituality,
+slowly evolved under pressure of experience, nearly always did this. It
+has bequeathed to us a funded wisdom of which we make little use; and
+<a name="Page_253" id="Page_253" />this, reinterpreted in the light of psychological knowledge, might I
+believe cast a great deal of light on the fundamental problems of
+spiritual education. We could if we chose take many hints from it, as
+regards the disciplining of the attention, the correct use of
+suggestion, the teaching of meditation, the sublimation and direction to
+an assigned end of the natural impulse to reverie; above all, the
+education of the moral life. For character-building as understood by
+these old specialists was the most practical of arts.</p>
+
+<p>Further, in all this teaching, those inward activities and responses to
+which we can give generally the name of prayer, and those outward
+activities and deeds of service to which we can give the name of work,
+ought to be trained together and never dissociated. They are the
+complementary and balanced expressions of one spirit of life: and must
+be given together, under appropriately simple forms. Concrete
+application of the child's energies, aptitudes and ideals must from the
+first run side by side with the teaching of principle. Young people
+therefore should constantly be encouraged to face as practical and
+interesting facts, not as formul&aelig;, those reactions to eternal and
+this-world reality which used to be called our duty to God and our
+neighbour; and do concrete things proper to a real citizen of a really
+theocratic world. They must be made to realize that nothing is truly
+ours until we have expressed it in our deeds. Moreover, these <a name="Page_254" id="Page_254" />deeds
+should not be easy. They should involve effort and self-sacrifice; and
+also some drudgery, which is worse. The spiritual life is only valued by
+those on whom it makes genuine demands. Almost any kind of service will
+do, which calls for attention, time and hard work. Though voluntary, it
+must not be casual: but, once undertaken, should be regarded as an
+honourable obligation. The Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have shown us how
+wide a choice of possible &quot;good deeds&quot; is offered by every community:
+and such a banding together of young people for corporate acts of
+service is strongly to be commended. It encourages unselfish
+comradeship, satisfies that &quot;gang-instinct&quot; which is a well-known
+character of adolescence, and should leave no opening for
+self-consciousness, rivalry, and vanity in well-doing or in abnegation.</p>
+
+<p>Wise educators find that a combined system of organized games in which
+the social instinct can be expressed and developed, and of independent
+constructive work, in which the creative impulse can find satisfaction,
+best meets the corporate and creative needs of adolescence, favours the
+right development of character, and produces a harmonized life. On the
+level of the spiritual life too this principle is valid; and, guided by
+it, we should seek to give young people both corporate and personal work
+and experience. On the one hand, gregariousness is at its strongest in
+the healthy adolescent, the force of <a name="Page_255" id="Page_255" />public opinion is more intensely
+felt than at any other time of life, that priceless quality the spirit
+of comradeship is most easily educed. We must therefore seek to give the
+spiritual life a vigorous corporate character; to make it &quot;good form&quot;
+for the school, and to use the team-spirit in the choir and the guild as
+well as in the cricket field. By an extension of this principle and
+under the influence of a suitable teacher, the school-mob may be
+transformed into a co-operative society animated by one joyous and
+unselfish spirit: all the great powers of social suggestion being freely
+used for the highest ends. Thus we may introduce the pupil, at his most
+plastic age, into a spiritual-social order and let him grow within it,
+developing those qualities and skills on which it makes demands. The
+religious exercises, whatever they are, should be in common, in order to
+develop the mass consciousness of the school and weld it into a real
+group. Music, songs, processions, etc., produce a feeling of unity, and
+encourage spiritual contagion. Services of an appropriate kind, if there
+be a chapel, or the opening of school with prayer and a hymn (which
+ought always to be followed by a short silence) provide a natural
+expression for corporate religious feeling: and remember that to give a
+feeling opportunity of voluntary expression is commonly to educe and
+affirm it. As regards active work, whilst school charities are an
+obvious field in which unselfish energies may <a name="Page_256" id="Page_256" />be spent, many other
+openings will be found by enthusiastic teachers, and by the pupils whom
+their enthusiasm has inspired.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the spare-time occupations of the adolescent; the
+independent and self-chosen work, often most arduous and always
+absorbing, of making, planning, learning about things&mdash;and most of us
+can still remember how desperately important these seemed to us, whether
+our taste was for making engines, writing poetry, or collecting
+moths&mdash;these are of the greatest importance for his development. They
+give him something really his own, exercise his powers, train his
+attention, feed his creative instinct. They counteract those mechanical
+and conventional reactions to the world, which are induced by the merely
+traditional type of education, either of manners or of mind. And here,
+in the prudent encouragement of a personal interest in and dealing with
+the actual problems of conduct and even of belief&mdash;the most difficult of
+the educator's tasks&mdash;we guard against the merely acquiescent attitude
+of much adult piety, and foster from the beginning a vigorous personal
+interest, a first-hand contact with higher realities.</p>
+
+<p>The heroic aspect of history may well form the second line in this
+attempt to capture education and use it in the interests of the
+spiritual life. By it we can best link up the actual and the ideal, and
+demonstrate the single character of human greatness; whether it be
+exhibited, in the physical or the super<a name="Page_257" id="Page_257" />sensual sphere. Such a
+demonstration is most important; for so long as the spiritual life is
+regarded as merely a departmental thing, and its full development as a
+matter for specialists or saints, it will never produce its full effect
+in human affairs. We must exhibit it as the full flower of that Reality
+which inspires all human life. <i>&quot;All</i> kinds of skill,&quot; said Tauler, &quot;are
+gifts of the Holy Ghost,&quot; and he might have said, all kinds of beauty
+and all kinds of courage too.</p>
+
+<p>The heroic makes a direct appeal to lads and girls, and is by far the
+safest way of approach to their emotions. The chivalrous, the noble, the
+desperately brave, attract the adolescent far more than passive
+goodness. That strong instinct of subjection, of homage, which he shows
+in his hero-worship, is a most valuable tool in the hands of the teacher
+who is seeking to lead him into greater fullness of life. Yet the range
+over which we seek material for his admiration is often deplorably
+narrow. We have behind us a great spiritual history, which shows the
+highest faculties of the soul in action: the power and the happiness
+they bring. Do we take enough notice of it? What about our English
+saints? I mean the real saints, not the official ones. Not St. George
+and St. Alban, about whom we know practically nothing: but, for
+instance, Lancelot Andrewes, John Wesley, Elizabeth Fry, about whom we
+know a great deal. Children, who find difficulty in general ideas, learn
+best from par<a name="Page_258" id="Page_258" />ticular instances. Yet boys and girls who can give a
+coherent account of such stimulating personalities as Julius Caesar,
+William the Conqueror, Henry VIII. and his wives, or Napoleon&mdash;none of
+whom have so very much to tell us that bears on the permanent interests
+of the soul&mdash;do not as a rule possess any vivid idea, say, of Gautama,
+St. Benedict, Gregory the Great, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis
+Xavier, George Fox, St. Vincent de Paul and his friends: persons at
+least as significant, and far better worth meeting, than the military
+commanders and political adventurers of their time. The stories of the
+early Buddhists, the Sufi saints, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius,
+the early Quakers, the African missionaries, are full of things which
+can be made to interest even a young child. The legends which have grown
+up round some of them satisfy the instinct that draws it to fairy tales.
+They help it to dream well; and give to the developing mind food which
+it could assimilate in no other way. Older boys and girls, could they be
+given some idea of the spiritual heroes of Christendom as real men and
+women, without the nauseous note of piety which generally infects their
+biographies, would find much to delight them: romance of the best sort,
+because concerned with the highest values, and stories of endurance and
+courage such as always appeal to them. These people were not
+objectionable pietists. They were persons of fullest vitality and
+immense natural attraction; the pick <a name="Page_259" id="Page_259" />of the race. We know that, by the
+numbers who left all to follow them. Ought we not to introduce our
+pupils to them; not as stuffed specimens, but as vivid human beings?
+Something might be done to create the right atmosphere for this, on the
+lines suggested by Dr. Hayward in that splendid little book &quot;The Lesson
+in Appreciation.&quot; All that he says there about &aelig;sthetics, is applicable
+to any lesson dealing with the higher values of life. In this way, young
+people would be made to realize the spiritual life; not as something
+abnormal and more or less conventionalized, but as a golden thread
+running right through human history, and making demands on just those
+dynamic qualities which they feel themselves to possess. The adolescent
+is naturally vigorous and combative, and wants, above all else,
+something worth fighting for. This, too often, his teachers forget to
+provide.</p>
+
+<p>The study of nature, and of &aelig;sthetics&mdash;including poetry&mdash;gives us yet
+another way of approach. The child should be introduced to these great
+worlds of life and of beauty, and encouraged but never forced to feed on
+the best they contain. By implication, but never by any method savouring
+of &quot;uplift,&quot; these subjects should be related with that sense of the
+spiritual and of its immanence in creation, which ought to inspire the
+teacher; and with which it is his duty to infect his pupils if he can.
+Children may, very early, be taught or rather induced to look at natural
+things with that quietness, <a name="Page_260" id="Page_260" />attention, and delight which are the
+beginnings of contemplation, and the conditions, under which nature
+reveals her real secrets to us. The child is a natural pagan, and often
+the first appeal to its nascent spiritual faculty is best made through
+its instinctive joy in the life of animals and flowers, the clouds and
+the winds. Here it may learn very easily that wonder and adoration,
+which are the gateways to the presence of God. In simple forms of verse,
+music, and rhythmical movement it can be encouraged&mdash;as the Salvation
+Army has discovered&mdash;to give this happy adoration a natural, dramatic,
+and rhythmic expression: for the young child, as we know, reproduces the
+mental condition of the primitive, and primitive forms of worship will
+suit it best.</p>
+
+<p>It need hardly be said that education of the type we have been
+considering demands great gifts in the teacher: simplicity, enthusiasm,
+sympathy, and also a vigorous sense of humour, keeping him sharply aware
+of the narrow line that divides the priggish from the ideal. This
+education ought to inspire, but it ought not to replace, the fullest and
+most expert training of the body and mind; for the spirit needs a
+perfectly balanced machine, through which to express its life in the
+physical world. The actual additions to curriculum which it demands may
+be few: it is the attitude, the spirit, which must be changed.
+Specifically moral education, the building of character, will of course
+form an es<a name="Page_261" id="Page_261" />sential part of it: in fact must be present within it from
+the first. But this comes best without observation, and will be found to
+depend chiefly on the character of the teacher, the love, admiration and
+imitation he evokes, the ethical tone he gives. Childhood is of all ages
+the one most open to suggestion, and in this fact the educator finds at
+once his best opportunity and greatest responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>Ruysbroeck has described to us the three outstanding moral dispositions
+in respect of God, of man, and of the conduct of life, which mark the
+true man or woman of the Spirit; and it is in the childhood that the
+tendency to these qualities must be acquired. First, he says,&mdash;I
+paraphrase, since the old terms of moral theology are no longer vivid to
+us&mdash;there comes an attitude of reverent love, of adoration, towards all
+that is holy, beautiful, or true. And next, from this, there grows up an
+attitude towards other men, governed by those qualities which are the
+essence of courtesy: patience, gentleness, kindness, and sympathy. These
+keep us both supple and generous in our responses to our social
+environment. Last, our creative energies are transfigured by an
+energetic love, an inward eagerness for every kind of work, which makes
+impossible all slackness and dullness of heart, and will impel us to
+live to the utmost the active life of service for which we are
+born.<a name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148" /><a href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a></p>
+
+<p>But these moral qualities cannot be taught; they <a name="Page_262" id="Page_262" />are learned by
+imitation and infection, and developed by opportunity of action. The
+best agent of their propagation is an attractive personality in which
+they are dominant; for we know the universal tendency of young people to
+imitate those whom they admire. The relation between parent and child or
+master and pupil is therefore the central factor in any scheme of
+education which seeks to further the spiritual life. Only those who have
+already become real can communicate the knowledge of Reality. It is from
+the sportsman that we catch the spirit of fair-play, from the humble
+that we learn humility. The artist shows us beauty, the saint shows us
+God. It should therefore be the business of those in authority to search
+out and give scope to those who possess and are able to impart this
+triumphing spiritual life. A head-master who makes his boys live at
+their highest level and act on their noblest impulses, because he does
+it himself, is a person of supreme value to the State. It would be well
+if we cleared our minds of cant, and acknowledged that such a man alone
+is truly able to educate; since the spiritual life is infectious, but
+cannot be propagated by artificial means.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, we have to remember that any attempt towards the education of
+the spirit&mdash;and such an attempt must surely be made by all who accept
+spiritual values as central for life&mdash;can only safely be undertaken with
+full knowledge of its special dangers and difficulties. These dangers
+and diffi<a name="Page_263" id="Page_263" />culties are connected with the instinctive and intellectual
+life of the child and the adolescent, who are growing, and growing
+unevenly, during the whole period of training. They are supple as
+regards other forces than those which we bring to bear on them; open to
+suggestion from many different levels of life.</p>
+
+<p>Our greatest difficulty abides in the fact that, as we have seen, a
+vigorous spiritual life must give scope to the emotions. It is above all
+the heart rather than the mind which must be won for God. Yet, the
+greatest care must be exercised to ensure that the appeal to the
+emotions is free from all possibility of appeal to latent and
+uncomprehended natural instincts. This peril, to which current
+psychology gives perhaps too much attention, is nevertheless real.
+Candid students of religious history are bound to acknowledge the
+unfortunate part which it has often played in the past. These natural
+instincts fall into two great classes: those relating to
+self-preservation and those relating to the preservation of the race.
+The note of fear, the exaggerated longing for shelter and protection,
+the childish attitude of mere clinging dependence, fostered by religion
+of a certain type, are all oblique expressions of the instinct of
+self-preservation: and the rather feverish devotional moods and
+exuberant emotional expressions with which we are all familiar have,
+equally, a natural origin. Our task in the training of young people is
+to evoke enthusiasm, <a name="Page_264" id="Page_264" />courage and love, without appealing to either of
+these sources of excitement. Generally speaking, it is safe to say that
+for this reason all sentimental and many anthropomorphic religious ideas
+are bad for lads and girls. These have, indeed, no part in that austere
+yet ardent love of God which inspires the real spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>Our aim ought to be, to teach and impress the reality of Spirit, its
+regnancy in human life, whilst the mind is alert and supple: and so to
+teach and impress it, that it is woven into the stuff of the mental and
+moral life and cannot seriously be injured by the hostile criticisms of
+the rationalist. Remember, that the prime object of education is the
+moulding of the unconscious and instinctive nature, the home of habit.
+If we can give this the desired tendency and tone of feeling, we can
+trust the rational mind to find good reasons with which to reinforce its
+attitudes and preferences. So it is not so much the specific belief, as
+the whole spiritual attitude to existence which we seek to affirm; and
+this will be done on the whole more effectively by the generalized
+suggestions which come to the pupil from his own surroundings, and the
+lives of those whom he admires, than by the limited and special
+suggestions of a creed. It is found that the less any desired motive is
+bound up with particular acts, persons, or ideas, the greater is the
+chance of its being universalized and made good for life all round. I do
+not intend by this statement to criticize any particular presentation
+<a name="Page_265" id="Page_265" />of religion. Nevertheless, educators ought to remember that a religion
+which is first entirely bound up with narrow and childish theological
+ideas, and is then presented as true in the absolute sense, is bound to
+break down under greater knowledge or hostile criticism; and may then
+involve the disappearance of the religious impulse as a whole, at least
+for a long period.</p>
+
+<p>Did we know our business, we ought surely to be able to ensure in our
+young people a steady and harmonious spiritual growth. The &quot;conversion&quot;
+or psychic convulsion which is sometimes regarded as an essential
+preliminary of any vivid awakening of the spiritual consciousness, is
+really a tribute exacted by our wrong educational methods. It is a proof
+that we have allowed the plastic creature confided to us to harden in
+the wrong shape. But if, side by side and in simplest language, we teach
+the conceptions: first, of God as the transcendent yet indwelling Spirit
+of love, of beauty and of power; next, of man's constant dependence on
+Him and possible contact with His nature in that arduous and loving act
+of attention which is the essence of prayer; last, of unselfish work and
+fellowship as the necessary expressions of all human ideals&mdash;then, I
+think, we may hope to lay the foundations of a balanced and a wholesome
+life, in which man's various faculties work together for good, and his
+vigorous instinctive life is directed to the highest ends.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146" /><a href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a> Spencer: &quot;Education,&quot; Cap. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147" /><a href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> &quot;The Cloud of Unknowing,&quot; Cap. 39.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148" /><a href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a> Ruysbroeck: &quot;The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage,&quot;
+Bk. I, Caps. 12-24.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII" /><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266" />CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p style='text-align: center;'>THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER</p>
+
+
+<p>We have come to the last chapter of this book; and I am conscious that
+those who have had the patience to follow its argument from the
+beginning, may now feel a certain sense of incompleteness. They will
+observe that, though many things have been said about the life of the
+Spirit, not a great deal seems to have been said, at any rate directly,
+about the second half of the title&mdash;the life of to-day&mdash;and especially
+about those very important aspects of our modern active life which are
+resumed in the word Social. This avoidance has been, at least in part,
+intentional. We have witnessed in this century a violent revulsion from
+the individualistic type of religion; a revulsion which parallels
+upon-its own levels, and indeed is a part of, the revolt from Victorian
+individualism in political economic life. Those who come much into
+contact with students, and with the younger and more vigorous clergy,
+are aware how far this revolt has proceeded: how completely, in the
+minds of those young people who are interested in religion, the Social
+Gospel now overpowers all other aspects of the spiritual life. Again
+<a name="Page_267" id="Page_267" />and again we are assured by the most earnest among them that in their
+view religion is a social activity, and service is its proper
+expression: that all valid knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly
+known in mankind: that the use of prayer is mainly social, in that it
+improves us for service, otherwise it must be condemned as a merely
+selfish activity: finally, that the true meaning and value of suffering
+are social too. A visitor to a recent Swanwick Conference of the Student
+Christian Movement has publicly expressed his regret that some students
+still seemed to be concerned with the problems of their own spiritual
+life; and were not prepared to let that look after itself, whilst they
+started straight off to work for the social realization of the Kingdom
+of God. When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this extent, and is
+held to the exclusion of its compensating opposite, it is in a fair way
+to becoming a lie. And we have here, I think, a real confusion of ideas
+which will, if allowed to continue, react unfavourably upon the religion
+of the future; because it gives away the most sacred conviction of the
+idealist, the belief in the absolute character of spiritual values, and
+in the effort to win them as the great activity of man. Social service,
+since it is one form of such an effort, a bringing in of more order,
+beauty, joy, is a fundamental duty&mdash;the fundamental duty&mdash;of the active
+life. Man does not truly love the Perfect until he is driven thus to
+seek its incarnation in the world of time. No one doubts this. All
+spiritual <a name="Page_268" id="Page_268" />teachers have said it, in one way or another, for centuries.
+The mere fact that they feel impelled to teach at all, instead of saying
+&quot;My secret to myself&quot;&mdash;which is so much easier and pleasanter to the
+natural contemplative&mdash;is a guarantee of the claim to service which they
+feel that love lays upon them. But this does not make such service of
+man, however devoted, either the same thing as the search for, response
+to, intercourse with God; or, a sufficient substitute for these
+specifically spiritual acts.</p>
+
+<p>Plainly, we are called upon to strive with all our power to bring in the
+Kingdom; that is, to incarnate in the time world the highest spiritual
+values which we have known. But our ability to do this is strictly
+dependent on those values being known, at least by some of us, at
+first-hand; and for this first-hand perception, as we have seen, the
+soul must have a measure of solitude and silence. Therefore, if the
+swing-over to a purely social interpretation of religion be allowed to
+continue unchecked, the result can only be an impoverishment of our
+spiritual life; quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which
+follows from an unbridled individualism. Without the inner life of
+prayer and-meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian
+motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active
+social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the
+channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world of
+to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Christ, it is true, gives nobody any encouragement <a name="Page_269" id="Page_269" />for supposing that a
+merely self-cultivating sort of spirituality, keeping the home fires
+burning and so on, is anybody's main job. The main job confided to His
+friends is the preaching of the Gospel. That is, spreading Reality,
+teaching it, inserting it into existence; by prayers, words, acts, and
+also if need be by manual work, and always under the conditions and
+symbolisms of our contemporary world. But since we can only give others
+that which we already possess, this presupposes that we have got
+something of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves. The soul's
+two activities of reception and donation must be held in balance, or
+impotence and unreality will result. It is only out of the heart of his
+own experience that man really helps his neighbour: and thus there is an
+ultimate social value in the most secret responses of the soul to grace.
+No one, for instance, can help others to repentance who has not known it
+at first-hand. Therefore we have to keep the home fires burning, because
+they are the fires which raise the steam that does the work: and we do
+this mostly by the fuel with which we feed them, though partly too by
+giving free access to currents of fresh air from the outer world.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot read St. Paul's letters with sympathy and escape the
+conviction that in the midst of his great missionary efforts he was
+profoundly concerned too with the problems of his own inner life. The
+little bits of self-revelation that break into the epistles and,
+threaded together, show us the curve <a name="Page_270" id="Page_270" />of his growth, also show us how
+much, lay behind them, how intense, and how exacting was the inward
+travail that accompanied his outward deeds. Here he is representative of
+the true apostolic type. It is because St. Augustine is the man of the
+&quot;Confessions&quot; that he is also the creator of &quot;The City of God.&quot; The
+regenerative work of St. Francis was accompanied by an unremitting life
+of penitence and recollection. Fox and Wesley, abounding in labours, yet
+never relaxed the tension of their soul's effort to correspond with a
+transcendent Reality. These and many other examples warn us that only by
+such a sustained and double movement can the man of the Spirit actualize
+all his possibilities and do his real work. He must, says Ruysbroeck,
+&quot;both ascend and descend with love.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149" /><a href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> On any other basis he misses
+the richness of that fully integrated human existence &quot;swinging between
+the unseen and the seen&quot; in which the social and individual,
+incorporated and solitary responses to the demands of Spirit are fully
+carried through. Instead, he exhibits restriction and lack balance. This
+in the end must react as unfavourably on the social as on the personal
+side of life: since the place and influence of the spiritual life in the
+social order will depend entirely on its place in the individual
+consciousness of which that social order will be built, the extent in
+which loyalty to the one Spirit governs their reactions to common daily
+experience.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271" />Here then, as in so much else, the ideal is not an arbitrary choice but
+a struck balance. First, a personal contact with Eternal Reality,
+deepening, illuminating and enlarging all of our experience of fact, all
+our responses to it: that is, faith. Next, the fullest possible sense of
+our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely
+rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life: that is, charity. The
+dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that
+divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the
+human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.</p>
+
+<p>It is of course true that social groups may be regenerated. The success
+of such group-formations as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of
+God, the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this. But groups, in
+the last resort, consist of individuals, who must each be regenerated
+one by one; whose outlook, if they are to be whole men, must include in
+its span abiding values as well as the stream of time, and who, for the
+full development of this their two-fold destiny, require each a measure
+both of solitude and of association. Hence it follows, that the final
+answer to the repeated question: &quot;Does God save men, does Spirit work
+towards the regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by one, or in
+groups?&quot; is this: that the proposed alternative is illusory. We cannot
+say that the Divine action in the world as we know it, is either merely
+social or merely individual; but both. And the <a name="Page_272" id="Page_272" />next question&mdash;a highly
+practical question&mdash;is, &quot;How <i>both</i>?&quot; For the answer to this, if we can
+find it, will give us at last a formula by which we can true up our own
+effort toward completeness of self-expression in the here-and-now.</p>
+
+<p>How, then, are groups of men moved up to higher spiritual levels; helped
+to such an actual possession of power and love and a sound mind as shall
+transfigure and perfect their lives? For this, more than all else, is
+what we now want to achieve. I speak in generalities, and of average
+human nature, not of these specially sensitive or gifted individuals who
+are themselves the revealers of Reality to their fellow-men.</p>
+
+<p>History suggests, I think, that this group-regeneration is effected in
+the last resort through a special sublimation of the herd-instinct; that
+is, the full and willing use on spiritual levels of the characters which
+are inherent in human gregariousness.<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150" /><a href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a> We have looked at some of
+these characters in past chapters. Our study of them suggests, that the
+first stage in any social regeneration is likely to be brought about by
+the instinctive rallying of individuals about a natural leader, strong
+enough to compel and direct them; and whose appeal is to the impulsive
+life, to an acknowledged of unacknowledged lack or craving, not to the
+faculty of deliberate choice. This leader, then, must offer new life and
+<a name="Page_273" id="Page_273" />love, not intellectual solutions. He must be able to share with his
+flock his own ardour and apprehension of Reality; and evoke from them
+the profound human impulse to imitation. They will catch his enthusiasm,
+and thus receive the suggestions of his teaching and of his life. This
+first stage, supremely illustrated in the disciples of Christ, and again
+in the groups who gathered round such men as St. Francis, Fox, or Booth,
+is re-experienced in a lesser way in every successful revival: and each
+genuine restoration of the life of Spirit, whether its declared aim be
+social or religious, has a certain revivalistic character. We must
+therefore keep an eye on these principles of discipleship and contagion,
+as likely to govern any future spiritualization of our own social life;
+looking for the beginnings of true reconstruction, not to the general
+dissemination of suitable doctrines, but to the living burning influence
+of an ardent soul. And I may add here, as the corollary of this
+conclusion, first that the evoking and fostering of such ardour is in
+itself a piece of social service of the highest value, and next that it
+makes every individual socially responsible for the due sharing of even
+the small measure of ardour, certitude or power he or she has received.
+We are to be conductors of the Divine energy; not to insulate it. There
+is of course nothing new in all this: but there is nothing new
+fundamentally in the spiritual life, save in St. Augustine's sense of
+the eternal youth and fresh<a name="Page_274" id="Page_274" />ness of all beauty.<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151" /><a href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> The only novelty
+which we can safely introduce will be in the terms in which we describe
+it; the perpetual new exhibition of it within the time-world, the fresh
+and various applications which we can give to its abiding laws, in the
+special circumstances and opportunities of our own day.</p>
+
+<p>But the influence of the crowd-compeller, the leader, whether in the
+crude form of the revivalist or in the more penetrating and enduring
+form of the creative mystic or religious founder, the loyalty and
+imitation of the disciple, the corporate and generalized enthusiasm of
+the group can only be the first educative phase in any veritable
+incarnation of Spirit upon earth. Each member of the herd is now
+committed to the fullest personal living-out of the new life he has
+received. Only in so far as the first stage of suggestion and imitation
+is carried over to the next stage of personal actualization, can we say
+that there is any real promotion of spiritual <i>life</i>: any hope that this
+life will work a true renovation of the group into which it has been
+inserted and achieve the social phase.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, it does achieve the social phase what stages may we expect it
+to pass through, and by what special characters will it be graced?</p>
+
+<p>Let us look back for a moment at some of our conclusions about the
+individual life. We said that this life, if fully lived, exhibited the
+four characters <a name="Page_275" id="Page_275" />of work and contemplation, self-discipline and service:
+deepening and incarnating within its own various this-world experience
+its other-world apprehensions of Eternity, of God. Its temper should
+thus be both social and ascetic. It should be doubly based, on humility
+and on given power. Now the social order&mdash;more exactly, the social
+organism&mdash;in which Spirit is really to triumph, can only be built up of
+individuals who do with a greater or less perfection and intensity
+exhibit these characters, some upon independent levels of creative
+freedom, some on those of discipleship: for here all men are not equal,
+and it is humbug to pretend that they are. This social order, being so
+built of regenerate units, would be dominated by these same implicits of
+the regenerate consciousness; and would tend to solve in their light the
+special problems of community life. And this unity of aim would really
+make of it one body; the body of a fully socialized <i>and</i> fully
+spiritualized humanity, which perhaps we might without presumption
+describe as indeed the son of God.</p>
+
+<p>The life of such a social organism, its growth, its cycle of corporate
+behaviour, would be strung on that same fourfold cord which combined the
+desires and deeds of the regenerate self into a series: namely,
+Penitence, Surrender, Recollection, and Work. It would be actuated first
+by a real social repentance. That is, by a turning from that constant
+capitulation to its past, to animal and savage <a name="Page_276" id="Page_276" />impulse, the power of
+which our generation at least knows only too well; and by the
+complementary effort to unify vigorous instinctive action and social
+conscience. I think every one can find for themselves some sphere,
+national, racial, industrial, financial, in which social penitence could
+work; and the constant corporate fall-back into sin, which we now
+disguise as human nature, or sometimes&mdash;even more insincerely&mdash;as
+economic and political necessity, might be faced and called by its true
+name. Such a social penitence&mdash;such a corporate realization of the mess
+that we have made of things&mdash;is as much a direct movement of the Spirit,
+and as great an essential of regeneration, as any individual movement of
+the broken and contrite heart.</p>
+
+<p>Could a quick social conscience, aware of obligations to Reality which
+do not end with making this world a comfortable place&mdash;though we have
+not even managed that for the majority of men&mdash;feel quite at ease, say,
+after an unflinching survey of our present system of State punishment?
+Or after reading the unvarnished record of our dealings with the problem
+of Indian immigration into Africa? Or after considering the inner nature
+of international diplomacy and finance? Or even, to come nearer home,
+after a stroll through Hoxton: the sort of place, it is true, which we
+have not exactly made on purpose but which has made itself because we
+have not, as a community, exercised our undoubted powers of choice and
+action in an in<a name="Page_277" id="Page_277" />telligent and loving way. Can we justify the peculiar
+characteristics of Hoxton: congratulate ourselves on the amount of
+light, air and beauty which its inhabitants enjoy, the sort of children
+that are reared in it, as the best we can do towards furthering the
+racial aim? It is a monument of stupidity no less than of meanness. Yet
+the conception of God which the whole religious experience of growing
+man presses on us, suggests that both intelligence and love ought to
+characterize His ideal for human life. Look then at these, and all the
+other things of the same kind. Look at our attitude towards
+prostitution, at the drink traffic, at the ugliness and injustice of the
+many institutions which we allow to endure. Look at them in the
+Universal Spirit; and then consider, whether a searching corporate
+repentance is not really the inevitable preliminary of a social and
+spiritual advance. All these things have happened because we have as a
+body consistently fallen below our best possible, lacked courage to
+incarnate our vision in the political sphere. Instead, we have, acted on
+the crowd level, swayed by unsublimated instincts of acquisition,
+disguised lust, self-preservation, self-assertion, and ignoble fear: and
+such a fall-back is the very essence of social sin.</p>
+
+<p>We have made many plans and elevations; but we have not really tried to
+build Jerusalem either in our own hearts or in &quot;England's pleasant
+land.&quot; Blake thought that the preliminary of such a build<a name="Page_278" id="Page_278" />ing up of the
+harmonious social order must be the building up or harmonizing of men,
+of each man; and when this essential work was really done, Heaven's
+&quot;Countenance Divine&quot; would suddenly declare itself &quot;among the dark
+Satanic mills.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152" /><a href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> What was wrong with man, and ultimately therefore
+with society, was the cleavage between his &quot;Spectre&quot; or energetic
+intelligence, and &quot;Emanation&quot; or loving imagination. Divided, they only
+tormented one another. United, they were the material of divine
+humanity. Now the complementary affirmative movement which shall balance
+and complete true social penitence will be just such a unification and
+dedication of society's best energies and noblest ideals, now commonly
+separated. The Spectre is attending to economics: the Emanation is
+dreaming of Utopia. We want to see them united, for from this union
+alone will come the social aspect for surrender. That is to say, a
+single-minded, unselfish yielding to those good social impulses which we
+all feel from time to time, and might take more seriously did, we
+realize them as the impulsions of holy and creative Spirit pressing us
+towards novelty, giving us our chance; our small actualization of the
+universal tendency to the Divine. As it is, we do feel a little
+uncomfortable when these stirrings reach us; but commonly console
+ourselves with the thought that their realization is at present outside
+the sphere of practical politics. Yet the obliga<a name="Page_279" id="Page_279" />tion of response to
+those stirrings is laid on all who feel them; and unless some will first
+make this venture of faith, our possible future will never be achieved.
+Christ was born among those who <i>expected</i> the Kingdom of God. The
+favouring atmosphere of His childhood is suggested by these words. It is
+our business to prepare, so far as we may, a favourable atmosphere and
+environment for the children who will make the future: and this
+environment is not anything mysterious, it is simply ourselves. The men
+and women who are now coming to maturity, still supple to experience and
+capable of enthusiastic and disinterested choice&mdash;that is, of surrender
+in the noblest sense&mdash;will have great opportunities of influencing those
+who are younger than themselves. The torch is being offered to them; and
+it is of vital importance to the unborn future that they should grasp
+and hand it on, without worrying about whether their fingers are going
+to be burnt. If they do grasp it, they may prove to be the bringers in
+of a new world, a fresh and vigorous social order, which is based upon
+true values, controlled by a spiritual conception of life; a world in
+which this factor is as freely acknowledged by all normal persons, as is
+the movement of the earth round the sun.</p>
+
+<p>I do not speak here of fantastic dreams about Utopias, or of the
+coloured pictures of the apocalyptic imagination; but of a concrete
+genuine possibility, at which clear-sighted persons have hinted <a name="Page_280" id="Page_280" />again
+and again. Consider our racial past. Look at the Piltdown skull:
+reconstruct the person or creature whose brain that skull contained, and
+actualize the directions in which his imperious instincts, his vaguely
+conscious will and desire, were pressing into life. They too were
+expressions of Creative Spirit; and there is perfect continuity between
+his vital impulse and our own. Now, consider one of the better
+achievements of civilization; say the life of a University, with its
+devotion to disinterested learning, its conservation of old beauty and
+quest of new truth. Even if we take its lowest common measure, the
+transfiguration of desire is considerable. Yet in the things of the
+Spirit we must surely acknowledge ourselves still to be primitive men;
+and no one can say that it yet appears what we shall be. All really
+depends on the direction in which human society decides to push into
+experience, the surrender which it makes to the impulsion of the Spirit;
+how its tendency to novelty is employed, the sort of complex habits
+which are formed by it, as more and more crude social instinct is lifted
+up into conscious intention, and given the precision of thought.</p>
+
+<p>In our regenerate society, then, if we ever get it, the balanced moods
+of Repentance of our racial past and Surrender to our spiritual calling,
+the pull-forward of the Spirit of Life even in its most austere
+difficult demands, will control us; as being the socialized extensions
+of these same attitudes of <a name="Page_281" id="Page_281" />the individual soul. And they will press the
+community to those same balanced expressions of its instinct for
+reality, which completed the individual life: that is to say, to
+Recollection and Work. In the furnishing of a frame for the regular
+social exercise of recollection&mdash;the gathering in of the corporate mind
+and its direction to eternal values, the abiding foundations of
+existence; the consideration of all its problems in silence and peace;
+the dramatic and sacramental expression of its unity and of its
+dependence on the higher powers of life&mdash;in all this, the institutional
+religion of the future will perhaps find its true sphere of action, and
+take its rightful place in the socialized life of the Spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the work which is done by a community of which the inner life
+is controlled by these three factors will be the concrete expression of
+these factors in the time-world; and will perpetuate and hand on all
+that is noble, stable and reasonable in human discovery and tradition,
+whether in the sphere of conduct, of thought, of creation, of manual
+labour, or the control of nature, whilst remaining supple towards the
+demands and gifts of novelty. New value will be given to craftsmanship
+and a sense of dedication&mdash;now almost unknown&mdash;to those who direct it.
+Consider the effect of this attitude on worker, trader, designer,
+employer: how many questions would then answer themselves, how many sore
+places would be healed.</p>
+
+<p>It is not necessary, in order to take sides with <a name="Page_282" id="Page_282" />this possible new
+order and work for it, that we should commit ourselves to any one party
+or scheme of social reform. Still less is it necessary to suppose such
+reform the only field in which the active and social side of the
+spiritual life is to be lived. Repentance, surrender, recollection and
+industry can do their transfiguring work in art, science, craftsmanship,
+scholarship, and play: making all these things more representative of
+reality, nearer our own best possible, and so more vivid and worth
+while. If Tauler was right, and all kinds of skill are gifts of the Holy
+Ghost&mdash;a proposition which no thorough-going theist can refuse&mdash;then
+will not a reference back on the part of the worker to that fontal
+source of power make for humility and perfection in all work? Personally
+I am not at all afraid to recognize a spiritual element in all good
+craftsmanship, in the delighted and diligent creation of the fine
+potter, smith or carpenter, in the well-tended garden and beehive, the
+perfectly adjusted home; for do not all these help the explication of
+the one Spirit of Life in the diversity of His gifts?</p>
+
+<p>The full life of the Spirit must be more rich and various in its
+expression than any life that we have yet known, and find place for
+every worthy and delightful activity. It does not in the least mean a
+bloodless goodness; a refusal of fun and everlasting fuss about uplift.
+But it does mean looking at and judging each problem in a particular
+light, and <a name="Page_283" id="Page_283" />acting on that judgment without fear. Were this principle
+established, and society poised on this centre, reforms would follow its
+application almost automatically; specific evils would retreat. New
+knowledge of beauty would reveal the ugliness of many satisfactions
+which we now offer to ourselves, and new love the defective character of
+many of our social relations. Certain things would therefore leave off
+happening, would go; because the direction of desire had changed. I do
+not wish to particularize, for this only means blurring the issue by
+putting forward one's own pet reforms. But I cannot help pointing out
+that we shall never get spiritual values out of a society harried and
+tormented by economic pressure, or men and women whose whole attention
+is given up to the daily task of keeping alive. This is not a political
+statement: it is a plain fact that we must face. Though the courageous
+lives of the poor, their patient endurance of insecurity may reveal a
+nobility that shames us, it still remains true that these lives do not
+represent the most favourable conditions of the soul. It is not poverty
+that matters; but strain and the presence of anxiety and fear, the
+impossibility of detachment. Therefore this oppression at least would
+have to be lightened, before the social conscience could be at ease.
+Moreover as society advances along this way, every&mdash;even the most
+subtle&mdash;kind of cruelty and exploitation of self-advantage obtained to
+the detriment of other individuals, must <a name="Page_284" id="Page_284" />tend to be eliminated; because
+here the drag-back of the past will be more and more completely
+conquered, its instincts fully sublimated, and no one will care to do
+those things any more. Bringing new feelings and more real concepts to
+our contact with our environment, we shall, in accordance with the law
+of apperception, see this environment in a different way; and so obtain
+from it a fresh series of experiences. The scale of pain and pleasure
+will be altered. We shall feel a searching responsibility about the way
+in which our money is made, and about any disadvantages to others which
+our amusements or comforts may involve.</p>
+
+<p>Here, perhaps, it is well to register a protest against the curious but
+prevalent notion that any such concentrated effort for the
+spiritualization of society must tend to work itself out in the
+direction of a maudlin humanitarianism, a soft and sentimental reading
+of life. This idea merely advertises once more the fact that we still
+have a very mean and imperfect conception of God, and have made the
+mistake of setting up a water-tight bulkhead; between His revelation, in
+nature and His discovery in the life of prayer. It shows a failure to
+appreciate the stern, heroic aspect of Reality; the element of austerity
+in all genuine religion, the distinction between love and
+sentimentalism, the rightful place of risk, effort, even suffering, in
+all full achievement and all joy. If we are surrendered in love to the
+purposes of the Spirit, we are committed to the <a name="Page_285" id="Page_285" />bringing out of the
+best possible in life; and this is a hard business, involving a quite
+definite social struggle with evil and atavism, in which some one is
+likely to be hurt. But surely that manly spirit of adventure which has
+driven men to the North Pole and the desert, and made them battle with
+delight against apparently impossible odds, can here find its
+appropriate sublimation?</p>
+
+<p>If anyone who has followed these arguments, and now desires to bring
+them from idea into practice, asks: &quot;What next?&quot; the answer simply
+is&mdash;Begin. Begin with ourselves; and if possible, do not begin in
+solitude. &quot;The basal principles of all collective life,&quot; says McDougall,
+&quot;are sympathetic contagion, mass suggestion, imitation&quot;:<a name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153" /><a href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a> and again
+and again the history of spiritual experience illustrates this law, that
+its propagation is most often by way of discipleship and the corporate
+life, not by the intensive culture of purely solitary effort. It is for
+those who believe in the spiritual life to take full advantage now of
+this social suggestibility of man; though without any detraction from
+the prime importance of the personal spiritual life. Therefore, join up
+with somebody, find fellowship; whether it be in a church or society, or
+among a few like-minded friends. Draw together for mutual support, and
+face those imperatives of prayer and work which we have seen to be the
+condition of the fullest living-out of our existence. Fix and keep a
+reason<a name="Page_286" id="Page_286" />ably balanced daily rule. Accept leadership where you find
+it&mdash;give it, if you feel the impulse and the strength. Do not wait for
+some grand opportunity, and whilst you are waiting stiffen in the wrong
+shape. The great opportunity may not be for us, but for the generation
+whose path we now prepare: and we do our best towards such preparation,
+if we begin in a small and humble way the incorporation of our hopes and
+desires as for instance Wesley and the Oxford Methodists did. They
+sought merely to put their own deeply felt ideas into action quite
+simply and without fuss; and we know how far the resulting impulse
+spread. The Bab movement in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show
+us this principle still operative; what a &quot;little flock&quot; dominated by a
+suitable herd-leader and swayed by love and adoration can do&mdash;and these,
+like Christianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous groups. It
+may be that our hope for the future depends on the formation of such
+groups&mdash;hives of the Spirit&mdash;in which the worker of every grade, the
+thinker, the artist, might each have their place: obtaining from
+incorporation the herd-advantages of mutual protection and unity of aim,
+and forming nuclei to which others could adhere.</p>
+
+<p>Such a small group&mdash;and I am now thinking of something quite practical,
+say to begin with a study-circle, or a company of like-minded friends
+with a definite rule of life&mdash;may not seem to the outward eye very
+impressive. Regarded as a unit, it will <a name="Page_287" id="Page_287" />even tend to be inferior to its
+best members: but it will be superior to the weakest, and with its
+leader will possess a dynamic character and reproductive power which he
+could never have exhibited alone. It should form a compact organization,
+both fervent and business-like; and might take as its ideal a
+combination of the characteristic temper of the contemplative order,
+with that of active and intelligent Christianity as seen in the best
+type of social settlement. This double character of inwardness and
+practicality seems to me to be essential to its success; and
+incorporation will certainly help it to be maintained. The rule should
+be simple and unostentatious, and need indeed be little more than the
+&quot;heavenly rule&quot; of faith, hope, and charity. This will involve first the
+realization of man's true life within a spiritual world-order, his utter
+dependence upon its realities and powers of communion with them; next
+his infinite possibilities of recovery and advancement; last his duty of
+love to all other selves and things. This triple law would be applied
+without shirking to every problem of existence; and the corporate spirit
+would be encouraged by meetings, by associated prayer, and specially I
+hope by the practice of corporate silence. Such a group would never
+permit the intrusion of the controversial element, but would be based on
+mutual trust; and the fact that all the members shared substantially the
+same view of human life, strove though in differing ways for the same
+ideals, were filled by the same <a name="Page_288" id="Page_288" />enthusiasms, would allow the problems
+and experiences of the Spirit to be accepted as real, and discussed with
+frankness and simplicity. Thus oases of prayer and clear thinking might
+be created in our social wilderness, gradually developing such power and
+group-consciousness as we see in really living religious bodies. The
+group would probably make some definite piece of social work, or some
+definite question, specially its own. Seeking to judge the problem this
+presented in the Universal Spirit, it would work towards a solution,
+using for this purpose both heart and head. It would strive in regard to
+the special province chosen and solution reached to make its weight
+felt, either locally or nationally, in a way the individual could never
+hope to do; and might reasonably hope that its conclusions and its
+actions would exceed in balance and sanity those which any one of the
+members could have achieved alone.</p>
+
+<p>I think that these groups would develop their own discipline, not borrow
+its details from the past: for they would soon find that some drill was
+necessary to them, and that luxury, idleness, self-indulgence and
+indifference to the common-good were in conflict with the inner spirit
+of the herd. They would inevitably come to practise that sane
+asceticism, not incompatible with gaiety of heart, which consists in
+concentration on the real, and quiet avoidance of the attractive sham.
+Plainness and simplicity do help the spiritual life, and these are <a name="Page_289" id="Page_289" />more
+easy and wholesome when practised in common than when they are displayed
+by individuals in defiance of the social order that surrounds them. The
+differences of temperament and of spiritual level in the group members
+would prevent monotony; and insure that variety of reaction to the life
+of the Spirit which we so much wish to preserve. Those whose chief gift
+was for action would thus be directly supported by those natural
+contemplatives who might, if they remained in solitude, find it
+difficult to make their special gift serve their fellows as it must.
+Group-consciousness would cause the spreading and equalization of that
+spiritual sensitiveness which is, as a matter of fact, very unequally
+distributed amongst men. And in the backing up of the predominantly
+active workers by the organized prayerful will of the group, all the
+real values of intercession would be obtained: for this has really
+nothing to do with trying to persuade God to do specific acts, it is a
+particular way of exerting love, and thus of reaching and using
+spiritual power.</p>
+
+<p>This incorporation, as I see it, would be made for the express purpose
+of getting driving force with which to act directly upon life. For
+spirituality, as we have seen all along, must not be a lovely fluid
+notion or a merely self-regarding education; but an education for
+action, for the insertion of eternal values into the time-world, in
+conformity with the incarnational philosophy which justifies it. Such
+<a name="Page_290" id="Page_290" />action&mdash;such Insertion&mdash;depends on constant recourse to the sources of
+spiritual power. At present we tend to starve our possible centres of
+regeneration, or let them starve themselves, by our encouragement of the
+active at the expense of the contemplative life; and till this is
+mended, we shall get nothing really done. Forgetting St. Teresa's
+warning, that to give our Lord a perfect service, Martha and Mary must
+combine,<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154" /><a href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a> we represent the service of man as being itself an
+attention to God; and thus drain our best workers of their energies, and
+leave them no leisure for taking in Fresh supplies. Often they are
+wearied and confused by the multiplicity in which they must struggle;
+and they are not taught and encouraged to seek the healing experience of
+unity. Hence even our noblest teachers often show painful signs of
+spiritual exhaustion, and tend to relapse into the formal repetition of
+a message which was once a burning fire.</p>
+
+<p>The continued force of any regenerative movement depends above all else
+on continued vivid contact with the Divine order, for the problems of
+the reformer are only really understood and seen in true proportion in
+its light. Such contact is not always easy: it is a form of work. After
+a time the weary and discouraged will need the support of discipline if
+they are to do it. Therefore definite role of silence and
+withdrawal&mdash;perhaps an extension of that system of periodical retreats
+which <a name="Page_291" id="Page_291" />is one of the most hopeful features of contemporary religious
+life&mdash;is essential to any group-scheme for the general and social
+furtherance of the spiritual life. It is not to be denied for a moment,
+that countless good men and women who love the world in the divine and
+not in the self-regarding sense, are busy all their lives long in
+forwarding the purposes of the Spirit: which is acting through them, as
+truly as through the conscious prophets and regenerators of the race.
+But, to return for a moment to psychological language, whilst the Divine
+impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is not doing all that
+it could for us nor we all that we could do for it; for we are not
+completely unified. We can by appropriate education bring up that
+imperative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, and wittingly
+dedicate to its uses our heart, mind and will; and such realization in
+its most perfect form appears to be the psychological equivalent of the
+state which is described by spiritual writers, in their own special
+language, as &quot;union with God.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I have been at some pains to avoid the use of this special language of
+the mystics; but now perhaps we may remind ourselves that, by the
+declaration of all who have achieved it, the mature spiritual life is
+such a condition of completed harmony&mdash;such a theopathetic state.
+Therefore here to-day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble,
+no less that in the Indian forest or the medi&aelig;val cloister, man's really
+religious method and self-ex<a name="Page_292" id="Page_292" />pression must be harmonious with a
+life-process of which this is the recognized if distant goal: and in all
+the work of restatement, this abiding objective must be kept in view.
+Such union, such full identification with the Divine purpose, must be a
+social as well as an individual expression of full life. It cannot be
+satisfied by the mere picking out of crumbs of perfection from the
+welter, but must mean in the end that the real interests of society are
+indentical with the interests of Creative Spirit, in so far as these are
+felt and known by man; the interests, that is, of a love that is energy
+and an energy that is love. Towards this identification, the willed
+tendency of each truly awakened individual must steadfastly be set; and
+also the corporate desire of each group, as expressed in its prayer and
+work. For the whole secret of life lies in directed desire.</p>
+
+<p>A wide-spreading love to all in common, says Ruysbroeck in a celebrated
+passage, is the authentic mark of a truly spiritual man.<a name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155" /><a href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> In this
+phrase is concealed the link between the social and personal aspects of
+the spiritual life. It means that our passional nature with its cravings
+and ardours, instead of making self-centred whirlpools, flows out in
+streams of charity and power towards all life. And we observe too that
+the Ninth Perfection of the Buddhist is such a state of active charity.
+&quot;In his loving, sympathizing, joyful and steadfast mind he will
+recognize himself in all things, and will shed <a name="Page_293" id="Page_293" />warmth and light on the
+world in all directions out of his great, deep, unbounded heart.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_156_156" id="FNanchor_156_156" /><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a></p>
+
+<p>Let this, then, be the teleological objective on which the will and the
+desire of individual and group are set: and let us ask what it involves,
+and how it is achieved. It involves all the ardour, tenderness and
+idealism of the lover, spent not on one chosen object but on all living
+things. Thus it means an immense widening of the arc of human sympathy;
+and this it is not possible to do properly, unless we have found the
+centre of the circle first. The glaring defect of current religion&mdash;I
+mean the vigorous kind, not the kind that is responsible for empty
+churches&mdash;is that it spends so much time in running round the arc, and
+rather takes the centre for granted. We see a great deal of love in
+generous-minded people, but also a good many gaps in it which reference
+to the centre might help us to find and to mend. Some Christian people
+seem to have a difficulty about loving reactionaries, and some about
+loving revolutionaries. And in institutional religion there are people
+of real ardour, called by those beautiful names Catholic and
+Evangelical, who do not seem able to see each other in the light of this
+wide-spreading love. Yet they would meet at the centre. And it is at the
+centre that the real life of the Spirit aims first; thence flowing out
+to the circumference&mdash;even to its most harsh, dark, difficult <a name="Page_294" id="Page_294" />and
+rugged limits&mdash;in unbroken streams of generous love.</p>
+
+<p>Such love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending
+itself on the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed,
+and has as its special vocation&mdash;a vocation identical with that of the
+great artist&mdash;the &quot;loving of the unlovely into lovableness.&quot; Thus does
+it participate according to its measure in the work of Divine
+incarnation. This does not mean a maudlin optimism, or any other kind of
+sentimentality; for as we delve more deeply into life, we always leave
+sentimentality behind. But it does mean a love which is based on a deep
+understanding of man's slow struggles and of the unequal movements of
+life, and is expressed in both arduous and highly skillful actions. It
+means taking the grimy, degraded, misshapen, and trying to get them
+right; because we feel that essentially they can be right. And further,
+of course, it means getting behind them to the conditions that control
+their wrongness; and getting these right if we can. Consider what human
+society would be if each of its members&mdash;not merely occasional
+philanthropists, idealists or saints, but financiers, politicians,
+traders, employers, employed&mdash;had this quality of spreading a creative
+love: if the whole impulse of life in every man and woman were towards
+such a harmony, first with God, and then with all other things and
+souls. There is nothing unnatural in this conception. It only means that
+our vital energy would <a name="Page_295" id="Page_295" />flow in its real channel at last. Where then
+would be our most heart-searching social problems? The social order then
+would really be an order; tallying with St. Augustine's definition of a
+virtuous life as the ordering of love.</p>
+
+<p>What about the master and the worker in such a possibly regenerated
+social order? Consider alone the immense release of energy for work
+needing to be done, if the civil wars of civilized man could cease and
+be replaced by that other mental fight, for the upbuilding of Jerusalem:
+how the impulse of Creative Spirit, surely working in humanity, would
+find the way made clear. Would not this, at last, actualize the Pauline
+dream, of each single citizen as a member of the Body of Christ? It is
+because we are not thus attuned to life, and surrendered to it, that our
+social confusion arises; the conflict of impulse within society simply
+mirrors the conflict of impulse within each individual mind.</p>
+
+<p>We know that some of the greatest movements of history, veritable
+transformations of the group-mind, can be traced back to a tiny
+beginning in the faithful spiritual experience and response of some one
+man, his contact with the centre which started the ripples of creative
+love. If, then, we could elevate such universalized individuals into the
+position of herd-leaders, spread their secret, persuade society first to
+imitate them, and then to share their point of view, the real and sane,
+because love-impelled social revolution might begin. It will begin, when
+<a name="Page_296" id="Page_296" />more and ever more people find themselves unable to participate in, or
+reap advantage from, the things which conflict with love: when tender
+emotion in man is so universalized, that it controls the instincts of
+acquisitiveness and of self-assertion. There are already for each of us
+some things in which we cannot participate, because they conflict too
+flagrantly with some aspect of our love, either for truth, or for
+justice, or for humanity, or for God; and these things each individual,
+according to his own level of realization, is bound to oppose without
+compromise. Most of us have enough widespreading love to be&mdash;for
+instance&mdash;quite free from temptation to be cruel, at any rate directly,
+to children or to animals. I say nothing about the indirect tortures
+which our sloth and insensitiveness still permit. Were these first
+flickers made ardent, and did they control all our reactions to
+life&mdash;and there is nothing abnormal, no break in continuity involved in
+this, only a reasonable growth&mdash;then, new paths of social discharge
+would have been made for-our chief desires and impulses; and along these
+they would tend more and more to flow freely and easily, establishing
+new social-habits, unhampered by solicitations from our savage past. To
+us already, on the whole, these solicitations are less insistent than
+they were to the men of earlier centuries. We see their gradual defeat
+in slave emancipation, factory acts, increased religious tolerance,
+every movement towards social justice, every in<a name="Page_297" id="Page_297" />crease of the arc over
+which our obligations to other men obtain. They must now disguise
+themselves as patriotic or economic necessities, if we are to listen to
+them: as, in the Freudian dream, our hidden unworthy wishes slip through
+into consciousness in a symbolic form. But when their energy has been
+fully sublimated, the social action will no longer be a conflict but a
+harmony. Then we shall live the life of Spirit; and from this life will
+flow all love-inspired reform.</p>
+
+<p>Yet we are, above all, to avoid the conclusion that the spiritual life,
+in its social expression, shall necessarily push us towards mere change;
+that novelty contains everything, and stability nothing, of the will of
+the Spirit for the race. Surely our aim shall be this: that religious
+sensitiveness shall spread, as our discovery of religion in the universe
+spreads, so that at last every man's reaction to the whole of experience
+shall be entinctured with Reality, coloured by this dominant
+feeling-tone. Spirit would then work from within outwards, and all life
+personal and social, mental and physical, would be moulded by its
+inspiring power. And in looking here for our best hope of development,
+we remain safely within history; and do not strive for any desperate
+pulling down or false simplification of our complex existence, such as
+has wrecked many attempts to spiritualize society in the past.</p>
+
+<p>Consider the way by which we have come. We found in man an instinct for
+a spiritual Reality. A <a name="Page_298" id="Page_298" />single, concrete, objective Fact, transcending
+yet informing his universe, compels his adoration, and is apperceived by
+him in three main ways. First, as the very Being, Heart and Meaning of
+that universe, the universal of all universals, next as a Presence
+including and exceeding the best that personality can mean to him, last
+as an indwelling and energizing Life. We saw in history the persistent
+emergence of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as to subdue to
+its interests all the activities of life; ever seeking to incarnate its
+abiding values in the world of time. And further, psychology suggested
+to us, even in its tentative new findings, its exploration of our
+strange mental deeps, reason for holding such surrender to the purposes
+of the Spirit to represent the condition of man's fullest psychic
+health, and access to his real sources of power. We found in the
+universal existence of religious institutions further evidence of this
+profound human need of spirituality. We saw there the often sharp and
+sky-piercing intensity of the individual aptitude for Reality enveloped,
+tempered and made wholesome by the social influences of the cultus and
+the group: made too, available for the community by the symbolisms that
+cultus had preserved. So that gradually the life of the Spirit emerged
+for us as something most actual, not archaic: a perennial possibility of
+newness, of regeneration, a widening of our span of pain and joy. A
+human fact, completing and most closely linked with those other human
+facts, the <a name="Page_299" id="Page_299" />vocation to service, to beauty, to truth. A fact, then,
+which must control our view of personal self-discipline, of education,
+and of social effort: since it refers to the abiding Reality which alone
+gives all these their meaning and worth, and which man, consciously or
+unconsciously, must pursue.</p>
+
+<p>And last, if we ask as a summing up of the whole matter: <i>Why</i> man is
+thus to seek the Eternal, through, behind and within the ever-fleeting?
+The answer is that he cannot, as a matter of fact, help doing it sooner
+or later: for his heart is never at rest, till it finds itself there.
+But he often wastes a great deal of time before he realizes this. And
+perhaps we may find the reason why man&mdash;each man&mdash;is thus pressed
+towards some measure of union with Reality, in the fact that his
+conscious will thus only becomes an agent of the veritable purposes of
+life: of that Power which, in and through mankind, conserves and slowly
+presses towards realization the noblest aspirations of each soul. This
+power and push we may call if we like in the language of realism the
+tendency of our space-time universe towards deity; or in the language of
+religion, the working of the Holy Spirit. And since, so far as we know,
+it is only in man that life becomes self-conscious, and ever more and
+more self-conscious, with the deepening and widening of his love and his
+thought; so it is only in man that it can dedicate the will and desire
+which are life's central qualities to the furtherance of this Divine
+creative aim.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149" /><a href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> &quot;The Mirror of Eternal Salvation,&quot; Cap. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150" /><a href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> A good general discussion in Tansley: &quot;The New Psychology
+and its Relation to Life,&quot; Caps. 19, 20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151" /><a href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a> Aug. Conf., Bk. X, Cap. 27.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152" /><a href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a> Blake; &quot;Jerusalem.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153" /><a href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> &quot;Social Psychology,&quot; Cap. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154" /><a href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a> &quot;The Interior Castle&quot;: Sleuth Habitation, Cap. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155" /><a href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> &quot;The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage,&quot; Bk. II, Cap.
+44.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156" /><a href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a> Warren: &quot;Buddhism in Translations,&quot; p. 28.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PRINCIPAL_WORKS_USED_OR_CITED" id="PRINCIPAL_WORKS_USED_OR_CITED" /><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300" />PRINCIPAL WORKS USED OR CITED.</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>S. Alexander</i>. Space, Time, and Deity. London, 1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>Blessed Angela of Foligno</i>. Book of Divine Consolations (New Medi&aelig;val
+Library). London, 1908.</p>
+
+<p><i>St. Thomas Aquinas</i>. Summa Contra Gentiles (Of God and His Creatures),
+trans. by J. Rickaby, London, 1905.</p>
+
+<p><i>St. Augustine</i>. Confessions, trans. by Rev. C. Bigg. London, 1898.</p>
+
+<p><i>Venerable Augustine Baker</i>. Holy Wisdom, or Directions for the Prayer
+of Contemplation. London, 1908.</p>
+
+<p><i>Charles Baudouin</i>. Suggestion et Auto-suggestion. Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>Harold Begbie</i>. William Booth, Founder of the Salvation Army. London,
+1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>William Blake</i>. Poetical Works, with Variorum Readings by J. Sampson,
+Oxford, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Jerusalem, edited by E.R.D. Maclagan and A.E.B. Russell. London, 1904.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jacob Boehme</i>. The Aurora, trans. by J. Sparrow, London, 1914.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Six Theosophic Points, trans. by J.R. Earle, London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;The Way to Christ. London, 1911.</p>
+
+<p><i>St. Bonaventura</i>. Opera Omnia. Paris, 1864-71.</p>
+
+<p><i>Bernard Bosanquet</i>. What Religion Is. London, 1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dan Cuthbert Butler</i>. Benedictine Monachism. London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301" /><i>St. Catherine of Siena</i>. The Divine Dialogue, trans. by Algar Thorold.
+London, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>The Cloud of Unknowing, edited from B.M. Harl, 674, with an Introduction
+by Evelyn Underhill. London, 1912.</p>
+
+<p><i>G.A. Coe</i>. A Social Theory of Religious Education. New York, 1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>Benedetto Croce</i>. &AElig;sthetic, or the Science of Expression, trans. by D.
+Ainslie. London, 1909.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Theory and History of Historiography, trans. by D. Ainslie. London,
+1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dante Alighieri</i>. Tutte le Opere. Rived. nel testo da Dr. E. Moore.
+Oxford, 1894.</p>
+
+<p><i>Abbot Delatte</i>. The Benedictine Rule. Eng. trans. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>John Donne</i>. Sermons: Selected Passages, with an Essay by L. Pearsall
+Smith. Oxford, 1919.</p>
+
+<p><i>Meister Eckhart</i>. Schriften und Predigten aus dem Mittelhochsdeutschen.
+Ubersetzt und herausgegeben von Buttner. Leipzig, 1903.</p>
+
+<p><i>John Everard</i>. Some Gospel Treasures Opened. London, 1653.</p>
+
+<p><i>George Fox</i>. Journal, edited from the MSS. by N. Penney. Cambridge,
+1911.</p>
+
+<p><i>Elizabeth Fry</i>. Memoir with Extracts from her Journals and Letters,
+edited by two of her Daughters, 2nd. ed. London, 1848.</p>
+
+<p><i>Edmund Gardner</i>. St. Catherine of Siena. London, 1907.</p>
+
+<p><i>Gabriela Cunninghame Graham</i>. St. Teresa, her Life and Times. London,
+1894.</p>
+
+<p><i>Viscount Haldane</i>. The Reign of Relativity. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>J.O. Hannay</i>. The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism. London,
+1903.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302" /><i>F.H. Hayward</i>. The Lesson in Appreciation. New York, 1915.</p>
+
+<p><i>F.H. Hayward and A. Freeman</i>. The Spiritual Foundations of
+Reconstruction. London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p><i>Violet Hodgkin</i>. A Book of Quarter Saints. London, 1918.</p>
+
+<p><i>Harold H&ouml;ffding</i>. The Philosophy of Religion. London, 1906.</p>
+
+<p><i>Edmond Holmes</i>. What Is and What Might Be. London, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Give me the Young, London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>Baron Fredrick von H&uuml;gel</i>. The Mystical Element of Religion. London,
+1908.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Eternal Life: A Study of its Implications and Applications. London,
+1912.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jacopone da Todi</i>. Le Laude, secondo la stampa fiorentino del 1490. A
+cura di G. Ferri. Bari, 1915.</p>
+
+<p><i>William James</i>. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London, 1902.</p>
+
+<p><i>William James</i>. The Will to Believe and other Essays. London, 1897.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Principles of Psychology. London, 1901.</p>
+
+<p><i>St. John of the Cross</i>. The Ascent of Mount Carmel, trans. by David
+Lewis. London, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;The Dark Night of the Soul, trans. by David Lewis. London, 1908.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sir Henry Jones and J.H. Muirhead</i>. The Life and Philosophy of Edward
+Caird. Glasgow, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>Rufus Jones</i>. Studies in Mystical Religion. London, 1909.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;<a name="Page_303" id="Page_303" />Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
+London, 1914.</p>
+
+<p><i>Julian of Norwich</i>. Revelations of Divine Love, edited by Grace
+Warrack. London, 1901.</p>
+
+<p><i>C.G. Jung</i>. The Psychology of the Unconscious. London, 1916.</p>
+
+<p><i>Kabir</i>. One Hundred Poems, edited by Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn
+Underhill. London, 1915.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thomas &agrave; Kempis</i>. The Imitation of Christ: the Earliest English
+Translation (Everyman's Library). London, n.d.</p>
+
+<p><i>S. Kettlewell</i>. Thomas &agrave; Kempis and the Brothers of the Common Life.
+London, 1882.</p>
+
+<p><i>William Law</i>. Liberal and Mystical Writings, edited by W. Scott Palmer.
+London, 1908.</p>
+
+<p><i>W.P. Livingstone</i>. Mary Slessor of Calabar. London, 1918.</p>
+
+<p>Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine. Paris, 1912.</p>
+
+<p><i>W. McDougall</i>. An Introduction to Social Psychology, 9th ed. London,
+1915.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;The Group Mind. Cambridge, 1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>W.M. McGovern</i>. An Introduction to Mah&atilde;y&atilde;na Buddhism. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mechthild of Magdeburg</i>. Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit. Regensburg,
+1869.</p>
+
+<p><i>Reynold Nicholson</i>. Selected Poems from the Div&atilde;ni, Shamsi Tabriz.
+Cambridge, 1898.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;Studies in Islamic Mysticism. Cambridge, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>J.H. Overton</i>. John Wesley. London, 1891.</p>
+
+<p><i>William Penn</i>. No Cross, No Crown. London, 1851.</p>
+
+<p><i>Plotinus</i>. The Ethical Treatises, trans. from the Greek by Stephen
+Mackenna. London, 1917.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304" /><i>Plotinus</i>. The Physical and Psychical Treatises, trans. from the Greek
+by Stephen Mackenna. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>J.B. Pratt</i>. The Religious Consciousness; a Psychological Study. New
+York, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>Richard of St. Victor.</i> Opera Omnia. Migne, Pat Lat., t. 196.</p>
+
+<p><i>W.H.R. Rivers</i>. Instinct and the Unconscious, Cambridge, 1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>Richard Rolle of Hampole</i>. The Fire of Love and Mending of Life,
+Englished by R. Misyn (E.E.T.S. 106).London, 1896.</p>
+
+<p><i>Bertrand Russell</i>. The Analysis of Mind, London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>John Ruysbroeck</i>. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, the Book of
+Truth, and the Sparkling Stone, trans. from the Flemish by C.A.
+Wynschenk Dom. London, 1916.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;The Book of the XII B&eacute;guines, trans. by John Francis. London, 1913.</p>
+
+<p><i>R. Semon</i>. Die Mneme, 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1908.</p>
+
+<p><i>Herbert Spencer</i>. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical London,
+1861.</p>
+
+<p><i>B.H. Streeter and A.J. Appasamy</i>. The Sadhu: a Study in Mysticism and
+Practical Religion. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>B.H. Streeter</i>. (edited by). The Spirit: God and His Relation to Man.
+London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p><i>Blessed Henry Suso</i>. Life, by-Himself, trans. by T.F. Knox. London,
+1913.</p>
+
+<p><i>Devendranath Tagore.</i> Autobiography, trans. by S. Tagore and I. Devi,
+London, 1914.</p>
+
+<p><i>A.G. Tansley</i>. The New Psychology and its Relation to Life London,
+1920.</p>
+
+<p><i>St. Teresa</i>. The Life of St. Teresa written by Herself, trans. by D,
+Lewis. London, 1904.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;<a name="Page_305" id="Page_305" />The Interior Castle, trans. by the Benedictines of Stanbrook, 2nd ed.
+London, 1912.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;The Way of Perfection, ed. by E.R. Waller. London, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Theologia Germanica, ed. by Susanna Winkworth, 4th ed. London, 1907.</p>
+
+<p><i>Soeur Th&eacute;r&egrave;se de l'Enfant-J&eacute;sus:</i> Histoire d'une Ame. Paris, 1911.</p>
+
+<p><i>Francis Thompson.</i> St. Ignatius Loyola. London, 1909.</p>
+
+<p><i>W.F. Trotter.</i> Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 3rd ed. London,
+1917.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miguel da Unamuno.</i> The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples,
+Eng. trans. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>Evelyn Underhill.</i> Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic. London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p><i>C.B. Upton.</i> The Bases of Religious Belief. London, 1894.</p>
+
+<p><i>J. Varendonck.</i> The Psychology of Day-Dreams. London, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><i>H.C. Warren.</i> Buddhism in Translations. Cambridge, Mass., 1900.</p>
+
+<p><i>John Wesley.</i> Journal, from original MSS. Standard edition, vols 1-8.
+London, 1909-16.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX" /><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306" /><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307" />INDEX</h2>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Abreaction, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Abu Said, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Adolescence, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a> seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Alexander, S. <a href='#Page_26'>26</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Angela of Foligno, Blessed, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Apperception, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_284'>284</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Aquinas, St. Thomas, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Asceticism, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_288'>288</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Augustine, St., <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a>, <a href='#Page_273'>273</a>, <a href='#Page_295'>295</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Autistic thought, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Auto Suggestion <i>see</i> <a href="#suggestion">Suggestion</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Baudouin, C., <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Benedict, St. <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Benedictine Order, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bernard, St. <a href='#Page_52'>52</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bhakti Marga, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bible-reading, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Blake, W., <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_277'>277</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Boehme, Jacob, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bonaventura, St., <a href='#Page_146'>146</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Booth, General, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bosanquet, Bernard <a href='#Page_6'>6</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brahmo Samaj, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brothers of Common Life, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Buddhism, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>, <a href='#Page_292'>292</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Butler, Dom C., <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Caird, Edward, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Catherine of Genoa, St., <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Catherine of Siena, St., <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Christianity, Primitive, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Church, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">essentials of, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_171'>171</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">future, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_281'>281</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">gifts of, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">limitations, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cloud of Unknowing, The, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Complex, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conflict, Psychic, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Consciousness, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">group, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_288'>288</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">spiritual, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Contemplation, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a> in children, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conversion, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_265'>265</a></span><br /><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308" />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Croce, Benedetto, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cultus, <a name="cultus" /><a href='#Page_171'>171</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dante, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Delatte, Abbot, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dionysius, the Areopagite, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Discipleship, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Donne, John, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Eckhart, Master, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Education, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_177'>177</a> seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">factors of, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Spencer on, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Spiritual, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">dangers of, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_262'>262</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emotion, Religious, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Eternal Life, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Everard, John, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fox, George, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a>, <a href='#Page_273'>273</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Francis of Assisi, St., <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a>, <a href='#Page_273'>273</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Friends of God, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fry, Elizabeth, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gardner, Edmund, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">God, Experience of, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a> seq., <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>, <a href='#Page_275'>275</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">personality of, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Grace, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Groot, Gerard, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Groups, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Guyon, Madame, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Habit, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hadfield, J.A., <a href='#Page_100'>100</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Haldane, Viscount, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hayward, F.H., <a href='#Page_259'>259</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hinduism, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">History and spiritual life, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_212'>212</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">in education, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">H&ouml;ffding, H., <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">H&uuml;gel, Baron, F. von, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">on spiritual life, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Humility, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_275'>275</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hymns, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ignatius, Loyola, St., <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Instinct, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">herd, <a href='#Page_272'>272</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">in children, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Intercession, <a href='#Page_289'>289</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Introversion, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Isaiah, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacopone da Todi, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">James, William, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jerome, St., <a href='#Page_154'>154</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jesus Christ, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a>, <a href='#Page_273'>273</a>, <a href='#Page_279'>279</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Joan of Arc, St., <a href='#Page_95'>95</a></span><br /><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309" />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&quot;John Inglesant&quot;, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">John, St., <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">John of the Cross, St., <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Julian of Norwich, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kabir, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lawrence, Brother, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Law, William, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Liturgy, <i>see</i> <a href="#cultus">Cultus</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Livingstone, W.P., <a href='#Page_96'>96</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Love, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_292'>292</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">defined, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lucie, Christine, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mass, The, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">McDougall, W., <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">McGovern, W.M., <a href='#Page_72'>72</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mechthild of Magdeburg, St., <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Memory, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Methodists, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mind, analysis of, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">foreconscious, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">instinctive, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">primitive, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">rational, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">unconscious, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Motive, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mystical Experience, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nanak, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nicholson, Reynold, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pascal, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Patmore, Coventry, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Paul, St., <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>, <a href='#Page_269'>269</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Penn, William, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Plotinus, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pratt, J.B., <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Prayer <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>, <a href='#Page_265'>265</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Childrens', <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">corporate, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">distractions in, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">education in, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">of quiet, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Sadhu on, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">short act, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and suggestion <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">vocal, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and work, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Psyche, The, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Purgation, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_218'>218</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quakers, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ramakrishna, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Recollection, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">corporate, <a href='#Page_281'>281</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Regeneration, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">corporate, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_293'>293</a>, seq.</span><br /><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310" />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Religious ceremonies, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_188'>188</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">education, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">institutions, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_281'>281</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">magic <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">orders, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Repentance, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_269'>269</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">social, <a href='#Page_275'>275</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Reverie, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Richard of St. Victor, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rolle, Richard, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_67'>67</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rosary, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Russell, Bertrand, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ruysbroeck, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_261'>261</a>, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a>, <a href='#Page_292'>292</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sacrifice, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sadhu, Sundar, Singh, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Saints, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Salvation, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Salvation Army, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Semon, R., <a href='#Page_179'>179</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sin, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">corporate, <a href='#Page_276'>276</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sins, Seven Deadly, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Slessor, Mary, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_96'>96</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Social reform, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_296'>296</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">service, <a href='#Page_267'>267</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spencer, Herbert, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spirit of Power, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_290'>290</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spiritual Life</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">in adolescence, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">characters of, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_261'>261</a>, <a href='#Page_269'>269</a>, <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_283'>283</a>, <a href='#Page_292'>292</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">contagious, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_261'>261</a>, <a href='#Page_273'>273</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_295'>295</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">corporate, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>, <a href='#Page_275'>275</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">dangers of <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_263'>263</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">development of, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and education, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and history, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_212'>212</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and institutions <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">personal, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a>, <a href='#Page_274'>274</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and prayer, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and, psychology, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and reading, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">social, aspect of, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and work, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spiritual Type, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_226'>226</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Stigmata, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Streeter, B.H., <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sublimation, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_297'>297</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sufis, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Suggestion, <a name="suggestion" /><a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_167'>167</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and faith, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a></span><br /><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311" />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">laws of, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">in worship, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Surrender, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_299'>299</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Symbols, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tagore, Maharerhi Devendranath, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tansley, C., <a href='#Page_272'>272</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tauler, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Teresa, St, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_290'>290</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Theologia, Germanica, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Th&eacute;r&egrave;se de l'Enfant, J&eacute;sus, V&eacute;n&eacute;rable, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thomas &agrave; Kempis, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Trinity, Doctrine of, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Trotter, W.F., <a href='#Page_168'>168</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Unamuno, Don M. de, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Unification, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, seq., <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_278'>278</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Union with God, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a>, <a href='#Page_299'>299</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Upton, T., <a href='#Page_10'>10</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Varendonck, J., <a href='#Page_117'>117</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vincent de Paul, St. <a href='#Page_55'>55</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Virtues, Evangelical, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Visions, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, seq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vocation, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a>, <a href='#Page_300'>300</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wesley, John, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Work, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Worship, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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diff --git a/15082.txt b/15082.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/15082.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8336 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day, by Evelyn Underhill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
+
+Author: Evelyn Underhill
+
+Release Date: February 16, 2005 [EBook #15082]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Garrett Alley, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+AND
+
+THE LIFE OF TO-DAY
+
+BY
+
+EVELYN UNDERHILL
+
+Author of "MYSTICISM," "THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM," etc.
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+
+681 FIFTH AVENUE
+
+
+Copyright, 1922.
+
+BY E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+IN MEMORIAM
+
+E.R.B.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This book owes its origin to the fact that in the autumn of 1921 the
+authorities of Manchester College, Oxford invited me to deliver the
+inaugural course of a lectureship in religion newly established under
+the will of the late Professor Upton. No conditions being attached to
+this appointment, it seemed a suitable opportunity to discuss, so far as
+possible in the language of the moment, some of the implicits which I
+believe to underlie human effort and achievement in the domain of the
+spiritual life. The material gathered for this purpose has now been
+added to, revised, and to some extent re-written, in order to make it
+appropriate to the purposes of the reader rather than the hearer. As the
+object of the book is strictly practical, a special attempt has been
+made to bring the classic experiences of the spiritual life into line
+with the conclusions of modern psychology, and in particular, to suggest
+some of the directions in which recent psychological research may cast
+light on the standard problems of the religious consciousness. This
+subject is still in its infancy; but it is destined, I am sure, in the
+near future to exercise a transforming influence on the study of
+spiritual experience, and may even prove to be the starting point of a
+new apologetic. Those who are inclined either to fear or to resent the
+application to this experience of those laws which--as we are now
+gradually discovering--govern the rest of our psychic life, or who are
+offended by the resulting demonstrations of continuity between our most
+homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to
+themselves the plain words of Thomas a Kempis: "Thou art a man and not
+God, thou art flesh and no angel."
+
+Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity but the normal
+life of the Spirit, as it may be and is lived in the here-and-now, I
+have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in
+the ordinary terms of present day thought, and with little or no use of
+the technical language of mysticism. For the same reason, no attention
+has been given to those abnormal experiences and states of
+consciousness, which, too often regarded as specially "mystical," are
+now recognized by all competent students as representing the unfortunate
+accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirituality. Readers of
+these pages will find nothing about trances, Ecstasies and other rare
+psychic phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and sometimes only
+disease. For information on these matters they must go to larger and
+more technical works. My aim here is the more general one, of indicating
+first the characteristic experiences--discoverable within all great
+religions--which justify or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and
+the way in which these experiences may be accommodated to the
+world-view of the modern man: and next, the nature of that spiritual
+life as it appears in human history. The succeeding sections of the book
+treat in some detail the light cast on spiritual problems by mental
+analysis--a process which need not necessarily be conducted from the
+standpoint of a degraded materialism--and by recent work on the
+psychology of autistic thought and of suggestion. These investigations
+have a practical interest for every man who desires to be the "captain
+of his soul." The relation in which institutional religion does or
+should stand to the spiritual life is also in part a matter for
+psychology; which is here called upon to deal with the religious aspect
+of the social instincts, and the problems surrounding symbols and cults.
+These chapters lead up to a discussion of the personal aspect of the
+spiritual life, its curve of growth, characters and activities; and a
+further section suggests some ways in which educationists might promote
+the up springing of this life in the young. Finally, the last chapter
+attempts to place the fact of the life of the Spirit in its relation to
+the social order, and to indicate some of the results which might follow
+upon its healthy corporate development. It is superfluous to point out
+that each of these subjects needs, at least, a volume to itself: and to
+some of them I shall hope to return in the future. Their treatment in
+the present work is necessarily fragmentary and suggestive; and is
+intended rather to stimulate thought, than to offer solutions.
+
+Part of Chapter IV has already appeared in "The Fortnightly Review"
+under the title "Suggestion and Religious Experience." Chapter VIII
+incorporates several passages from an article on "Sources of Power in
+Human Life" originally contributed to the "Hubert Journal." These are
+reprinted by kind permission of the editors concerned. My numerous debts
+to previous writers are obvious, and for the most part are acknowledged
+in the footnotes; the greatest, to the works of Baron Von Hugely, will
+be clear to all students of his writings. Thanks are also due to my old
+friend William Scott Palmer, who read part of the manuscript and gave me
+much generous and valuable advice. It is a pleasure to express in this
+place my warm gratitude first to the Principal and authorities of
+Manchester College, who gave me the opportunity of delivering these
+chapters in their original form, and whose unfailing sympathy and
+kindness so greatly helped me: and secondly, to the members of the
+Oxford Faculty of Theology, to whom I owe the great Honor of being the
+first woman lecturer in religion to appear in the University list.
+
+  E.U.
+
+  _Epiphany_, 1922.
+
+[** Transcriber's Note: This text contains just a few instances of a
+    character with a diacritical mark. The character is a lower-case
+    'u' with a macron (straight line) above it. In the text, that
+    character is depicted thusly: [=u] **]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+      PREFACE                                             vii
+
+   I. THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE                      1
+
+  II. HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT                   38
+
+ III. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
+     (I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND                              74
+
+  IV. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
+     (II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION                    112
+
+   V. INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT   153
+
+  VI. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL            191
+
+ VII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION                228
+
+VIII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER         266
+
+      PRINCIPAL WORKS USED AND CITED                      300
+
+      INDEX                                               307
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+AND
+
+THE LIFE OF TO-DAY
+
+  Initio tu, Domine, terram fundasti; et opera manuum tuarum sunt caeli.
+  Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanes; et omnes sicut vestimentum
+        veterascent.
+  Et sicut opertorium mutabis eos, et mutabuntur;
+  Tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient.
+  Filii servorum tuorum habitabunt; et semen eorum in seculum dirigetur.
+
+                                 --Psalm cii: 25-28
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE
+
+
+This book has been called "The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day" in order to emphasize as much as possible the practical,
+here-and-now nature of its subject; and specially to combat the idea
+that the spiritual life--or the mystic life, as its more intense
+manifestations are sometimes called--is to be regarded as primarily a
+matter of history. It is not. It is a matter of biology. Though we
+cannot disregard history in our study of it, that history will only be
+valuable to us in so far as we keep tight hold on its direct connection
+with the present, its immediate bearing on our own lives: and this we
+shall do only in so far as we realize the unity of all the higher
+experiences of the race. In fact, were I called upon to choose a motto
+which should express the central notion of these chapters, that motto
+would be--"There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." This
+declaration I would interpret in the widest possible sense; as
+suggesting the underlying harmony and single inspiration of all man's
+various and apparently conflicting expressions of his instinct for
+fullness of life. For we shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful
+sense, of the tangle of material which is before us, until we have
+subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one transcendent Object towards
+which all our twisting pathways run, and one impulsion pressing us
+towards it.
+
+As psychology is now teaching us to find, at all levels of our craving,
+dreaming, or thinking, the diverse expressions of one psychic energy; so
+that type of philosophy which comes nearest to the religion of the
+Spirit, invites us to find at all levels of life the workings and
+strivings of one Power: "a Reality which both underlies and crowns all
+our other, lesser strivings."[1] Variously manifested in partial
+achievements of order and goodness, in diversities of beauty, and in our
+graded apprehensions of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us
+in the transcendent values of holiness and love. The more deeply it is
+loved by man, the nearer he draws to its heart: and the greater his
+love, the more fully does he experience its transforming and energizing
+power. The words of Plotinus are still true for every one of us, and are
+unaffected by the presence or absence of creed:
+
+"Yonder is the true object of our love, which it is possible to grasp
+and to live with and truly to possess, since no envelope of flesh
+separates us from it. He who has seen it knows what I say, that the soul
+then has another life, when it comes to God, and having come possesses
+Him, and knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the
+dispenser of true life and that it needs nothing further."[2]
+
+So, if we would achieve anything like a real integration of life--and
+until we have done so, we are bound to be restless and uncertain in our
+touch upon experience--we are compelled to press back towards contact
+with this living Reality, however conceived by us. And this not by way
+of a retreat from our actual physical and mental life, but by way of a
+fulfilment of it.
+
+More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the
+searching question of the disciple in Boehme's Dialogue on the
+Supersensual Life: "Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature
+into the supersensual ground, without destroying nature?"[3] And such a
+coming through into the ground, such a finding and feeling of Eternal
+Life, is I take it the central business of religion. For religion is
+committed to achieving a synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting,
+of nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to a greater
+reality, because a greater participation in eternity. Such a
+participation in eternity, manifested in the time-world, is the very
+essence of the spiritual life: but, set as we are in mutability, our
+apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative. Absolutes are
+known only to absolute mind; our measurements, however careful and
+intricate, can never tally with the measurements of God. As Einstein
+conceives of space curved round the sun we, borrowing his symbolism for
+a moment, may perhaps think of the world of Spirit as curved round the
+human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, and therefore presenting
+to us innumerable angles of approach. This means that God can and must
+be sought only within and through our human experience. "Where," says
+Jacob Boehme, "will you seek for God? Seek Him in your soul, which has
+proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living fountain of forces
+wherein the Divine working stands."[4]
+
+But, on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for
+agnosticism. For this our human experience in its humbling imperfection,
+however we interpret it, is as real within its own system of reference
+as anything else. It is our inevitably limited way of laying hold on the
+stuff of existence: and not less real for that than the monkeys' way on
+one hand, or the angels' way on the other. Only we must be sure that we
+do it as thoroughly and completely as we can; disdaining the indolence
+which so easily relapses to the lower level and the smaller world.
+
+And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call
+the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all
+times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which
+is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or
+rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of
+fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some
+form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and
+also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience,
+whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as
+effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most
+readily understand and respond to it.
+
+
+Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of
+analysis, can only say: "The soul knows when in that state that it is in
+the presence of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, does he
+not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful
+longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of
+Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying "More than all
+else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless
+life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known
+that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious
+experience, in so far as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is
+only of course in a limited and relative sense. The subjective element,
+all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and
+control it. Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an
+independent objective Reality. This experience is more real and
+concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which
+theology seeks to explain it. We may then take it, without prejudice to
+any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is _one
+life_; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the
+diversity of gifts and graces which men have been willing to call true,
+holy, beautiful and good. For the moment at least we may accept the
+definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as "oneness with the Supreme
+Good in every facet of the heart and will."[6] And since without
+derogation of its transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and worth,
+it is in human experience rather than in speculation that we are bound
+to seek it, we shall look first at the forms taken by man's intuition of
+Eternity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next at the actual
+appearance of this life in history. Then at the psychological machinery
+by which we may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious
+institutions make to its realization; and last, turning our backs on
+these partial explorations of the living Whole, seek if we can to seize
+something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way in
+which education may best prepare its fulfilment, and the part it must
+play in the social group.
+
+We begin therefore at the starting point of this life of Spirit: in
+man's vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and
+transcendent reality--his instinct for God. The characteristic forms
+taken by this instinct are simple and fairly well known. Complication
+only comes in with the interpretation we put on them.
+
+By three main ways we tend to realize our limited personal relations
+with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real; and
+these, appearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, might
+be illustrated from all places and all times.
+
+First, there is the profound sense of security: of being safely held in
+a cosmos of which, despite all contrary appearance, peace is the very
+heart, and which is not inimical to our true interests. For those whose
+religious experience takes this form, God is the Ground of the soul, the
+Unmoved, our Very Rest; statements which meet us again and again in
+spiritual literature. This certitude of a principle of permanence within
+and beyond our world of change--the sense of Eternal Life--lies at the
+very centre of the religious consciousness; which will never on this
+point capitulate to the attacks of philosophy on the one hand (such as
+those of the New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, assuring
+him that what he mistakes for the Eternal World is really his own
+unconscious mind. Here man, at least in his great representatives--the
+persons of transcendent religious genius--seems to get beyond all
+labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that
+satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that
+transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art.
+If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever
+its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived,
+as George Fox was so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know
+the great passage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes
+how "the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never
+changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence."[7] There is
+nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend
+on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as
+fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine
+and discipline of Christian prayer have always admitted its validity.
+
+Here and in many other examples which might be quoted, the spiritual
+fact is interpreted in a non-personal and cosmic way; and we must
+remember that what is described to us is always, inevitably, the more or
+less emotional interpretation, never the pure immediacy of experience.
+This interpretation frequently makes use of the symbolisms of space,
+stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is "lost in the ocean of
+the Godhead," "enters His silence" or exclaims with Dante:
+
+        "la mia vista, venendo sincera,
+      e piu e piu entrava per lo raggio
+    dell' alta luce, che da se e vera."[8]
+
+But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the
+relationship is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of
+a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the
+great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while
+doubtless including in its span all the values we associate with
+personality, must far overpass it: and this conclusion has been reached
+again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians
+we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
+Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of
+finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a
+prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and
+emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to
+God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is
+significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of
+rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus
+we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox
+Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing--
+
+"I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
+of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
+leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself
+suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself
+at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in
+choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no
+turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique
+moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious,
+sovereign and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens
+out the way of the Lord."[9]
+
+Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: "If," he says, "this Absolute
+Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our
+life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new
+life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite
+infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is
+only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it
+associations too human and too limited adequately to express this
+profound God-consciousness."[10]
+
+Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those
+moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic
+activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.
+We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their
+philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the
+self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so
+to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an
+"intellectual fountain," hears the Divine Voice crying:
+
+    "I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
+    Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me."[11]
+
+Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say:
+
+    "O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!"[12]
+
+Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father
+and ever-present Companion of the soul,[13] and Kabir, for whom God is
+the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim:
+
+"From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and
+thee: and how shall such love be extinguished?"[14]
+
+Christianity, through its concepts of the Divine Fatherhood and of the
+Eternal Christ, has given to this sense of personal communion its
+fullest and most beautiful expression:
+
+    "Amore, chi t'ama non sta ozioso,
+    tanto li par dolce de te gustare,
+    ma tutta ora vive desideroso
+    como te possa stretto piu amare;
+    che tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso,
+    chi nol sentisse, nol porria parlare
+    quanto e dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore."[15]
+
+On the immense question of _what_ it is that lies behind this sense of
+direct intercourse, this passionate friendship with the Invisible, I
+cannot enter. But it has been one of the strongest and most fruitful
+influences in religious history, and gives in particular its special
+colour to the most perfect developments of Christian mysticism.
+
+Last--and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially
+to concern us--Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable
+accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group,
+impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its
+existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh
+levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions
+of the Spirit. "He giveth power to the faint," says the Second Isaiah,
+"and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that
+wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
+wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk,
+and not faint."[16] "I live--yet not I," "I can do all things," says St.
+Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading
+and controlling him: and assures his neophytes that they too have
+received "the Spirit of power." "My life," says St. Augustine, "shall be
+a real life, being wholly full of Thee."[17] "Having found God," says a
+modern Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained
+fresh strength."[18] All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the
+same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and
+endurance.
+
+So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be
+resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The
+cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite
+Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living
+and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The
+dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us.
+These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving
+objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into
+account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual
+life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be
+present in some measure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine
+says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same
+time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power,[19] and her Indian contemporary
+the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers after God must realize
+Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without,
+and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And
+it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
+Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
+these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
+us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
+an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
+which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
+part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
+knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
+how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power,
+of beauty which are contained in them.
+
+And if the first type of experience, with the immense feeling of
+assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive
+contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the "world that is
+unwalled,"[21] and from the mind's utter surrender and abolition of
+resistances--if all this seems to lead to a merely static or
+contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of
+experience, with its impulse towards action, its often strongly felt
+accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and
+dynamic interpretation of that life. Indeed, if the first moment in the
+life of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal Life, the second
+moment--without which the first has little worth for him--consists of
+his response to that transcendent Reality. Perception of it lays on him
+the obligation of living in its atmosphere, fulfilling its meaning, if
+he can: and this will involve for him a measure of inward
+transformation, a difficult growth and change. Thus the ideas of new
+birth and regeneration have always been, and I think must ever be,
+closely associated with man's discovery of God: and the soul's true path
+seems to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral effort, and
+thence to charity.
+
+Even so did the Oxford Methodists, who began by trying only to worship
+God and _be_ good by adhering to a strict devotional rule, soon find
+themselves impelled to try to _do_ good by active social work.[22] And
+at his highest development, and in so far as he has appropriated the
+full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should
+find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and
+contemplation. Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss
+in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich
+and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a
+fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent
+love, and its felt possession of and duty towards immanent love--a paradox
+which only some form of incarnational philosophy can solve. It is said
+of Abu Said, the great S[=u]fi, at the full term of his development,
+that he "did all normal things while ever thinking of God."[23] Here, I
+believe, we find the norm of the spiritual life, in such a complete
+response both to the temporal and to the eternal revelations and demands
+of the Divine nature: on the one hand, the highest and most costing
+calls made on us by that world of succession in which we find ourselves;
+on the other, an unmoved abiding in the bosom of eternity, "where was
+never heard quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to
+turne."[24]
+
+There have been many schools and periods in which one half of this dual
+life of man has been unduly emphasized to the detriment of the other.
+Often in the East--and often too in the first, pre-Benedictine phase of
+Christian monasticism--there has been an unbalanced cultivation of the
+contemplative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imperfectly
+vitalized a-social type of spirituality. On the other hand, in our own
+day the tendency to action usually obliterates the contemplative side of
+experience altogether: and the result is the feverishness, exhaustion
+and uncertainty of aim characteristic of the over-driven and the
+underfed. But no one can be said to live in its fulness the life of the
+Spirit who does not observe a due balance between the two: both
+receiving and giving, both apprehending and expressing, and thus
+achieving that state of which Ruysbroeck said "Then only is our life a
+whole, when work and contemplation dwell in us side by side, and we are
+perfectly in both of them at once."[25] All Christian writers on the
+life of the Spirit point to the perfect achievement of this two-fold
+ideal in Christ; the pattern of that completed humanity towards which
+the indwelling Spirit is pressing the race. His deeds of power and
+mercy, His richly various responses to every level of human existence,
+His gift to others of new faith and life, were directly dependent on the
+nights spent on the mountain in prayer. When St. Paul entreats us to
+grow up into the fulness of His stature, this is the ideal that is
+implied.
+
+In the intermediate term of the religious experience, that felt
+communion with a Person which is the _clou_ of the devotional life, we
+get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of
+transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of
+contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that
+religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual
+growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity
+has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the
+exaggerations to which it has led. Both extremes are richly represented
+in the literature of mysticism. But we should remember that Christianity
+is not alone in thus requiring place to be made for such a conception of
+God as shall give body to all the most precious and fruitful experiences
+of the heart, providing simple human sense and human feeling with
+something on which to lay hold. In India, there is the existence, within
+and alongside the austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of the
+ardent personal Vaishnavite devotion to the heart's Lord, known as
+Bhakti Marga. In Islam, there is the impassioned longing of the S[=u]fis
+for the Beloved, who is "the Rose of all Reason and all Truth."
+
+    "Without Thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest;
+    Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon.
+    Tho' every hair on my body becomes a tongue
+    A thousandth part of the thanks due to Thee I cannot tell."[26]
+
+There is the sudden note of rapture which startles us in the
+Neoplatonists, as when Plotinus speaks of "the name of love for what is
+there to know--the passion of the lover testing on the 'bosom of his
+love."[27] Surely we may accept all these, as the instinctive responses
+of a diversity of spirits to the one eternal Spirit of life and love:
+and recognize that without such personal response, such a discovery of
+imperishable love, a fully lived spiritual life is no more possible than
+is a fully lived physical life from which love has been left out.
+
+When we descend from experience to interpretation, the paradoxical
+character of such a personal sense of intimacy is eased for us, if we
+remember that the religious man's awareness of the indwelling Spirit, or
+of a Divine companionship--whatever name he gives it--is just his
+limited realization, achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of a
+universal and not a particular truth. To this realization he brings all
+his human--more, his sub-human--feelings and experiences: not only those
+which are vaguely called his spiritual intuitions, but the full weight
+of his impulsive and emotional life. His experience and its
+interpretation are, then, inevitably conditioned by this apperceiving
+mass. And here I think the intellect should show mercy, and not probe
+without remorse into those tender places where the heart and the spirit
+are at one. Let us then be content to note, that when we consult the
+works of those who have best and most fully interpreted their religion
+in a universal sense, we find how careful they are to provide a category
+for this experience of a personally known and loved indwelling
+Divinity--man's Father, Lover, Saviour, ever-present Companion--which
+shall avoid its identification with the mere spirit of Nature, whilst
+safeguarding its immanence no less than its transcendent quality. Thus,
+Julian of Norwich heard in her meditations the voice of God saying to
+her, "See! I am in all things! See! I lift never mine hand from off my
+works, nor ever shall!"[28] Is it possible to state more plainly the
+indivisible identity of the Spirit of Life? "See! I am in _all_ things!"
+In the terrific energies of the stellar universe, and the smallest song
+of the birds. In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much
+a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the
+more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive. This
+sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and
+transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of
+effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual
+experience, wherever found. It chimes well with the definition of
+Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly spiritual man, though he
+may not be any better morally than his non-religious neighbour, "has a
+confidence in the universe and an inner joy which the other does not
+know--is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men."[29]
+
+If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning
+Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and
+symbols of poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order
+to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love. Such a
+divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic
+incarnation, though not limited by it: and it is continued into history
+by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.
+The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest
+and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that
+this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.
+
+Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as
+a genuine and abiding human fact--a form of life--independent of the
+dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed. I now
+wish to go on to a second point: this--that it follows that any complete
+description of human life as we know it, must find room for the
+spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it
+finds expression. This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal
+series, as we might find room for any special human activity or
+aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but
+deep-set in the enduring stuff of man's true life. We must believe that
+the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot _in fact_ be
+broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth with the universe
+as a whole. But the extent in which we find and feel it is the measure
+of the fullness of spiritual life that we enjoy. Organic union must be
+lifted to conscious realization: and this to do, is the business of
+religion. In this act of realization each aspect of the psychic
+life--thought, will and feeling--must have its part, and from each must
+be evoked a response. Only in so far as such all-round realization and
+response are achieved by us do we live the spiritual life. We do it
+perhaps in some degree, every time that we surrender to pure beauty or
+unselfish devotion; for then all but the most insensitive must be
+conscious of an unearthly touch, and hear the cadence of a heavenly
+melody. In these partial experiences something, as it were, of the
+richness of Reality overflows and is experienced by us. But it is in the
+wholeness of response characteristic of religion--that uncalculated
+response to stimulus which is the mark of the instinctive life--that
+this Realty of love and power is most truly found and felt by us. In
+this generous and heart-searching surrender of religion, rightly made,
+the self achieves inner harmony, and finds a satisfying objective for
+all its cravings and energies. It then finds its life, and the
+possibilities before it, to be far greater than it knew.
+
+We need not claim that those men and women who have most fully realized,
+and so at first hand have described to us, this life of the Spirit, have
+neither discerned or communicated the ultimate truth of things; nor need
+we claim that the symbols they use have intrinsic value, beyond the
+poetic power of suggesting to us the quality and wonder of their
+transfigured lives. Still less must we claim this discovery as the
+monopoly of any one system of religion. But we can and ought to claim,
+that no system shall be held satisfactory which does not find a place
+for it: and that only in so far as we at least apprehend and respond to
+the world's spiritual aspect, do we approach the full stature of
+humanity. Psychologists at present are much concerned to entreat us to
+"face reality," discarding idealism along with the other phantasies that
+haunt the race. Yet this facing of reality can hardly be complete if we
+do not face the facts of the spiritual life. Certainly we shall find it
+most difficult to interpret these facts; they are confused, and more
+than one reading of them is possible. But still we cannot leave them out
+and claim to have "faced reality."
+
+Hoeffding goes so far as to say that any real religion implies and must
+give us a world-view.[30] And I think it is true that any vividly lived
+spiritual life must, as soon as it passes beyond the level of mere
+feeling and involves reflection, involve too some more or less
+articulated conception of the spiritual universe, in harmony with which
+that life is to be lived. This may be given to us by authority, in the
+form of creed: but if we do not thus receive it, we are committed to the
+building of our own City of God. And to-day, that world-view, that
+spiritual landscape, must harmonize--if it is needed to help our
+living--with the outlook, the cosmic map, of the ordinary man. If it be
+adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless
+conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving world of
+biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical
+relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy--these great
+constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind,
+must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view
+which centres on the God known in religious experience. They are true
+within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis
+wide enough to contain them.
+
+It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional
+type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which
+devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an
+explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to
+live. But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of
+modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the
+explorations of history and of psychology. Even contrasted with our
+every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in
+a wilderness. Whilst we are inside everything seems all right.
+
+Beauty and fragrance surround us. But emerging from its doors, we find
+ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of
+reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we possess has got to
+accommodate itself to the conditions in which they live. If the claim of
+religion be true at all, it is plain that the conservatory-type of
+spiritual world is inconsistent with it. Imperfect though any conception
+we frame of the universe must be--and here we may keep in mind Samuel
+Butler's warning that "there is no such source of error as the pursuit
+of absolute truth"--still, a view which is controlled by the religious
+factor ought to be, so to speak, a hill-top view. Lifting us up to
+higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. Hence, the wider
+the span of experience which we are able to bring within our system, the
+more valid its claim becomes: and the setting apart of spiritual
+experience in a special compartment, the keeping of it under glass, is
+daily becoming less possible. That experience is life in its fullness,
+or nothing at all. Therefore it must come out into the open, and must
+witness to its own most sacred conviction; that the universe as a whole
+is a religious fact, and man is not living completely until he is living
+in a world religiously conceived.
+
+More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading
+of existence. The revolt from the last century's materialism is almost
+complete. In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and
+feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and
+realization the meaning, and perhaps--if we may dare to use such a
+word--the purpose of life. It suggests--and here, more and more,
+psychology supports it--that, real and alive as we are in relation to
+this system with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet we are
+not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to be. The characters of
+our psychic life point us on and up to other levels. Already we perceive
+that man's universe is no fixed order; and that the many ways in which
+he is able to apprehend it are earnests of a greater transfiguration, a
+more profound contact with reality yet possible to him. Higher forms of
+realization, a wider span of experience, a sharpening of our vague,
+uncertain consciousness of value--these may well be before us. We have
+to remember how dim, tentative, half-understood a great deal of our
+so-called "normal" experience is: how narrow the little field of
+consciousness, how small the number of impressions it picks up from the
+rich flux of existence, how subjective the picture it constructs from
+them. To take only one obvious example, artists and poets have given us
+plenty of hints that a real beauty and significance which we seldom
+notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us to contradict the statement
+of religion that God is standing there too.
+
+That thought which inspires the last chapters of Professor 'Alexander's
+"Space, Time, and Deity," that the universe as a whole has a tendency
+towards deity, does at least seem true of the fully awakened human
+consciousness.[31] Though St. Thomas Aquinas may not have covered all
+the facts when he called man a contemplative animal,[32] he came nearer
+the mark than more modern anthropologists. Man has an ineradicable
+impulse to transcendence, though sometimes--as we may admit--it is
+expressed in strange ways: and no psychology which fails to take account
+of it can be accepted by us as complete. He has a craving which nothing
+in his material surroundings seems adequate either to awaken or to
+satisfy; a deep conviction that some larger synthesis of experience is
+possible to him. The sense that we are not yet full grown has always
+haunted the race. "I am the Food of the full-grown. _Grow,_ and thou
+shalt feed on Me!"[33] said the voice of supreme Reality to St.
+Augustine. Here we seem to lay our finger on the distinguishing mark of
+humanity: that in man the titanic craving for a fuller life and love
+which is characteristic of all living things, has a teleological
+objective. He alone guesses that he may or should be something other;
+yet cannot guess what he may be. And from this vague sense of being _in
+via,_ the restlessness and discord of his nature proceed. In him, the
+onward thrust of the world of becoming achieves self-consciousness.
+
+The best individuals and communities of each age have felt this craving
+and conviction; and obeyed, in a greater or less degree, its persistent
+onward push. "The seed of the new birth," says William Law, "is not a
+notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting, a magnetic
+desire."[34] Over and over again, rituals have dramatized this, desire
+and saints have surrendered to it. The history of religion and
+philosophy is really the history of the profound human belief that we
+have faculties capable of responding to orders of truth which, did we
+apprehend them, would change the whole character of our universe;
+showing us reality from another angle, lit by another light. And time
+after time too--as we shall see, when we come to consider the testimony
+of history--favourable variations have arisen within the race and proved
+in their own persons that this claim is true. Often at the cost of great
+pain, sacrifice, and inward conflict they have broken their attachments
+to the narrow world of the senses: and this act of detachment has been
+repaid by a new, more lucid vision, and a mighty inflow of power. The
+principle of degrees assures us that such changed levels of
+consciousness and angles of approach may well involve introduction into
+a universe of new relations, which we are not competent to
+criticize.[35] This is a truth which should make us humble in our
+efforts to understand the difficult and too often paradoxical utterances
+of religious genius. It suggests the puzzlings of philosophers and
+theologians--and, I may add, of psychologists too--over experiences
+which they have not shared, are not of great authority for those whose
+object is to find the secret of the Spirit, and make it useful for life.
+Here, the only witnesses we can receive are, on the one part, the
+first-hand witnesses of experience, and on the other part, our own
+profound instinct that these are telling us news of our native land.
+
+Baron von Huegel has finely said, that the facts of this spiritual life
+are themselves the earnests of its objective. These facts cannot be
+explained merely as man's share in the cosmic movement towards a yet
+unrealized perfection; such as the unachieved and self-evolving Divinity
+of some realist philosophers. "For we have no other instance of an
+unrealized perfection producing such pain and joy, such volitions, such
+endlessly varied and real results; and all by means of just this vivid
+and persistent impression that this Becoming is an already realized
+Perfection."[36] Therefore though the irresistible urge and the effort
+forward, experienced on highest levels of love and service, are plainly
+one-half of the life of the Spirit--which can never be consistent with a
+pious indolence, an acceptance of things as they are, either in the
+social or the individual life--yet, the other half, and the very
+inspiration of that striving, is this certitude of an untarnishable
+Perfection, a great goal really there; a living God Who draws all
+spirits to Himself. "Our quest," said Plotinus, "is of an End, not of
+ends: for that only can be chosen by us which is ultimate and noblest,
+that which calls forth the tenderest longings of our soul."[37]
+
+There is of course a sense in which such a life of the Spirit is the
+same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Even if we consider it in relation
+to historical time, the span within which it has appeared is so short,
+compared with the ages of human evolution, that we may as well regard it
+as still in the stage of undifferentiated infancy. Yet even babies
+change, and change quickly, in their relations with the external world.
+And though the universe with which man's childish spirit is in contact
+be a world of enduring values; yet, placed as we are in the stream of
+succession, part of the stuff of a changing world and linked at every
+point with it, our apprehensions of this life of spirit, the symbols we
+use to describe it--and we must use symbols--must inevitably change too.
+Therefore from time to time some restatement becomes imperative, if
+actuality is not to be lost. Whatever God meant man to do or to be, the
+whole universe assures us that He did not mean him to stand still. Such
+a restatement, then, may reasonably be called a truly religious work;
+and I believe that it is indeed one of the chief works to which religion
+must find itself committed in the near future. Hence my main object In
+this book is to recommend the consideration of this enduring fact of the
+life of the Spirit and what it can mean to us, from various points of
+view; thus helping to prepare the ground for that synthesis which we may
+not yet be able to achieve, but towards which we ought to look. It is
+from this stand-point, and with this object of examining what we have,
+of sorting out if we can the permanent from the transitory, of noticing
+lacks and bridging cleavages, that we shall consider in turn the
+testimony of history, the position in respect of psychology, and the
+institutional personal and social aspects of the spiritual life.
+
+In such a restatement, such a reference back to actual man, here at the
+present day as we have him--such a demand for a spiritual interpretation
+of the universe, which will allow us to fit in all his many-levelled
+experiences--I believe we have the way of approach to which religion
+to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that
+museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which--agreeable as it
+may be to the historic or aesthetic sense--makes it so unreal to our
+workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the
+tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is
+already a marked character of contemporary thought.
+
+And note that, working on this basis, we need not in order to find room
+for the facts commit ourselves to the harsh dualism, the opposition
+between nature and spirit, which is characteristic of some earlier forms
+of Christian thought. In this dualism, too, we find simply an effort to
+describe felt experience. It is an expression of the fact, so strongly
+and deeply felt by the richest natures, that there _is_ an utter
+difference in kind between the natural life of use and wont, as most of
+us live it, and the life that is dominated by the spiritual
+consciousness. The change is indeed so great, the transfiguration so
+complete, that they seize on the strongest language in which to state
+it. And in the good old human way, referring their own feelings to the
+universe, they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds of matter
+and of spirit, of nature and of grace. But those who have most deeply
+reflected, have perceived that the change effected is not a change of
+worlds. It is rather such a change of temper and attitude as will
+disclose within our one world, here and now, the one Spirit in the
+diversity of His gifts; the one Love, in homeliest incidents as well as
+noblest vision, laying its obligations on the soul; and so the true
+nature and full possibilities of this our present life.
+
+Although it is true that we must register our profound sense of the
+transcendental character of this spirit-life, its otherness from mere
+nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature
+receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more
+naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language
+of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this
+perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it.
+And whatever its special, language and personal colour be--for all our
+news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual men, and
+arrives tinctured by their feelings and beliefs--in the end it does
+this by disclosing us to ourselves as spirits growing up, though
+unevenly and hampered by our past, through the physical order into
+completeness of response to a universe that is itself a spiritual fact.
+"Heaven," said Jacob Boehme, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the
+Eternal One, wherein all worketh and willeth in quiet love."[38] Such a
+manifestation of Spirit must clearly be made through humanity, at least
+so far as our own order is concerned: by our redirection and full use of
+that spirit of life which energizes us, and which, emerging from the
+more primitive levels of organic creation, is ours to carry on and
+up--either to new self-satisfactions, or to new consecrations.
+
+It is hardly worth while to insist that the need for such a redirection
+has never been more strongly felt than at the present day. There is
+indeed no period in which history exhibits mankind as at once more
+active, more feverishly self-conscious, and more distracted, than is our
+own bewildered generation; nor any which stood in greater need of
+Blake's exhortation: "Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage
+himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit
+for the Building up of Jerusalem."[39]
+
+How many people do each of us know who work and will in quiet love, and
+thus participate in eternal life?
+
+Consider the weight of each of these words. The energy, the clear
+purpose, the deep calm, the warm charity they imply. Willed work; not
+grudging toil. Quiet love, not feverish emotionalism. Each term is quite
+plain and human, and each has equal importance as an attribute of
+heavenly life. How many politicians--the people to whom we have confided
+the control of our national existence--work and will in quiet love? What
+about industry? Do the masters, or the workers, work and will in quiet
+love? that is to say with diligence and faithful purpose, without
+selfish anxiety, without selfish demands and hostilities? What about the
+hurried, ugly and devitalizing existence of our big towns? Can we
+honestly say that young people reared in them are likely to acquire this
+temper of heaven? Yet we have been given the secret, the law of
+spiritual life; and psychologists would agree that it represents too the
+most favourable of conditions for a full psychic life, the state in
+which we have access to all our sources of power.
+
+But man will not achieve this state unless he dwells on the idea of it;
+and, dwelling on that idea, opening his mind to its suggestions, brings
+its modes of expression into harmony with his thought about the world of
+daily life. Our spiritual life to-day, such as it is, tends above all to
+express itself in social activities. Teacher after teacher comes forward
+to plume himself on the fact that Christianity is now taking a "social
+form"; that love of our neighbour is not so much the corollary as the
+equivalent of the love of God, and so forth. Here I am sure that all can
+supply themselves with illustrative quotations. Yet is there in this
+state of things nothing but food for congratulation? Is such a view
+complete? Is nothing left out? Have we not lost the wonder and poetry of
+the forest in our diligent cultivation of the economically valuable
+trees; and shall we ever see life truly until we see it with the poet's
+eyes? There is so much meritorious working and willing; and so little
+time left for quiet love. A spiritual fussiness--often a material
+fussiness too--seems to be taking the place of that inward resort to the
+fontal sources of our being which is the true religious act, our chance
+of contact with the Spirit. This compensating beat of the fully lived
+human life, that whole side of existence resumed in the word
+contemplation, has been left out. "All the artillery of the world," said
+John Everard, "were they all discharged together at one clap, could not
+more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamourings of desires in the
+soul deaf its ears, so you see a man must go into the silence, or else
+he cannot hear God speak."[40] And until we remodel our current
+conception of the Christian life in such a sense as to give that silence
+and its revelation their full value, I do not think that we can hope to
+exhibit the triumphing power of the Spirit in human character and human
+society. Our whole notion of life at present is such as to set up
+resistances to its inflow. Yet the inner mood, the consciousness, which
+makes of the self its channel, are accessible to all, if we would but
+believe this and act on our belief. "Worship," said William Penn, "is
+the supreme act of a man's life."[41] And what is worship but a
+reach-out of the finite spirit towards Infinite Life? Here thought must
+mend the breach which thought has made: for the root of our trouble
+consists in the fact that there is a fracture in our conception of God
+and of our relation with Him. We do not perceive the "hidden unity in
+the Eternal Being"; the single nature and purpose of that Spirit which
+brought life forth, and shall lead it to full realization.
+
+Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our view, in rushing
+round the sun; but perhaps found from another angle to fill quite
+another part in the cosmic scheme. And on this apparently unimportant
+speck, wandering among systems of suns, the appearance of life and its
+slow development and ever-increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain
+and of pleasure; and presently man with his growing capacity for
+self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, for rapture and for grief. Love
+with its unearthly happiness, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain;
+all the ecstasy, all the anguish that we extract from the rhythm of life
+and death. It is much, really, for one little planet to bring to birth.
+And presently another music, which some--not many perhaps yet, in
+comparison with its population--are able to hear. The music of a more
+inward life, a sort of fugue in which the eternal and temporal are
+mingled; and here and there some, already, who respond to it. Those who
+hear it would not all agree as to the nature of the melody; but all
+would agree that it is something different in kind from the rhythm of
+life and death. And in their surrender to this--to which, as they feel
+sure, the physical order too is really keeping time--they taste a larger
+life; more universal, more divine. As Plotinus said, they are looking at
+the Conductor in the midst; and, keeping time with Him, find the
+fulfilment both of their striving and of their peace.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Von Huegel: "Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of
+Religion," p. 60.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Ennead I, 6. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Op. cit., loc. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Bernard Bosanquet: "What Religion Is" p. 32.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Aug.: Conf. VII, 27.]
+
+[Footnote 8: "My vision, becoming more purified, entered deeper and
+deeper into the ray of that Supernal Light, which in itself is
+true"--Par. XXXIII, 52.]
+
+[Footnote 9: "The Tragic Sense of Life In Men and Peoples," p. 194.]
+
+[Footnote 10: T. Upton: "The Bases of Religious Belief," p. 363.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Blake: "Jerusalem," Cap. i.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Nicholson: "The Divani Shamsi Tabriz," p. 141.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Ennead V. i. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Kabir, op. cit., p. 41.]
+
+[Footnote 15: "Love, whoso loves thee cannot idle be, so sweet to him to
+taste thee; but every hour he lives in longing that he may love thee
+more straitly. For in thee the heart so joyful dwells, that he who feels
+it not can never say how sweet it is to taste thy savour"--Jacopone da
+Todi: Lauda 101.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Isaiah xl, 29-31.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Aug.: Conf. X, 28.]
+
+[Footnote 18: "Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
+12.]
+
+[Footnote 19: "Le Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine," p. ii.]
+
+[Footnote 20: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
+20.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Ruysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Beguines;" Cap. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Overton: "Life of Wesley." Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 23: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies In Islamic Mysticism," Cap. I.]
+
+[Footnote 24: "Donne's Sermons," edited by L. Pearsall Smith, p. 236.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Ruysbroeck, "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Bishr-i-Yasin, cf. Nicholson, op. cit., loc. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Ennead VI. 9. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 28: "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. II.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Hoeffding: "Philosophy of Religion," Pt. II, A]
+
+[Footnote 31: Op. cit., Bk. 4, Cap. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 32: "Summa contra Gentiles," L. III. Cap. 37.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Aug: Conf. VII, 10.]
+
+[Footnote 34: "The Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p.
+154.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Cf. Haldane, "The Reign of Relativity," Cap. VI.]
+
+[Footnote 36: Von Huegel: "Eternal Life," p. 385.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Ennead I. 4. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Blake: "Jerusalem": To the Christians.]
+
+[Footnote 40: "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 600.]
+
+[Footnote 41: William Penn, "No Cross, No Crown."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+We have already agreed that, if we wish to grasp the real character of
+spiritual life, we must avoid the temptation to look at it as merely a
+historical subject. If it is what it claims to be, it is a form of
+eternal life, as constant, as accessible to us here and now, as in any
+so-called age of faith: therefore of actual and present importance, or
+else nothing at all. This is why I think that the approach to it through
+philosophy and psychology is so much to be preferred to the approach
+through pure history. Yet there is a sense in which we must not neglect
+such history; for here, if we try to enter by sympathy into the past, we
+can see the life of the Spirit emerging and being lived in all degrees
+of perfection and under many different forms. Here, through and behind
+the immense diversity of temperaments which it has transfigured, we can
+best realise its uniform and enduring character; and therefore our own
+possibility of attaining to it, and the way that we must tread so to do.
+History does not exhort us or explain to us, but exhibits living
+specimens to us; and these specimens witness again and again to the fact
+that a compelling power does exist in the world--little understood,
+even by those who are inspired by it--which presses men to transcend
+their material limitations and mental conflicts, and live a new creative
+life of harmony, freedom and joy. Directly human character emerges as
+one of man's prime interests, this possibility emerges too, and is never
+lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian,
+Moslem and Christian all declare with more or less completeness a way of
+life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment;
+and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women
+who have followed this way, and found its promise to be true.
+
+It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did
+truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the
+pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic
+love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to
+them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not
+of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to
+our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it
+could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest
+actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been
+given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete
+image--and ever the more concrete, the greater his art--the results of
+his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. Thus, as the
+tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made
+of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic
+answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of
+the Spirit--eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the
+circumstances of their own time--are the earnests of our own latent
+destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to "grow taller in
+Christ."[42] These powers--that ability--are factually present in the
+race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which
+may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.
+
+In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of
+vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold
+on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the
+quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic
+spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we
+can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who
+have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types,
+varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that
+form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured
+with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative
+for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle
+of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens
+exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less
+picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete
+thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs
+now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as
+some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden
+atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such
+conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense;
+and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit--that
+is to say, with the Saints--they are particularly common and
+particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very
+condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated
+must live and be present in the soul of the historian; must be
+emotionally realized by him _now,_ as a concrete fact weighted with
+significance. It must answer to a present, not to a past interest of the
+race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward
+truth.
+
+Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rolle, who has been
+called the father of English mysticism. It is easy enough for those who
+regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something
+different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of
+the soul's reaction to God--the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of
+his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his
+austere, self-giving life[43]--as the probable result of the reaction of
+a neurotic temperament to mediaeval traditions. But if, for instance the
+Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque
+fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student--another Oxford
+undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time--who gave
+up that university and the career it could offer him, under the
+compulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then he re-enters the
+living past. If, standing by him in that small hut in the Yorkshire
+wolds, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the
+north of England, he hears Rolle saying "Nought more profitable, nought
+merrier than grace of contemplation, the which lifteth us from low
+things and presenteth us to God. What thing is grace but beginning of
+joy? And what is perfection of joy but grace complete?"[44]--if, I say,
+he so re-enters history that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not as
+a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life's very secret--then,
+his heart may be touched and he may begin to understand. And then it may
+occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard
+life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his
+own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental
+life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition
+or of pathology.
+
+When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past,
+our time-span is enlarged, and history is born and becomes contemporary;
+thus both widening and deepening our vital experience. It then becomes
+not only a real mode of life to us; but more than this, a mode of social
+life. Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time
+stream to achieve by ourselves, and in defiance of tradition, a true
+integration of existence. Thus to defy tradition is to refuse all the
+gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off from the cumulative
+experiences of the race. The Spirit, as Croce[45] reminds us, is
+history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all
+preceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, the creative
+formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed.
+
+It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical
+aspect of the life of Spirit; re-entering the past by sympathetic
+imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but
+seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which
+persist and have significance for it--getting, if we can, face to face
+with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it. This
+is not easy. In studying all such experience, we have to remember that
+the men and women of the Spirit are members of two orders. They have
+attachments both to time and to eternity. Their characteristic
+experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth;
+the earth of their own day. Therefore two factors will inevitably appear
+in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free
+movements of creative life: and we, if we would understand, must
+discriminate between them. In this power of taking from the past and
+pushing on to the future, the balance maintained between stability and
+novelty, we find one of their abiding characteristics. When this balance
+is broken--when there is either too complete a submission to tradition
+and authority, or too violent a rejection of it--full greatness is not
+achieved.
+
+In complete lives, the two things overlap: and so perfectly that no
+sharp distinction is made between the gifts of authority and of fresh
+experience. Traditional formulae, as we all know, are often used because
+they are found to tally with life, to light up dark corners of our own
+spirits and give names to experiences which we want to define.
+Ceremonial deeds are used to actualize free contacts with Reality. And
+we need not be surprised that they can do this; since tradition
+represents the crystallization, and handling on under symbols, of all
+the spiritual experiences of the race.
+
+Therefore the man or woman of the Spirit will always accept and use some
+tradition; and unless he does so, he is not of much use to his
+fellow-men. He must not, then, be discredited on account of the
+symbolic system he adopts; but must be allowed to tell his news in his
+own way. We must not refuse to find reality within the Hindu's account
+of his joyous life-giving communion with Ram, any more than we refuse to
+find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with
+Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout
+Buddhist who faithfully follows the Middle Way, or deny that Pagan
+sacramentalism was to its initiates a channel of grace. For all these
+are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of
+history; and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this
+fact with all that it involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see
+when we come to discuss the laws of suggestion and the function of
+belief, the weight of tradition presses the loyal and humble soul which
+accepts it, to such an interpretation of its own spiritual intuitions as
+its Church, its creed, its environment give to it. Thus St. Catherine of
+Genoa, St. Teresa, even Ruysbroeck, are able to describe their intuitive
+communion with God in strictly Catholic terms; and by so doing renew,
+enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow
+them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the
+current formulae--Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the
+sterility of the contemporary Church--were forced to find elsewhere some
+tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it
+in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic
+system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic and
+Christian connections. And all these regarded themselves far less as
+bringers-in of novelty, than as restorers of lost truth. So we must be
+prepared to discriminate the element of novelty from the element of
+stability; the reality of the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral
+situation, from the traditional and often symbolic language in which it
+is given to us. The comparative method helps us towards this; and is
+thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but rightly
+used the revealer of the Spirit of Life in its variety of gifts. In this
+connection we might remember that time--like space--is only of secondary
+importance to us. Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of
+years of our animal and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as
+it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous
+rather than successive. We may borrow the imagery of Donne's great
+discourse on Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the spiritual
+life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique, or
+mediaeval men, were "but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some
+at seven, some at eight--all in one morning in respect of this day."[46]
+
+Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere
+differences of language and appearance, and grasp the warmly living and
+contemporary character of all historic truth. It preserves us, too, from
+the common error of discriminating between so-called "ages of faith" and
+our own. The more we study the past, the more clearly we recognize that
+there are no "ages of faith." Such labels merely represent the arbitrary
+cuts which we make in the time-stream, the arbitrary colours which we
+give to it. The spiritual man or woman is always fundamentally the same
+kind of man or woman; always reaching out with the same faith and love
+towards the heart of the same universe, though telling that faith and
+love in various tongues. He is far less the child of his time, than the
+transformer of it. His this-world business is to bring in novelty, new
+reality, fresh life. Yet, coming to fulfil not to destroy, he uses for
+this purpose the traditions, creeds, even the institutions of his day.
+But when he has done with them, they do not look the same as they did
+before. Christ himself has been well called a Constructive
+Revolutionary,[47] yet each single element of His teaching can be found
+in Jewish tradition; and the noblest of His followers have the same
+character. Thus St. Francis of Assisi only sought consistently to apply
+the teaching of the New Testament, and St. Teresa that of the Carmelite
+Rule. Every element of Wesleyanism is to be found in primitive
+Christianity; and Wesleyanism is itself the tradition from which the new
+vigour of the Salvation Army sprang. The great regenerators of history
+are always in fundamental opposition to the common life of their day,
+for they demand by their very existence a return to first principles, a
+revolution in the ways of thinking and of acting common among men, a
+heroic consistency and single-mindedness: but they can use for their own
+fresh constructions and contacts with Eternal Life the material which
+this life offers to them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis,
+Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith.
+They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding
+apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with
+society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with
+the Spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and
+spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even
+eccentric at the time at which it appears. We are accustomed to think of
+"The Imitation of Christ" as the classic expression of mediaeval
+spirituality. But when Thomas a Kempis wrote his book, it was the
+manifesto of that which was called the Modern Devotion; and represented
+a new attempt to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to
+surrounding apathy.
+
+When we re-enter the past, what we find, there is the persistent
+conflict between this novelty and this apathy; that is to say between
+man's instinct for transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of
+the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his tendency to lag
+behind towards animal levels, in which we see the influence of his
+racial past. So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion
+means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by
+sin under the second head. And the most striking--though not the
+only--examples of the forward reach of life towards freedom (that is, of
+conquering grace) are those persons whom we call men and women of the
+Spirit. In them it is incarnate, and through them, as it were, it
+spreads and gives the race a lift: for their transfiguration is never
+for themselves alone, they impart it to all who follow them. But the
+downward falling movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit; and
+tends to drag back to the average level the group these have vivified,
+when their influence is withdrawn. Hence the history of the Spirit--and,
+incidentally, the history of all churches--exhibits to us a series of
+strong movements towards completed life, inspired by vigorous and
+transcendent personalities; thwarted by the common indolence and
+tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. We have no reason to
+suppose that this history is a closed book, or that the spiritual life
+struggling to emerge among ourselves will follow other laws.
+
+We desire then, if we can, to discover what it was that these
+transcendent personalities possessed. We may think, from the point at
+which we now stand, that they had some things which were false, or, at
+least, were misinterpreted by them. We cannot without insincerity make
+their view of the universe our own. But, plainly, they also possessed
+truths and values which most of us have not: they obtained from their
+religion, whether we allow that it had as creed an absolute or a
+symbolic value, a power of living, a courage and clear vision, which we
+do not as a rule obtain. When we study the character and works of these
+men and women, observing their nobility, their sweetness, their power of
+endurance, their outflowing love, we must, unless we be utterly
+insensitive, perceive ourselves to be confronted by a quality of being
+which we do not possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet one of
+them in the flesh, though his conduct is commonly more normal than our
+own, we know then with Plotinus that the soul _has_ another life. Yet
+many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies,
+acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law. But as
+something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the
+great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes
+more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new,
+intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable
+variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life
+and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the
+race.
+
+Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two
+groups:
+
+First, _Type._ What are the characters which mark this life of the
+Spirit?
+
+Secondly, _Process._ What is the line of development by which the
+individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?
+
+First, then, the _Spiritual Type._
+
+What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated
+that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort
+to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and
+real source of power is this single-mindedness. They aim at God: the
+phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the
+Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that "the householder
+must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions."[48] Thus the Sufi says
+he has but two laws--to look in one direction and to live in one
+way.[49] Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ;
+and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that
+all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The
+New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord's
+life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility
+to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were
+inspired by this union; and that He declared it, not as a unique fact,
+but as a possible human ideal. This Is not a theological, but a
+historical statement, which applies, in its degree to every man and
+woman who has been a follower of Christ: for He was, as St. Paul has
+said, "the eldest in a vast family of brothers." The same single-minded
+effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths; though these may
+lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love. And by a paradox
+repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to
+the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant
+fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do
+difficult things, but that creative charity which "wins and redeems the
+unlovely by the power of its love."[50] The man or woman of prayer, the
+community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the
+most practical ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was
+the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the
+soul; and it became one of the chief instruments in the civilization of
+Europe, carrying forward not only religion, but education, pure
+scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The object of St. Bernard's
+reform was the restoration of the life of prayer. His monks, going out
+into the waste places with no provision but their own faith, hope and
+charity, revived agriculture, established industry, literally compelled
+the wilderness to flower for God. The Brothers of the Common Life
+joined together, in order that, living simply and by their own industry,
+they might observe a rule of constant prayer: and they became in
+consequence a powerful educational influence. The object of Wesley and
+his first companions was by declaration the saving of their own souls
+and the living only to the glory of God; but they were impelled at once
+by this to practical deeds of mercy, and ultimately became the
+regenerators of religion in the English-speaking world.
+
+It is well to emphasize this truth, for it conveys a lesson which we can
+learn from history at the present time with much profit to ourselves. It
+means that reconstruction of character and reorientation of attention
+must precede reconstruction of society; that the Sufi is right when he
+declares that the whole secret lies in looking in one direction and
+living in one way. Again and again it has been proved, that those who
+aim at God do better work than those who start with the declared
+intention of benefiting their fellow-men. We must _be_ good before we
+can _do_ good; be real before we can accomplish real things. No
+generalized benevolence, no social Christianity, however beautiful and
+devoted, can take the place of this centring of the spirit on eternal
+values; this humble, deliberate recourse to Reality. To suppose that it
+can do so, is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect for
+cause.
+
+This brings us to the _Second Character_: the rich completeness of the
+spiritual life, the way in which it fuses and transfigures the
+complementary human tendencies to contemplation and action, the
+non-successive and successive aspects of reality. "The love of God,"
+said Ruysbroeck, "is an indrawing _and_ outpouring tide";[51] and
+history endorses this. In its greatest representatives, the rhythm of
+adoration and work is seen in an accentuated form. These people seldom
+or never answer to the popular idea of idle contemplatives. They do not
+withdraw from the stream of natural life and effort, but plunge into it
+more deeply, seek its heart. They have powers of expression and
+creation, and use them to the full. St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard,
+St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius organizing families which shall
+incarnate the gift of new life; Fox, Wesley and Booth striving to save
+other men; Mary Slessor driven by vocation from the Dundee mill to the
+African swamps--these are characteristic of them. We perceive that they
+are not specialists, as more earthly types of efficiency are apt to be.
+Theirs are rich natures, their touch on existence has often an artistic
+quality, St. Paul in his correspondence could break into poetry, as the
+only way of telling the truth. St. Jerome lived to the full the lives of
+scholar and of ascetic. St. Francis, in his perpetual missionary
+activities, still found time for his music songs; St. Hildegarde and St.
+Catherine of Siena had their strong political interests; Jacopone da
+Todi combined the careers of contemplative politician and poet. So too
+in practical matters. St. Catherine of Genoa was one of the first
+hospital administrators, St. Vincent de Paul a genius in the sphere of
+organized charity, Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform. Brother
+Laurence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in
+the Presence of God. Jacob Boehme was a hard-working cobbler, and
+afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition. The
+perpetual journeyings and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller
+compass the career of St. Paul: he was also an exact scholar and a
+practical educationist. Mary Slessor showed the quality of a ruler as
+well as that of a winner of souls. In the intellectual region, Richard
+of St. Victor was supreme in contemplation, and also a psychologist far
+in advance of his time. We are apt to forget the mystical side of
+Aquinas; who was poet and contemplative as well as scholastic
+philosopher.
+
+And the third feature we notice about these men and women is, that this
+new power by which they lived was, as Ruysbroeck calls it, "a spreading
+light."[52] It poured out of them, invading and illuminating other men:
+so that, through them, whole groups or societies were re-born, if only
+for a time, on to fresh levels of reality, goodness and power. Their own
+intense personal experience was valid not only for themselves. They
+belonged to that class of natural, leaders who are capable,--of
+infecting the herd with their own ideals; leading it to new feeding
+grounds, improving the common level It is indeed the main social
+function of the man or woman of the Spirit to be such a crowd-compeller
+In the highest sense; and, as the artist reveals new beauty to his
+fellow-men, to stimulate in their neighbours the latent human capacity
+for God. In every great surge forward to new life, we can trace back the
+radiance to such a single point of light; the transfiguration of an
+individual soul. Thus Christ's communion with His Father was the
+life-centre, the point of contact with Eternity, whence radiated the joy
+and power of the primitive Christian flock: the classic example of a
+corporate spiritual life. When the young man with great possessions
+asked Jesus, "What shall I do to be saved?" Jesus replied in effect,
+"Put aside all lesser interests, strip off unrealities, and come, give
+yourself the chance of catching the Infection of holiness from Me."
+Whatever be our view of Christian dogma, whatever meaning we attach to
+the words "redemption" and "atonement," we shall hardly deny that in the
+life and character of the historic Christ something new was thus evoked
+from, and added to, humanity. No one can read with attention the Gospel
+and the story of the primitive Church, without being struck by the
+consciousness of renovation, of enhancement, experienced by all who
+received the Christian secret in its charismatic stage. This new factor
+is sometimes called re-birth, sometimes grace, sometimes the power of
+the Spirit, sometimes being "in Christ." We misread history if we regard
+it either as a mere gust of emotional fervour, or a theological idea, or
+discount the "miracles of healing" and other proofs of enhanced power by
+which it was expressed. Everything goes to prove that the "more abundant
+life" offered by the Johannine Christ to His followers, was literally
+experienced by them; and was the source of their joy, their enthusiasm,
+their mutual love and power of endurance.
+
+On lower levels, and through the inspiration of lesser teachers, history
+shows us the phenomena of primitive Christianity repeated again and
+again; both within and without the Christian circle of ideas. Every
+religion looks for, and most have possessed, some revealer of the
+Spirit; some Prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the
+characteristic demonstrations of the human power of transcendence--a
+supernatural life which can be lived by us--have begun in one person,
+who has become a creative centre mediating new life to his fellow-men:
+as were Buddha and Mohammed for the faiths which they founded. Such
+lives as those of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley,
+Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of this law. The parable
+of the leaven is in fact an exact description of the way in which the
+spiritual consciousness--the supernatural urge--is observed to spread in
+human society. It is characteristic of the regenerate type, that he
+should as it were overflow his own boundaries and energize other souls:
+for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours out inevitably from
+those who possess it to other men. We notice that the great mystics
+recognize again and again such a fertilizing and creative power, as a
+mark of the soul's full vitality. It is not the personal rapture of the
+spiritual marriage, but rather the "divine fecundity" of one who is a
+parent of spiritual children; which seems to them the goal of human
+transcendence, and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels, in
+real union with God. "In the fourth and last degree of love the soul
+brings forth its children," says Richard of St. Victor.[53] "The last
+perfection to supervene upon a thing," says Aquinas, "is its becoming
+the cause of other things."[54] In a word, it is creative. And the
+spiritual life as we see it in history is thus creative; the cause of
+other things.
+
+History is full of examples of this law: that the man or woman of the
+spirit is, fundamentally, a life-giver; and all corporate achievement of
+the life of the spirit flows from some great apostle or initiator, is
+the fruit of discipleship. Such corporate achievement is a form of group
+consciousness, brought into being through the power and attraction of a
+fully harmonized life, infecting others with its own sharp sense of
+Divine reality. Poets and artists thus infect in a measure all those
+who yield to their influence. The active mystic, who is the poet of
+Eternal Life, does it in a supreme degree. Such a relation of master and
+disciples is conspicuous in every true spiritual revival; and is the
+link between the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration. We see
+it in the little flock that followed Christ, the Little Poor Men who
+followed Francis, the Friends of Fox, the army of General Booth. Not
+Christianity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify to this
+necessity. The Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a
+_guru_ who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere; and
+must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience. The S[=u]fi
+neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his _sheikh_ "as a
+corpse in the hands of the washer"; and all the great saints of Islam
+have been the inspiring centres of more or less organized groups.
+
+History teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through
+men. We most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring
+human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic
+contagion. Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into
+the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous
+outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful
+analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment,
+tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it.
+There is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human
+experience and education. Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of
+God are also the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped by those
+who go before them. And as regards the generality, not isolated effort
+but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher--and every man
+and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of
+influence--the unselfconscious trust of the disciple, are the means by
+which the secret of full life has been handed on. "One loving spirit,"
+said St. Augustine, "sets another on fire"; and expressed in this phrase
+the law which governs the spiritual history of man. This law finds
+notable expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; a type of
+association, found in more or less perfection in every great religion,
+which has not received the attention it deserves from students of
+psychology. If we study the lives of those who founded these
+Orders--though such a foundation was not always intended by them--we
+notice one general characteristic: each was an enthusiast, abounding in
+zest and hope, and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a
+source of spiritual infection, for those who came under his influence.
+In each the spiritual world was seen "through a temperament," and so
+mediated to the disciples; who shared so far as they were able the
+master's special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Benedict's sane
+and generous outlook is crystallized in the Benedictine rule. St.
+Francis' deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave
+Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character. The heroisms of the
+early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St.
+Ignatius. The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance
+from St. Teresa's mystical experience. The great Orders in their purity
+were families, inheriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their
+patriarch; who gave, as a father to his children, life stamped with his
+own characteristics.
+
+Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of its founder, the group
+appears to lose its spontaneous and enthusiastic character. Zest fails.
+Unless a fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles down again
+towards the general level of the herd. Thence it can only be roused by
+means of "reforms" or "revivals," the arrival of new, vigorous leaders,
+and the formation of new enthusiastic groups: for the bulk of men as we
+know them cannot or will not make the costing effort needed for a
+first-hand participation in eternal life. They want a "crowd-compeller"
+to lift them above themselves. Thus the history of Christianity is the
+history of successive spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to
+survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed His little flock
+with the avowed aim of "bringing in the Kingdom of God"--transmuting the
+mentality of the race, and so giving it more abundant life.
+
+Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of
+their Master, the influence and infection of His spirit and atmosphere,
+as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life:
+and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain
+contact with the eternal world in prayer. The great speech of Serenus de
+Cressy in "John Inglesant" described once for all the highest type of
+Christian spirituality.[55] But in practice this link and this influence
+are too subtle for the mass of men. They must constantly be
+re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and by them be mediated
+to fresh groups, formed within or without the institutional frame. Thus
+in the thirteenth century St. Francis, and in the fourteenth the Friends
+of God, created a true spiritual society within the Church, by restoring
+in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian
+idea and Christian life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
+Fox and Wesley possessed by the same essential vision, broke away from
+the institution which was no longer supple enough to meet their needs,
+and formed their fresh groups outside the old herd.
+
+When such creative personalities appear and such groups are founded by
+them, the phenomena of the spiritual life reappear in their full vigour,
+and are disseminated. A new vitality, a fresh power of endurance, is
+seen in all who are drawn within the group and share its mind. This is
+what St. Paul seems to have meant, when he reminded his converts that
+they had the mind of Christ. The primitive friars, living under the
+influence of Francis, did practice the perfect poverty which is also
+perfect joy. The assured calm and willing sufferings of the early
+Christians were reproduced in the early Quakers, secure in their
+possession of the inner light. We know very well the essential
+characters of this fresh mentality; the power, the enthusiasm, the
+radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hardship it confers. But we
+can no more produce it from these raw materials than the chemist's
+crucible can produce life. The whole experience of St. Francis is
+implied in the Beatitudes. The secret of Elizabeth Fry is the secret of
+St. John. The doctrine of General Booth is fully stated by St. Paul. But
+it was not by referring inquirers to the pages of the New Testament that
+the first brought men fettered by things to experience the freedom of
+poverty; the second faced and tamed three hundred Newgate criminals, who
+seemed at her first visit "like wild beasts"; or the third created
+armies of the redeemed from the dregs of the London Slums. They did
+these things by direct personal contagion; and they will be done among
+us again when the triumphant power of Eternal Spirit is again exhibited,
+not in ideas but in human character.
+
+I think, then, that history justifies us in regarding the full living of
+the spiritual life as implying at least these three characters. First,
+single-mindedness: to mean only God. Second, the full integration of the
+contemplative and active sides of existence, lifted up, harmonized, and
+completely consecrated to those interests which the self recognizes as
+Divine. Third, the power of reproducing this life; incorporating it in a
+group. Before we go on, we will look at one concrete example which
+illustrates all these points. This example is that of St. Benedict and
+the Order which he founded; for in the rounded completeness of his life
+and system we see what should be the normal life of the Spirit, and its
+result.
+
+Benedict was born in times not unlike our own, when wars had shaken
+civilization, the arts of peace were unsettled, religion was at a low
+ebb. As a young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from the
+vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the hills, and lived in a
+cave for three years alone with his thoughts of God. It would be easy to
+regard him as an eccentric boy: but he was adjusting himself to the real
+centre of his life. Gradually others who longed for a more real
+existence joined him, and he divided them into groups of twelve, and
+settled them in small houses; giving them a time-table by which to live,
+which should make possible a full and balanced existence of body, mind
+and soul. Thanks to those years of retreat and preparation, he knew what
+he wanted and what he ought to do; and they ushered in a long life of
+intense mental and spiritual activity. His houses were schools, which
+taught the service of God and the perfecting of the soul as the aims of
+life. His rule, in which genial human tolerance, gentle courtesy, and a
+profound understanding of men are not less marked than lofty
+spirituality, is the classic statement of all that the Christian
+spiritual life implies and should be.[56]
+
+What, then, is the character of the life which St. Benedict proposed as
+a remedy for the human failure and disharmony that he saw around him? It
+was framed, of course, for a celibate community: but it has many
+permanent features which are unaffected by his limitation. It offers
+balanced opportunities of development to the body, the mind and the
+spirit; laying equal emphasis on hard work, study, and prayer. It aims
+at a robust completeness, not at the production of professional
+ascetics; indeed, its Rule says little about physical austerities,
+insists on sufficient food and rest, and countenances no extremes.
+According to Abbot Butler, St. Benedict's day was divided into three and
+a half hours for public worship, four and a half for reading and
+meditation, six and a half for manual work, eight and a half for sleep,
+and one hour for meals. So that in spite of the time devoted to
+spiritual and mental interests, the primitive Benedictine did a good
+day's work and had a good night's rest at the end of it. The work might
+be anything that wanted doing, so long as the hours of prayer were not
+infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, handicrafts and art have
+all been done perfectly by St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in
+quiet love. This is what one of the greatest constructive minds of
+Christendom regarded as a reasonable way of life; a frame within which
+the loftiest human faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieve that
+harmony with God which is its goal. Moreover, this life was to be
+social. It was in the beginning just the busy useful life of an Italian
+farm, lived in groups--in monastic families, under the rule and
+inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the
+spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility,
+obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the
+authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has
+something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried
+and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time
+for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those
+marks of the regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown to us
+as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action
+and contemplation, the creative power, and above all the principle of
+social solidarity and discipleship.
+
+We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the
+process by which the individual normally develops this life of the
+Spirit, the serial changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is of
+practical importance to us. The full inwardness of these changes will be
+considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life.
+Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the
+constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and
+small personalities under the various labels which have been given to
+it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence
+with the temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that
+union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This life we must
+believe in some form and degree to be possible for all; but we study it
+best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its
+fullest records survive.
+
+The first moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love
+with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it.
+Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his
+nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he
+has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict,
+disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis,
+abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle,
+turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life; in the restless
+misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking "something
+that could speak to his condition"; and also in two outstanding
+examples from modern India, those of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore
+and the Sadhu Sundar Singh. This dissatisfaction, sometimes associated
+with the negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with the
+positive longing for holiness and peace, is the mental preparation of
+conversion; which, though not a constant, is at least a characteristic
+feature of the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history. We
+might, indeed, expect some crucial change of attitude, some inner
+crisis, to mark the beginning of a new life which is to aim only at God.
+Here too we find one motive of that movement of world-abandonment which
+so commonly follows conversion, especially in heroic souls. Thus St.
+Paul hides himself in Arabia; St. Benedict retires for three years to
+the cave at Subiaco; St. Ignatius to Manresa. Gerard Groot, the
+brilliant and wealthy young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of the
+Common Life, began his new life by self-seclusion in a Carthusian cell.
+St. Catherine of Siena at first lived solitary in her own room. St.
+Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his whole past, even the
+clothing that was part of it. Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer
+converted to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to
+express his utter separation from the world. Others, it is true, have
+chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the
+cell of self-knowledge the solitude they required; but _some_ decisive
+break was imperative for all. History assures us that there is no easy
+sliding into the life of the Spirit.
+
+A secondary cause of such world refusal is the first awakening of the
+contemplative powers; the intuition of Eternity, hitherto dormant, and
+felt at this stage to be--in its overwhelming reality and appeal--in
+conflict with the unreal world and unsublimated active life. This is the
+controlling idea of the hermit and recluse. It is well seen in St.
+Teresa; whom her biographers describe as torn, for years, between the
+interests of human intercourse and the imperative inner voice urging her
+to solitary self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that in the
+beginning of the life of the Spirit, as history shows it to us, if
+disillusion marks the first moment, some measure of asceticism, of
+world-refusal and painful self-schooling, is likely to mark the second
+moment.
+
+What we are watching is the complete reconstruction of personality; a
+personality that has generally grown into the wrong shape. This is
+likely to be a hard and painful business; and indeed history assures us
+that it is, and further that the spiritual life is never achieved by
+taking the line of least resistance and basking in the divine light.
+With world-refusal, then, is intimately connected stern moral conflict;
+often lasting for years, and having as its object the conquest of
+selfhood in all its insidious forms. "Take one step out of yourself,"
+say the S[=u]fis, "and you will arrive at God."[57] This one step is the
+most difficult act of life; yet urged by love, man has taken it again
+and again. This phase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual
+biography, that I need not insist upon it. "In the field of this body,"
+says Kabir, "a great war goes forward, against passion, anger, pride and
+greed. It is in the Kingdom of Truth, Contentment and Purity that this
+battle is raging, and the sword that rings forth most loudly is the
+sword of His Name."[58] "Man," says Boehme, "must here be at war with
+himself if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen ... fighting must be the
+watchword, not with tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit; and not
+to give over."[59] The need of such a conflict, shown to us in history,
+is explained on human levels by psychology. On spiritual levels it is
+made plain to all whose hearts are touched by the love of God. By this
+way all must pass who achieve the life of the Spirit; subduing to its
+purposes their wayward wills, and sublimating in its power their
+conflicting animal impulses. This long effort brings, as its reward a
+unification of character, an inflow of power: from it we see the mature
+man or woman of the Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this
+conflict lasted for four years, after which the thought of sin ceased to
+rule her consciousness.[60] St. Teresa's intermittent struggles are
+said to have continued for thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply
+religious, did not attain the inner stability he calls assurance till he
+was thirty-five years old. Blake was for twenty years in mental
+conflict, shut off from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do
+great personalities come to their full stature, and subdue their
+vigorous impulses to the one ruling idea.
+
+The ending of this conflict, the self's unification and establishment in
+the new life, commonly means a return more or less complete to that
+world from which the convert had retreated; taking up of the fully
+energized and fully consecrated human existence, which must express
+itself in work no less than in prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity
+for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the "first
+return" of the Buddhist saint is "from the absolute world to the world
+of phenomena to save all sentient beings."[61] Thus St. Benedict's and
+St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for
+their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a
+disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as a
+busy and devoted hospital matron and inspired teacher of a group of
+disciples. St. Teresa's long interior struggles precede her vigorous
+career as founder and reformer; her creation of spiritual families, new
+centres of contemplative life. The vast activities of Fox and Wesley
+were the fruits first of inner conflict, then of assurance--the
+experience of God and of the self's relation to Him. And on the highest
+levels of the spiritual life as history shows them to us, this
+experience and realization, first of profound harmony with Eternity and
+its interests, next of a personal relation of love, last of an
+indwelling creative power, a givenness, an energizing grace, reaches
+that completeness to which has been given the name of union with God.
+
+The great man or woman of the Spirit who achieves this perfect
+development is, it is true, a special product: a genius, comparable with
+great creative personalities in other walks of life. But he neither
+invalidates the smaller talent nor the more general tendency in which
+his supreme gift takes its rise. Where he appears, that tendency is
+vigorously stimulated. Like other artists, he founds a school; the
+spiritual life flames up, and spreads to those within his circle of
+influence. Through him, ordinary men, whose aptitude for God might have
+remained latent, obtain a fresh start; an impetus to growth. There is a
+sense in which he might say with the Johannine Christ, "He that
+receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me"; for yielding to his magnetism,
+men really yield to the drawing of the Spirit itself. And when they do
+this, their lives are found to reproduce--though with less
+intensity--the life history of their leader. Therefore the main
+characters of that life history, that steady undivided process of
+sublimation; are normal human characters. We too may heal the discords
+of our moral nature, learn to judge existence in the universal light,
+bring into consciousness our latent transcendental sense, and keep
+ourselves so spiritually supple that alike in times of stress and hours
+of prayer and silence we are aware of the mysterious and energizing
+contact of God. Psychology suggests to us that the great spiritual
+personalities revealed in history are but supreme instances of a
+searching self-adjustment and of a way of life, always accessible to
+love and courage, which all men may in some sense undertake.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 42: Everard, "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 555]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Canor Dulcor, Canor;_ cf. Rolle: "The Fire of Love," Bk.
+1, Cap. 14]
+
+[Footnote 44: Rolle: "The Mending of Life," Cap. XII.]
+
+[Footnote 45: Benedetto Croce: "Theory and History of Historiography,"
+trans. by Douglas Ainslie, p. 25.]
+
+[Footnote 46: "Donne's Sermons," p. 236.]
+
+[Footnote 47: B.H. Streeter, in "The Spirit," p. 349 _seq_.]
+
+[Footnote 48: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
+23.]
+
+[Footnote 49: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. i.]
+
+[Footnote 50: Baron von Huegel In the "Hibbert Journal," July, 1921.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk.
+II, Cap. 39.]
+
+[Footnote 53: R. of St. Victor: "De Quatuor Gradibus Violentae
+Charitatis" (Migne, Pat. Lat.) T. 196, Col. 1216.]
+
+[Footnote 54: "Summa Contra Gentiles," Bk. III, Cap. 21.]
+
+[Footnote 55: J.E. Shorthouse: "John Inglesant," Cap. 19.]
+
+[Footnote 56: Cf. Delatte: "The Rule of St. Benedict"; and C. Butler:
+"Benedictine Monachism."]
+
+[Footnote 57: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 58: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 44.]
+
+[Footnote 59: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 111.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Cf. Von Huegel: "The Mystical Element of Religion," Vol. I,
+Pt. II.]
+
+[Footnote 61: McGovern: "An Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism," p. 175.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+(I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND
+
+
+Having interrogated history in our attempt to discover the essential
+character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to
+see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of
+the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It
+is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out,
+would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in
+a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming
+available for it: but many of the principles involved are, even yet,
+obscure. Therefore any conclusions at which we may arrive can only be
+tentative; and the theories and schematic representations that we shall
+be obliged to use must be regarded as mere working diagrams--almost
+certainly of a temporary character--but useful to us, because they do
+give us an interpretation of inner experience with which we can deal. I
+need not emphasize the extent in which modern developments of psychology
+are affecting our conceptions of the spiritual life, and our reading of
+many religious phenomena on which our ancestors looked with awe. When we
+have eliminated the more heady exaggerations of the psycho-analysts, and
+the too-violent simplifications of the behaviourists, it remains true
+that many problems have lately been elucidated in an unexpected, and
+some in a helpful, sense. We are learning in particular to see in true
+proportion those abnormal states of trance and ecstasy which were once
+regarded as the essentials, but are now recognized as the by-products,
+of the mystical life. But a good deal that at first sight seems
+startling, and even disturbing to the religious mind, turns out on
+investigation to be no more than the re-labelling of old facts, which
+behind their new tickets remain unchanged. Perhaps no generation has
+ever been so much at the mercy of such labels as our own. Thus many
+people who are inclined to jibe at the doctrine of original sin welcome
+it with open arms when it is reintroduced as the uprush of primitive
+instinct. Opportunity of confession to a psychoanalyst is eagerly sought
+and gladly paid for, by troubled spirits who would never resort for the
+same purpose to a priest. The formulae of auto-suggestion are freely used
+by those who repudiate vocal prayer and acts of faith with scorn. If,
+then, I use for the purpose of exposition some of those labels which are
+affected by the newest schools, I do so without any suggestion that they
+represent the only valid way of dealing with the psychic life of man.
+Indeed, I regard these labels as little more than exceedingly clever
+guesses at truth. But since they are now generally current and often
+suggestive, it is well that we should try to find a place for spiritual
+experience within the system which they represent; thus carrying through
+the principle on which we are working, that of interpreting the abiding
+facts of the spiritual life, so far as we can, in the language of the
+present day.
+
+First, then, I propose to consider the analysis of mind, and what It has
+to tell us about the nature of Sin, of Salvation, of Conversion; what
+light it casts on the process of purgation or self-purification which is
+demanded by all religions of the Spirit; what are the respective parts
+played by reason and instinct in the process of regeneration; and the
+importance for religious experience of the phenomena of apperception.
+
+We need not at this point consider again all that we mean by the life of
+the Spirit. We have already considered it as it appears in history--its
+inexhaustible variety, its power, nobility, and grace. We need only to
+remind ourselves that what we have got to find room for in our
+psychological scheme is literally, a changed and enhanced life; a life
+which, immersed in the stream of history, is yet poised on the eternal
+world. This life involves a complete re-direction of our desires and
+impulses, a transfiguration of character; and often, too, a sense of
+subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of impersonal strength,
+so overwhelming as to give many of its activities an inspirational or
+automatic character. We found that this life was marked by a rhythmic
+alternation between receptivity and activity, more complete and
+purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should
+condition, the healthy life of sense. This re-direction and
+transfiguration, this removal to a higher term of our mental rhythm, are
+of course psychic phenomena; using this word in a broad sense, without
+prejudice to the discrimination of any one aspect of it as spiritual.
+All that we mean at the moment is, that the change which brings in the
+spiritual life is a change in the mind and heart of man, working in the
+stuff of our common human nature, and involving all that the modern
+psychologist means by the word psyche.
+
+We begin therefore with the nature of the psyche as this modern,
+growing, changing psychology conceives it; for this is the raw material
+of regenerate man. If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological
+theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate
+minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche--by which of
+course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William
+James--was anticipated by Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Ennead,
+that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the
+body and of the higher for the purposes of the Spirit, and yet
+constitutes a unity; an unbroken series of ascending values and powers
+of response, from the levels of merely physical and mainly unconscious
+life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness.[62] We
+first discover psychic energy as undifferentiated directive power,
+controlling response and adaption to environment; and as it develops,
+ever increasing the complexity of its impulses and habits, yet never
+abandoning anything of its past. Instinct represents the correspondence
+of this life-force with mere nature, its effort as it were to keep its
+footing and accomplish its destiny in the world of time. Spirit
+represents this same life acting on highest levels, with most vivid
+purpose; seeking and achieving correspondence with the eternal world,
+and realities of the loftiest order yet discovered to be accessible to
+us. We are compelled to use words of this kind; and the proceeding is
+harmless enough so long as we remember that they are abstractions, and
+that we have no real reason to suppose breaks in the life process which
+extends from the infant's first craving for food and shelter to the
+saint's craving for the knowledge of God. This urgent, craving life is
+the dominant characteristic of the psyche. Thought is but the last come
+and least developed of its powers; one among its various responses to
+environment, and ways of laying hold on experience.
+
+This conception of the multiplicity in unity of the psyche, conscious
+and unconscious, is probably one of the most important results of
+recent psychological advance. It means that we cannot any longer in the
+good old way rule off bits or aspects of it, and call them intellect,
+soul, spirit, conscience and so forth; or, on the other hand, refer to
+our "lower" nature as if it were something separate from ourselves. I am
+spirit when I pray, if I pray rightly. I am my lower nature, when my
+thoughts and deeds are swayed by my primitive impulses and physical
+longings, declared or disguised. I am most wholly myself when that
+impulsive nature and that craving spirit are welded into one, subject to
+the same emotional stimulus, directed to one goal. When theologians and
+psychologists, ignoring this unity of the self, set up arbitrary
+divisions--and both classes are very fond of doing so--they are merely
+making diagrams for their own convenience. We ourselves shall probably
+be compelled to do this: and the proceeding is harmless enough, so long
+as we recollect that these diagrams are at best symbolic pictures of
+fact. Specially is it necessary to keep our heads, and refuse to be led
+away by the constant modern talk of the primitive, unconscious,
+foreconscious instinctive and other minds which are so prominent in
+modern psychological literature, or by the spatial suggestions of such
+terms as threshold, complex, channel of discharge: remembering always
+the central unity and non-material nature of that many-faced psychic
+life which is described under these various formulae.
+
+If we accept this central unity with all its implications, it follows
+that we cannot take our superior and conscious faculties, set them
+apart, and call them "ourselves"; refusing responsibility for the more
+animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with
+such distressing ease and frequency from the deeps, by attributing these
+to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that
+the sophisticated surface-mind which alone we usually recognize is the
+smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least
+important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and
+desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate
+for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic
+unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying
+with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices,
+impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to
+us the extent in which the jungle and the Stone Age are still active in
+our games, our politics and our creeds; how many of our motives are
+still those of primitive man, and how many of our social institutions
+offer him a discreet opportunity of self-expression.
+
+Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of
+religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one
+another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely
+restating the fundamental Christian paradox, that man is truly one, a
+living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; and
+yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic
+natures--that duality which St. Paul calls the old Adam and the new
+Adam. The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the
+earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life
+of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are
+conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise.
+True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of
+the facts. That which one calls original sin, the other calls the
+instinctive mind: but the situation each puts before us is the same. "I
+find a law," says St. Paul, "that when I would do good evil is present
+with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man _but_ I
+see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind....
+With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law
+of sin." Without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said
+in my hearing, "If St. Paul had come to me, I feel I could have helped
+him," I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to
+this, and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more
+psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction; demonstrating
+that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the
+impulsive and the rational life, the many conflicts which sap his
+energy, arise from the persistence within us of the archaic and
+primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many
+stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one
+of us; though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly
+instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety
+and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried
+over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when
+we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive; with
+its outlook of wonder, self-interest and fear, developed under
+conditions of ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. The
+history of primitive man covers millions of years: the history of
+civilized man, a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not
+surprising that the primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the
+plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still the infantile
+foundation of our mental life. Finally, there is the rational life, so
+far as the rational is yet achieved by us; correcting, conflicting with,
+and seeking to refine and control the vigour of primitive impulse.
+
+But if it is to give an account of all the facts psychology must also
+point out, and find place for, the last-comer in the evolutionary
+series: the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual
+consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and
+pointing, not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human
+growth. But it cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as
+something separate from, and wholly unconditioned by, our racial past.
+We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the
+end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which
+St. Paul calls "growing up into the stature of Christ." Here psychology
+is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to
+recognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us. In the
+spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the
+religious consciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we
+perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of this deep germinal
+life. And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward
+the upgrowth of this spiritual life, we must take into account those
+earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue
+underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition
+and explain so many of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that the
+psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven; and that every one of us
+still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many
+of the characters of those stages of development through which the race
+has passed--characters which inevitably give their colour to our
+religious no less than to our social life.
+
+"I desire," says a Kempis, "to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take
+thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and
+unmortified passions depress me. I will in my mind be above all things
+but in despite of myself I am constrained to be beneath, so I unhappy
+man fight with myself and am made grievous to myself while the spirit
+seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath. O what I suffer
+within while I think on heavenly things in my mind; the company of
+fleshly things cometh against me when I pray."[63]
+
+"Oh Master," says the Scholar in Boehme's great dialogue, "the creatures
+that live in me so withhold me, that I cannot wholly yield and give
+myself up as I willingly would."[64]
+
+No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation
+than have these old specialists in the spiritual life.
+
+The bearing of all this on the study of organized religion is of course
+of great importance; and will be discussed in a subsequent section. All
+that I wish to point out now is that the beliefs, and the explanations
+of action, put forward by our rationalizing surface consciousness are
+often mere veils which drape the crudeness of our real desires and
+reactions to life; and that before life can be reintegrated about its
+highest centres, these real beliefs and motives must be tracked down,
+and their humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and the tiger, in
+fact, are not dead in any one of us. In polite persons they are caged,
+which Is a very different thing: and a careful introspection will teach
+us to recognize their snarls and chatterings, their urgent requests for
+more mutton chops or bananas, under the many disguises which they
+assume--disguises which are not infrequently borrowed from ethics or
+from religion. Thus a primitive desire for revenge often masquerades as
+justice, and an unedifying interest in personal safety can be discerned
+in at least some interpretations of atonement, and some aspirations
+towards immortality.[65]
+
+I now go on to a second point. It will already be clear that the modern
+conception of the many-levelled psyche gives us a fresh standpoint from
+which to consider the nature of Sin. It suggests to us, that the essence
+of much sin is conservatism, or atavism: that it is rooted in the
+tendency of the instinctive life to go on, in changed circumstances,
+acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence
+with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our
+best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct,
+the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess; and
+perpetually forces us to use on new and higher levels that machinery of
+habit-formation, that power of implanting tendencies in the plastic
+psyche, to which man owes his earthly dominance. When our unstable
+psychic life relaxes tension and sinks to lower levels than this, and
+it Is always tending so to do, we are relapsing to antique methods of
+response, suitable to an environment which is no longer there. Few
+people go through life without knowing what it is to feel a sudden, even
+murderous, impulse to destroy the obstacle in their path; or seize, at
+all costs, that which they desire. Our ancestors called these uprushes
+the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the Christian soul;
+and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our
+spiritual strength. It is true that every man has within him such a
+tempting spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the
+Zoological Gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell.
+"External Reason," says Boehme, "supposes that hell is far from us. But
+it is near us. Every one carries it in himself."[66] Many of our vices,
+in fact, are simply savage qualities--and some are even savage
+virtues--in their old age. Thus in an organized society the
+acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive
+dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and
+covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar,
+the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the
+great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted
+expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual
+could hardly survive.
+
+When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are
+outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's
+spiritualization, then--whatever they may be--they belong to the body of
+death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump--none
+other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67]
+Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as
+religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich
+declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.
+Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse
+satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The
+violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to
+wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature--the old Adam, in
+fact--leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength. He
+obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with
+the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality
+keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural
+instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures
+came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St.
+Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a
+spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport
+of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a
+certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of
+games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The
+sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent
+in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved:
+failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the
+moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this
+fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London
+provoke the immediate attention of the police.
+
+Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of
+conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its
+conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to
+look at the idea of Salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit
+have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation: on the
+conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if
+he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it, then, from which he
+must be saved?
+
+I think that the answer must be, from conflict: the conflict between the
+pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual
+destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul,
+each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may
+as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts
+and resistances: that the trite verse about "fightings and fears
+within, without" does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive
+mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its
+inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason need some
+reinforcement, some helping power, if they are to conquer and control
+his archaic impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from
+the wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive impulse in its many
+strange forms, is a prime business of religion; sometimes achieved in
+the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower
+process of education. The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of
+the Puritan and the extreme ascetic, where all animal impulse is
+regarded as "sin" and repressed: a proceeding which involves the risk of
+grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a
+bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by
+Jacob Boehme, when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man
+to "harness his fiery energies to the service of the light--" that is to
+say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction,
+harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration:
+this is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic
+conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The
+voice which St. Mechthild heard, saying "Come and be reconciled,"
+expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity.
+
+This need for the conversion or remaking of the instinctive life,
+rather than the achievement of mere beliefs, has always been appreciated
+by real spiritual teachers; who are usually some generations in advance
+of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the "root of evil," the
+heart of the "old man" and best promise of the "new." Here is the raw
+material both of vice and of virtue--namely, a mass of desires and
+cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural
+and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and desire," says William Law,
+"consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature."[70]
+The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set love in order, thou
+that lovest Me!" declared the one law of mental growth.[71] To use for a
+moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the
+first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the
+direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in
+which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast
+setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of
+the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and
+which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard,
+conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and
+higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true
+self-conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness,
+reality and worth.
+
+"Oh, Academicus," says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would
+endorse, "forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a
+plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that
+there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth
+of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives
+within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have
+in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and
+rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a
+wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a
+sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only
+restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall
+offer."[72] Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild
+beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find
+the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert
+turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to
+save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work
+of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been
+directed into a fresh channel of use.
+
+We may now look a little more closely at the character and
+potentialties of our instinctive life: for this life is plainly of the
+highest importance to us, since it will either energize or thwart all
+the efforts of the rational self. Current psychology, even more plainly
+than religion, encourages us to recognize in this powerful instinctive
+nature the real source of our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic
+personal demands, those impulses to action, which condition the full and
+successful life of the natural man. Instincts in the animal and the
+natural man are the methods by which the life force takes care of its
+own interests, insures its own full development, its unimpeded forward
+drive. In so far as we form part of the animal kingdom our own safety,
+property, food, dominance, and the reproduction of our own type, are
+inevitably the first objects of our instinctive care. Civilized life has
+disguised some of these crude demands and the behaviour which is
+inspired by them, but their essential character remains unchanged. Love
+and hate, fear and wonder, self-assertion and self-abasement, the
+gregarious, the acquisitive, the constructive tendencies, are all
+expressions of instinctive feeling; and can be traced back to our
+simplest animal needs.
+
+But instincts are not fixed tendencies: they are adaptable. This can be
+seen clearly in the case of animals whose environment Is artificially
+changed. In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of the pack
+has become loyalty to his master's household. In man, too, there has
+already been obvious modification and sublimation of many instincts.
+The hunting impulse begins in the jungle, and may end in the
+philosopher's exploration of the Infinite. It is the combative instinct
+which drives the reformer headlong against the evils of the world, as it
+once drove two cave men at each others' throats. Love, which begins in
+the mergence of two cells, ends in the saint's supreme discovery, "Thou
+art the Love wherewith the heart loves Thee."[73] The much advertized
+herd instinct may weld us into a mob at the mercy of unreasoning
+passions; but it can also make us living members of the Communion of
+Saints. The appeals of the prophet and the revivalist, the Psalmist's
+"Taste and see," the Baptist's "Change your hearts," are all invitations
+to an alteration in the direction of desire, which would turn our
+instinctive energies in a new direction and begin the domestication of
+the human soul for God.
+
+This, then, is the real business of conversion and of the character
+building that succeeds it; the harnessing of instinct to idea and its
+direction into new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting the
+turmoil of man's merely egoistic ambitions, anxieties and emotional
+desires into fresh forms of creative energy, and transferring their
+interest from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven
+deadly sins of Christian ethics--Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth,
+Gluttony, and Lust--represent not so much deliberate wrongfulness, as
+the outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self-regarding
+instincts; unbridled self-assertion, ruthless acquisitiveness, and
+undisciplined indulgence of sense. The traditional evangelical virtues
+of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience which sum up the demands of the
+spiritual life exactly oppose them. Over against the self-assertion of
+the proud and angry is set the ideal of humble obedience, with its wise
+suppleness and abnegation of self-will. Over against the acquisitiveness
+of the covetous and envious is set the ideal of inward poverty, with its
+liberation from the narrow self-interest of I, Me and Mine. Over against
+the sensual indulgence of the greedy, lustful and lazy is set the ideal
+of chastity, which finds all creatures pure to enjoy, since it sees them
+in God, and God in all creatures. Yet all this, rightly understood, is
+no mere policy of repression. It is rather a rational policy of release,
+freeing for higher activities instinctive force too often thrown away.
+It is giving the wild beast his work to do, training him. Since the
+instincts represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to achieve
+self-protection and self-realization, it is plain that the true
+regeneration of the psyche, its redirection from lower to higher levels,
+can never be accomplished without their help. We only rise to the top of
+our powers when the whole man acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or
+an instinctive need.
+
+Further, a complete and ungraduated response to stimulus--an
+"all-or-none reaction"--is characteristic of the instinctive life and of
+the instinctive life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give
+themselves wholly to it; and so display a power far beyond that of the
+critical and the controlled. Thus, fear or rage will often confer
+abnormal strength and agility. A really dominant instinct is a veritable
+source of psycho-physical energy, unifying and maintaining in vigour all
+the activities directed to its fulfilment.[74] A young man in love is
+stimulated not only to emotional ardour, but also to hard work in the
+interests of the future home. The explorer develops amazing powers of
+endurance; the inventor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital
+forces, and may carry on for long periods without sleep or food. If we
+apply this law to the great examples of the spiritual life, we see in
+the vigour and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests a
+mark of instinctive action; and in the power, the indifference to
+hardship which these selves develop, the result of unification, of an
+"all-or-none" response to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It
+helps us to understand the cheerful austerities of the true ascetic; the
+superhuman achievement of St. Paul, little hindered by the "thorn in the
+flesh"; the career of St. Joan of Arc; the way in which St. Teresa or
+St. Ignatius, tormented by ill-health, yet brought their great
+conceptions to birth; the powers of resistance displayed by George Fox
+and other Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slessor living and working
+bare-foot and bare-headed under the tropical sun, disdaining the use of
+mosquito nets, eating native food, and taking with impunity daily risks
+fatal to the average European.[75] It shows us, too, why the great
+heroes of the spiritual life so seldom think out their positions, or
+husband their powers. They act because they are impelled: often in
+defiance of all prudent considerations! yet commonly with an amazing
+success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by "the impulses
+and urgings of an undying ambition" to save souls. What was this impulse
+and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a
+sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced
+will determine its value for life; but its character is much the same in
+the convert at a revival, in the postulant's vivid sense of vocation and
+consequent break with the world? in the disinterested man of science
+consecrated to the search for truth, and in the apostle's self-giving to
+the service of God, with its answering gift of new strength and
+fruitfulness. Its secret, and indeed the secret of all transcendence is
+implied In the direction of the old English mystic: "Mean God all, all
+God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God,"[76]
+The over-belief, the religious formula in which this instinctive
+passion is expressed, is comparatively unimportant The revivalist,
+wholly possessed by concrete and anthropomorphic ideas of God which are
+impossible to a man of different--and, as we suppose,
+superior--education, can yet, because of the burning reality with which
+he lives towards the God so strangely conceived, infect those with whom
+he comes in contact with the spiritual life.
+
+We are now in a position to say that the first necessity of the life of
+the Spirit is the sublimation of the instinctive life, involving the
+transfer of our interest and energy to new objectives, the giving of our
+old vigour to new longings and new loves. It appears that the invitation
+of religion to a change of heart, rather than a change of belief, is
+founded on solid psychological laws. I need not dwell on the way in
+which Divine love, as the saints have understood it, answers to the
+complete sublimation of our strongest natural passion; or the extent in
+which the highest experiences of the religious life satisfy man's
+instinctive craving for self-realization within a greater Reality, how
+he feels himself to be fed with a mysterious food, quickened by a fresh
+dower of life, assured of his own safety within a friendly universe,
+given a new objective for his energy. It is notorious that one of the
+most striking things about a truly spiritual man is, that he has
+achieved a certain stability which others lack. In him, the central
+craving of the psyche for more life and more love has reached its
+bourne; instead of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire which
+may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it He loves the thing which he
+ought to love, wants to do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all
+aspects of his personality satisfied in one objective. Every one has
+really a forced option between the costly effort to achieve this
+sublimation of impulse, this unification of the self on spiritual
+levels, and the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation to
+the animal instincts and unordered cravings of our many-levelled being.
+We cannot stand still; and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in
+mind of all the backward-tending possibilities collectively to be
+thought of as sin, and explains to us why sloth, lack of spiritual
+energy, is held by religion to be one of the capital forms of human
+wrongness.
+
+I go on to another point, which I regard as of special importance.
+
+It must not be supposed that the life of the Spirit begins and with the
+sublimation of, the instinctive and emotional life; though this is
+indeed for it a central necessity. Nor must we take it for granted that
+the apparent redirection of impulse to spiritual objects is always and
+inevitably an advance. All who are or may be concerned with the
+spiritual training, help, and counselling of others ought clearly to
+recognize that there are elements in religious experience which
+represent, not a true sublimation, but either disguised primitive
+cravings and ideas, or uprushes from lower instinctive levels: for these
+experiences have their special dangers. As we shall see when we come to
+their more detailed study, devotional practices tend to produce that
+state which psychologists call mobility of the threshold of
+consciousness; and may easily permit the emergence of natural
+inclinations and desires, of which the self does not recognize the real
+character. As a matter of fact, a good deal of religious emotion is of
+this kind. Instances are the childish longing for mere protection, for a
+sort of supersensual petting, the excessive desire for shelter and rest,
+voiced in too many popular hymns; the subtle form of self-assertion
+which can be detected in some claims to intercourse with God--e.g. the
+celebrated conversation of Angela of Foligno with the Holy Ghost;[77]
+the thinly veiled human feelings which find expression in the personal
+raptures of a certain type of pious literature, and in what has been
+well described as the "divine duet" type of devotion. Many, though not
+all of the supernormal phenomena of mysticism are open to the same
+suspicion: and the Church's constant insistence on the need of
+submitting these to some critical test before, accepting them at face
+value, is based on a most wholesome scepticism. Though a sense of meek
+dependence on enfolding love and power is the very heart of religion,
+and no intense spiritual life is possible unless it contain a strong
+emotional element, it is of first importance to be sure that its
+affective side represents a true sublimation of human feelings and
+desires, and not merely an oblique indulgence of lower cravings.
+
+Again, we have to remember that the instinctive self, powerful though it
+be? does not represent the sum total of human possibility. The maximum
+of man's strength is not reached until all the self's powers, the
+instinctive and also the rational, are united and set on one objective;
+for then only is he safe from the insidious inner conflict between
+natural craving and conscious purpose which saps his energies, and is
+welded into a complete and harmonious instrument of life, "The source of
+power," says Dr. Hadfield in "The Spirit," "lies not in instinctive
+emotion alone, but in instinctive emotion expressed in a way with which
+the whole man can, for the time being at least, identify himself.
+Ultimately, this is impossible without the achievement of a harmony of
+all the instincts _and_ the approval of the reason."[78]
+
+Thus we see that any unresolved conflict or divorce between the
+religious instinct and the intellect will mar the full power of the
+spiritual life: and that an essential part of the self's readjustment to
+reality must consist in the uniting of these partners, as intellect and
+intuition are united in creative art. The noblest music, most satisfying
+poetry are neither the casual results of uncriticized inspiration nor
+the deliberate fabrications of the brain, but are born of the perfect
+fusion of feeling and of thought; for the greatest and most fruitful
+minds are those which are rich and active on both levels--which are
+perpetually raising blind impulse to the level of conscious purpose,
+uniting energy with skill, and thus obtaining the fiery energies of the
+instinctive life for the highest uses. So too the spiritual life is only
+seen in its full worth and splendour when the whole man is subdued to
+it, and one object satisfies the utmost desires of heart and mind. The
+spiritual impulse must not be allowed to become the centre of a group of
+specialized feelings, a devotional complex, in opposition to, or at
+least alienated from, the intellectual and economic life. It must on the
+contrary brim over, invading every department of the self. When the
+mind's loftiest and most ideal thought, its conscious vivid aspiration,
+has been united with the more robust qualities of the natural man; then,
+and only then, we have the material for the making of a possible saint.
+
+We must also remember that, important as our primitive and instinctive
+life may be--and we should neither despise nor neglect it--its religious
+impulses, taken alone, no more represent the full range of man's
+spiritual possibilities than the life of the hunting tribe or the
+African kraal represent his full social possibilities. We may, and
+should, acknowledge and learn from our psychic origins. We must never be
+content to rest in them. Though in many respects, mental as well as
+physical, we are animals still; yet we are animals with a possible
+future in the making, both corporate and individual, which we cannot yet
+define. All other levels of life assure us that the impulsive nature is
+peculiarly susceptible to education. Not only can the whole group of
+instincts which help self-fulfilment be directed to higher levels,
+united and subdued to a dominant emotional interest; but merely
+instinctive actions can, by repetition and control, be raised to the
+level of habit and be given improved precision and complexity. This, of
+course, is a primary function of devotional exercises; training the
+first blind instinct for God to the complex responses of the life of
+prayer. Instinct is at best a rough and ready tool of life: practice is
+required if it is to produce its best results. Observe, for instance,
+the poor efforts of the young bird to escape capture; and compare this
+with the finished performance of the parent.[79] Therefore in estimating
+man's capacity for spiritual response, we must reckon not only his
+innate instinct for God, but also his capacity for developing this
+instinct on the level of habit; educating and using its latent powers to
+the best advantage. Especially on the contemplative side of life,
+education does great things for us; or would do, if we gave it the
+chance. Here, then, the rational mind and conscious will must play their
+part in that great business of human transcendence, which is man's
+function within the universal plan.
+
+It is true that the deep-seated human tendency to God may best be
+understood as the highest form of that out-going instinctive craving of
+the psyche for more life and love which, on whatever level it be
+experienced, is always one. But some external stimulus seems to be
+needed, if this deep tendency is to be brought up into consciousness;
+and some education, if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus and
+this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition; that is to say,
+by religious belief and practice. Or they may come from the countless
+minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few
+of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or
+environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual
+order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied,
+the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule,
+this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of
+conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and
+reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. There is, however,
+nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself. It has its parallel
+in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a
+method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the
+union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.
+
+Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for
+the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the
+Divine. But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very
+little. Thus we see that the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" spoke as
+a true psychologist when he said that "a secret blind love pressing
+towards God" held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do;
+"for He may well be loved but not thought--by love He may be gotten and
+holden, but by thought never."[80] Nevertheless, if that consistency of
+deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by
+us, every man's conception of the God Whom he serves ought to be the
+very best of which he is capable. Because ideas which we recognize as
+partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of
+other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and
+seeking a Reality which fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and
+beauty, as well, as our instinct for good. It is easy, natural, and
+always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a
+little bit below its highest possible. On one hand to wallow in easy
+loves, rest in traditional formulae, or enjoy a "moving type of devotion"
+which makes no intellectual demand. On the other, to accept without
+criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in
+the furrow of intelligent agnosticism.
+
+Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre
+levels; reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to
+the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for
+comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and
+satisfying its devotional inclinations by any "long psalter unmindfully
+mumbled in the teeth."[81] And a certain type of intelligent people have
+an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the
+traditional notions of the past. In so far as all this represents a
+slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin: at
+any rate, it lacks the true character of spiritual life. Such life
+involves growth, sublimation, the constant and difficult redirection of
+energy from lower to higher levels; a real effort to purge motive, see
+things more truly, face and resolve the conflict between the deep
+instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the
+nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do
+not do with them the very best that they possibly can: and the penalty
+of this sin must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The laws of
+apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to
+our sensual impressions: what we bring with us will condition what we
+obtain.
+
+"We behold that which we are!" said Ruysbroeck long ago.[82] The mind's
+content and its ruling feeling-tone, says psychology, all its memories
+and desires, mingle with all incoming impressions, colour them and
+condition those which our consciousness selects. This intervention of
+memory and emotion in our perceptions is entirely involuntary; and
+explains why the devotee of any specific creed always finds in the pure
+immediacy of religious experience the special marks of his own belief.
+In most acts of perception--and probably, too, in the intuitional
+awareness of religious experience--that which the mind brings is bulkier
+if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest
+analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this
+machinery of apperception--humbling though its realization must be to
+the eager idealist--does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel
+us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the
+contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological
+puzzles; whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual
+experiences we should otherwise miss, because it gives to us the means
+of interpreting them. Pure immediacy, as such, is almost ungraspable by
+us. As man, not as pure spirit, the High Priest entered the Holy of
+Holies: that is to say, he took to the encounter of the Infinite the
+finite machinery of sense. This limitation is ignored by us at our
+peril. The great mystics, who have sought to strip off all image and
+reach--as they say--the Bare Pure Truth, have merely become inarticulate
+in their effort to tell us what it was that they knew. "A light I cannot
+measure, goodness without form!" exclaims Jacopone da Todi.[83] "The
+Light of the _World_--the Good _Shepherd_," says St. John, bringing a
+richly furnished poetic consciousness to the vision of God; and at once
+gives us something on which to lay hold.
+
+Generally speaking, it is only in so far as we bring with us a plan of
+the universe that we can make anything of it; and only in so far as we
+bring with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire for Him, can we
+apprehend Him--so true is it that we do, indeed, behold that which we
+are, find that which we seek, receive that for which we ask. Feeling,
+thought, and tradition must all contribute to the full working out of
+religious experience. The empty soul facing an unconditioned Reality may
+achieve freedom but assuredly achieves nothing else: for though the
+self-giving of Spirit is abundant, we control our own powers of
+reception. This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind with the
+noblest possible thoughts about God, refusing unworthy and narrow
+conceptions, and keeping alight the fire of His love. We shall find that
+which we seek: hence a richly stored religious consciousness, the lofty
+conceptions of the truth seeker, the vision of the artist, the boundless
+charity and joy in life of the lover of his kind, really contribute to
+the fulness of the spiritual life; both on its active and on its
+contemplative side. As the self reaches the first degrees of the
+prayerful or recollected state, memory-elements, released from the
+competition of realistic experience, enter the foreconscious field.
+Among these will be the stored remembrances of past meditations,
+reading, and experiences, all giving an affective tone conducive to new
+and deeper apprehensions. The pure in heart see God, because they bring
+with them that radiant and undemanding purity: because the storehouse of
+ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter,
+is free from conflicting desires and images, perfectly controlled by
+this feeling-tone.
+
+It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports, from
+the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic
+overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral
+purgation, as the beginning of all personal spiritual life. Man does
+not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher
+levels of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard; complexes of
+which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces
+which they enchain. He must, then, examine without flinching his
+impulsive life, and know what is in his heart, before he is in a
+position to change it. "The light which shows us our sins," says George
+Fox, "is the light that heals us." All those repressed cravings, those
+quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust
+into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the
+surface and, in the language of psychology, "abreacted"; in the language
+of religion, confessed. The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges
+on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of
+repressing it. The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the
+hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their
+elements brought up into consciousness and faced: and only the self
+which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.
+It is a process of spiritual hygiene.
+
+Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the
+cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives,
+of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge. But
+the emotional colour of this process when it is undertaken in the full
+conviction of the power and holiness of that life-force which we have
+not used as well as we might, and with a humble and loving consciousness
+of our deficiency, our falling short, will be totally different from the
+feeling state of those who conceive themselves to be searching for the
+merely animal sources of their mental and spiritual life. "Meekness in
+itself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing," "is naught else but a true
+knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is. For surely whoso might
+verily see and feel himself as he is, he should verily be meek.
+Therefore swink and sweat all that thou canst and mayst for to get thee
+a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that
+soon after that thou shalt have a true knowing and feeling of God as he
+is."[84]
+
+The essence, then, of repentance and purification of character consists
+first in the identification, and next in the sublimation of our
+instinctive powers and tendencies; their detachment from egoistic
+desires and dedication to new purposes. We should not starve or repress
+the abounding life within us; but, relieving it of its concentration on
+the here-and-now, give its attention and its passion a wider circle of
+interest over which to range, a greater love to which it can consecrate
+its growing powers. We do not yet know what the limit of such
+sublimation may be. But we do know that it is the true path of life's
+advancement, that already we owe to it our purest loves, our loveliest
+visions, and our noblest deeds. When such feeling, such vision and such
+act are united and transfigured in God, and find in contact with His
+living Spirit the veritable sources of their power; then, man will have
+resolved his inner conflict, developed his true potentialities, and live
+a harmonious because a spiritual life.
+
+We end, therefore, upon this conception of the psyche as the living
+force within us; a storehouse of ancient memories and animal tendencies,
+yet plastic, adaptable, ever pressing on and ever craving for more life
+and more love. Only the life of reality, the life rooted in communion
+with God, will ever satisfy that hungry spirit, or provide an adequate
+objective for its persistent onward push.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 62: Ennead IV. 8. 5.]
+
+[Footnote 63: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 53.]
+
+[Footnote 64: Boehme, "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 65: Unamuno has not hesitated to base the whole of religion on
+the instinct of self-preservation: but this must I think be regarded as
+an exaggerated view. See "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in
+Peoples," Caps. 3 and 4.]
+
+[Footnote 66: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 98.]
+
+[Footnote 67: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 36.]
+
+[Footnote 68: E. Gardner: "St. Catherine of Siena," p. 20.]
+
+[Footnote 69: "Life of St. Teresa," by Herself, Cap. 30.]
+
+[Footnote 70: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law" p. 59.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Jacopone da Todi, Lauda 90.]
+
+[Footnote 72: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p. 123.]
+
+[Footnote 73:
+
+    "Amor tu se'quel ama
+     donde lo cor te ama."
+
+--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 81.]
+
+[Footnote 74: Cf. Watts: "Echo Personalities," for several illustrations
+of this law.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Livingstone: "Mary Slessor of Calabar," p. 131.]
+
+[Footnote 76: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap, 40.]
+
+[Footnote 77: "And very often did He say unto me, 'Bride and daughter,
+sweet art thou unto Me, I love thee better than any other who is in the
+valley of Spoleto.'" ("The Divine Consolations of Blessed Angela of
+Foligno," p. 160.)]
+
+[Footnote 78: "The Spirit," edited by B.H. Streeter, p. 93.]
+
+[Footnote 79: Cf. B. Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 80: Op. cit., Cap. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 81: "Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 37.]
+
+[Footnote 82: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 83: Lauda 91.]
+
+[Footnote 84: Op. cit., Cap. 13.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+(II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION
+
+
+In the last chapter we considered what the modern analysis of mind had
+to tell us about the nature of the spiritual life, the meaning of sin
+and of salvation. We now go on to another aspect of this subject:
+namely, the current conception of the unconscious mind as a dominant
+factor of our psychic life, and of the extent and the conditions in
+which its resources can be tapped, and its powers made amenable to the
+direction of the conscious mind. Two principal points must here be
+studied. The first is the mechanism of that which is called autistic
+thinking and its relation to religious experience: the second, the laws
+of suggestion and their bearing upon the spiritual life. Especially must
+we consider from this point of view the problems which are resumed under
+the headings of prayer, contemplation, and grace. We shall find
+ourselves compelled to examine the nature of meditation and
+recollection, as spiritual persons have always practised them; and, to
+give, if we can, a psychological account of many of their classic
+conceptions and activities. We shall therefore be much concerned with
+those experiences which are often called mystical, but which I prefer to
+call in general contemplative and intuitive; because they extend, as we
+shall find, without a break from the simplest type of mental prayer, the
+most general apprehensions of the Spirit, to the most fully developed
+examples of religious mono-ideism. To place all those intuitions and
+perceptions of which God or His Kingdom are the objects in a class apart
+from all other intuitions and perceptions, and call them "mystical," is
+really to beg the question from the start. The psychic mechanisms
+involved in them are seen in action in many other types of mental
+activity; and will not, in my opinion, be understood until they are
+removed from the category of the supernatural, and studied as the
+movements of the one spirit of life--here directed towards a
+transcendent objective. And further we must ever keep in mind, since we
+are now dealing with specific spiritual experiences, deeply exploring
+the contemplative soul, that though psychology can criticize these
+experiences, and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff--can tell
+us, too, a good deal about the machinery by which we lay hold of them,
+and the best way to use it--it cannot explain the experiences, pronounce
+upon their Object, or reduce that Object to its own terms.
+
+We may some day have a valid psychology of religion, though we are far
+from it yet: but when we do, it will only be true within its own system
+of reference. It will deal with the fact of the spiritual life from one
+side only. And as a discussion of the senses and their experience
+explains nothing about the universe by which these senses are impressed,
+so all discussion of spiritual faculty and experience remains within the
+human radius and neither invalidates nor accounts for the spiritual
+world. When the psychologist has finished telling us all that he knows
+about the rules which govern our mental life, and how to run it best, he
+is still left face to face with the mystery of that life, and of that
+human power of surrender to Spiritual Reality which is the very essence
+of religion. Humility remains, therefore, not only the most becoming but
+also the most scientific attitude for investigators in this field. We
+must, then, remember the inevitably symbolic nature of the language
+which we are compelled to use in our attempt to describe these
+experiences; and resist all temptation to confuse the handy series of
+labels with which psychology has furnished us, with the psychic unity to
+which they will be attached.
+
+Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent discoveries in the mental
+region will turn out to be that which is gradually revealing to us the
+extent and character of the unconscious mind; and the possibility of
+tapping its resources, bending its plastic shape to our own mould. It
+seems as though the laws of its being are at last beginning to be
+understood; giving a new content to the ancient command "Know thyself."
+We are learning that psycho-therapy, which made such immense strides
+during the war, is merely one of the directions in which this knowledge
+may be used, and this control exercised by us. That regnancy of spirit
+over matter towards which all idealists must look, is by way of coming
+at least to a partial fulfilment in this control of the conscious over
+the unconscious, and thus over the bodily life. Such control is indeed
+an aspect of our human freedom, of the creative power which has been put
+into our hands. In all this religion must be interested: because, once
+more, it is the business of religion to regenerate the whole man and win
+him for Reality.
+
+If we could get rid of the idea that the unconscious is a separate, and
+in some sort hostile or animal entity set over against the conscious
+mind; and realize that it is, simply, our whole personality, with the
+exception of the scrap that happens at any moment to be in
+consciousness--then, perhaps, we should more easily grasp the importance
+of exploring and mobilizing its powers. As it is, most of us behave like
+the owners of a well-furnished room, who ignore every aspect of it
+except the window looking out upon the street. This we keep polished,
+and drape with the best curtains that we can afford. But the room upon
+which we sedulously turn our backs contains all that we have inherited,
+all that we have accumulated, many tools which are rusting for want of
+use; machinery too which, left to itself, may function satisfactorily,
+or may get out of order and work to results that we neither desire nor
+dream. The room is twilit. Only by the window is a little patch of
+light. Beyond this there is a fringe of vague, fluctuating, sometimes
+prismatic radiance: an intermediate region, where the images and things
+which most interest us have their place, just within range, or the
+fringe of the field of consciousness. In the darkest corners the
+machinery that we do not understand, those possessions of which we are
+least proud, and those pictures we hate to look at, are hidden away.
+
+This little parable represents, more or less, that which psychology
+means by the conscious, foreconscious, and unconscious regions of the
+psyche. It must not be pressed, or too literally interpreted; but it
+helps us to remember the graded character of our consciousness, its
+fluctuating level, and the fact that, as well as the outward-looking
+mind which alone we usually recognize, there is also the psychic matrix
+from which it has been developed, the inward-looking mind, caring for a
+variety of interests of which we hardly, as we say, think at all. We
+know as yet little about this mysterious psychic whole: the inner nature
+of which is only very incompletely given to us in the fluctuating
+experiences of consciousness. But we do know that it, too, receives at
+least a measure of the light and the messages coming in by the window of
+our wits: that it is the home of memory instinct and habit, the source
+of conduct, and that its control and modification form the major part of
+the training of character. Further, it is sensitive, plastic, accessible
+to impressions, and unforgetting.
+
+Consider now that half-lit region which is called the foreconscious
+mind; for this is of special interest to the spiritual life. It is, in
+psychological language, the region of autistic as contrasted with
+realistic thought.[85] That is to say, it is the agent of reverie and
+meditation; it is at work in all our brooding states, from day-dream to
+artistic creation. Such autistic thought is dominated not by logic or
+will, but by feeling. It achieves its results by intuition, and has its
+reasons which the surface mind knows not of. Here, in this
+fringe-region--which alone seems fully able to experience adoration and
+wonder, or apprehend the values we call holiness, beauty or love--is the
+source of that intuition of the heart to which the mystic owes the love
+which is knowledge, and the knowledge which is love. Here is the true
+home of inspiration and invention. Here, by a process which is seldom
+fully conscious save in its final stages, the poet's creations are
+prepared, and thence presented in the form of inspiration to the reason;
+which--if he be a great artist--criticizes them, before they are given
+as poems to the world. Indeed, in all man's apprehensions of the
+transcendental these two states of the psyche must co-operate if he is
+to realize his full powers: and it is significant that to this
+foreconscious region religion, in its own special language, has always
+invited him to retreat, if he would know his own soul and thus commune
+with his God. Over and over again it assures him under various
+metaphors, that he must turn within, withdraw from the window, meet the
+inner guest; and such a withdrawal is the condition of all
+contemplation.
+
+Consider the opening of Jacob Boehme's great dialogue on the
+Supersensual Life.
+
+"The Scholar said to his Master: How may I come to the supersensual
+life, that I may see God and hear Him speak?
+
+"His Master said: When thou canst throw thyself for a moment into that
+where no creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh.
+
+"The Scholar said: Is that near at hand or far off?
+
+"The Master said: It is in thee, if thou canst for a while cease from
+all thinking and willing, thou shalt hear the unspeakable words of God.
+
+"The Scholar said: How can I hear when I stand still from thinking and
+willing?
+
+"The Master said: When thou standest still from the thinking and willing
+of self, then the eternal hearing, seeing and speaking will be revealed
+in thee."[86]
+
+In this passage we have a definite invitation to retreat from
+volitional to affective thought: from the window to the quiet place
+where "no creature dwelleth," and in Patmore's phrase "the night of
+thought becomes the light of perception."[87] This fringe-region or
+foreconscious is in fact the organ of contemplation, as the realistic
+outward looking mind is the organ of action. Most men go through life
+without conceiving, far less employing, the rich possibilities which are
+implicit in it. Yet here, among the many untapped resources of the self,
+lie our powers of response to our spiritual environment: powers which
+are kept by the tyrannical interests of everyday life below the
+threshold of full consciousness, and never given a chance to emerge.
+Here take place those searching experiences of the "inner life" which
+seem moonshine or morbidity to those who have not known them.
+
+The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious
+experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found
+to have expected this experience to be given to them without any
+deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. They have lived from
+childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have
+never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences
+with any other world than that of sense. Yet all normal men and women
+possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the
+transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty or love. In
+some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is
+latent and must be developed in the right way. In others again it may
+exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic outlook; gathering
+way until it claims its rights at last in a psychic storm. Its
+emergence, however achieved, is a part--and for our true life, by far
+the most important part--of that outcropping and overflowing into
+consciousness of the marginal faculties which is now being recognized as
+essential to all artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too,
+a large part in the regulation of mental and bodily health.
+
+All the great religions have implicitly understood--though without
+analysis--the vast importance of these spiritual intuitions and
+faculties lying below the surface of the everyday mind; and have
+perfected machinery tending to secure their release and their training.
+This is of two kinds: first, religious ceremonial, addressing itself to
+corporate feeling; next the discipline of meditation and prayer, which
+educates the individual to the same ends, gradually developing the
+powers of the foreconscious region, steadying them, and bringing them
+under the control of the purified will. Without some such education,
+widely as its details may vary, there can be no real living of the
+spiritual life.
+
+    "A going out into the life of sense
+     Prevented the exercise of earnest realization."[88]
+
+Psychologists sometimes divide men into the two extreme classes of
+extroverts and introverts. The extrovert is the typical active; always
+leaning out of the window and setting up contacts with the outside
+world. His thinking is mainly realistic. That is to say, it deals with
+the data of sense. The introvert is the typical contemplative,
+predominantly interested in the inner world. His thinking is mainly
+autistic, dealing with the results of intuition and feeling, working
+these up into new structures and extorting from them new experiences. He
+is at home in the foreconscious, has its peculiar powers under control;
+and instinctively obedient to the mystic command to sink into the ground
+of the soul, he leans towards those deep wells of his own being which
+plunge into the unconscious foundations of life. By this avoidance of
+total concentration on the sense world--though material obtained from it
+must as a matter of fact enter into all, even his most "spiritual"
+creations--he seems able to attend to the messages which intuition picks
+up from other levels of being. It is significant that nearly all
+spiritual writers use this very term of introversion, which psychology
+has now adopted as the most accurate that it can find, in a favourable,
+indeed laudatory, sense. By it they intend to describe the healthy
+expansion of the inner life, the development of the soul's power of
+attention to the spiritual, which is characteristic of those real men
+and women of prayer whom Ruysbroeck describes as:--
+
+    "Gazing inward with an eye uplifted and open to the Eternal Truth
+    Inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and in utter peace."[89]
+
+It is certain that no one who wholly lacks this power of retreat from
+the surface, and has failed thus to mobilize his foreconscious energies,
+can live a spiritual life. This is why silence and meditation play so
+large a part in all sane religious discipline. But the ideal state, a
+state answering to that rhythm of work and prayer which should be the
+norm of a mature spirituality, is one in which we have achieved that
+mental flexibility and control which puts us in full possession of our
+autistic _and_ our realistic powers; balancing and unifying the inner
+and the outer world.
+
+This being so, it is worth while to consider in more detail the
+character of foreconscious thought.
+
+Foreconscious thinking, as it commonly occurs in us, with its unchecked
+illogical stream of images and ideas, moving towards no assigned end,
+combined in no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call day-dream.
+But where a definite wish or purpose, an _end_, dominates this reverie
+and links up its images and ideas into a cycle, we get in combination
+all the valuable properties both of affective and of directed thinking;
+although the reverie or contemplation place in the fringe-region of our
+mental life, and in apparent freedom from the control of the conscious
+reason. The object of recollection and meditation, which are the first
+stages of mental prayer, is to set going such a series and to direct it
+towards an assigned end: and this first inward-turning act and
+self-orientation are voluntary, though the activities which they set up
+are not. "You must know, my daughters," says St. Teresa, "that this is
+no supernatural act but depends on our will; and that therefore we can
+do it, with that ordinary assistance of God which we need for all our
+acts and even for our good thoughts."[90]
+
+Consider for a moment what happens in prayer. I pass over the simple
+recitation of verbal prayers, which will better be dealt with when we
+come to consider the institutional framework of the spiritual life. We
+are now concerned with mental prayer or orison; the simplest of those
+degrees of contemplation which may pass gradually into mystical
+experience, and are at least in some form a necessity of any real and
+actualized spiritual life. Such prayer is well defined by the mystics,
+as "a devout intent directed to God."[91] What happens in it? All
+writers on the science of prayer observe, that the first necessity is
+Recollection; which, in a rough and ready way, we may render as
+concentration, or perhaps in the special language of psychology as
+"contention." The mind is called in from external interests and
+distractions, one by one the avenues of sense are closed, till the hunt
+of the world is hardly perceived by it. I need not labour this
+description, for it is a state of which we must all have experience: but
+those who wish to see it described with the precision of genius, need
+only turn to St. Teresa's "Way of Perfection." Having achieved this, we
+pass gradually into the condition of deep withdrawal variously called
+Simplicity or Quiet; a state in which the attention is quietly and
+without effort directed to God, and the whole self as it were held in
+His presence. This presence is given, dimly or clearly, in intuition.
+The actual prayer used will probably consist--again to use technical
+language--of "affective acts and aspirations"; short phrases repeated
+and held, perhaps expressing penitence, humility, adoration or love, and
+for the praying self charged with profound significance.
+
+"If we would intentively pray for getting of good," says "The Cloud of
+Unknowing," "let us cry either with word or with thought or with desire,
+nought else nor on more words but this word God.... Study thou not for
+no words, for so shouldst thou never come to thy purpose nor to this
+work, for it is never got by study, but all only by grace."[92]
+
+Now the question naturally arises, how does this recollected state, this
+alogical brooding on a spiritual theme, exceed in religions value the
+orderly saying of one's prayers? And the answer psychology suggests is,
+that more of us, not less, is engaged in such a spiritual act: that not
+only the conscious attention, but the foreconscious region too is then
+thrown open to the highest sources of life. We are at last learning to
+recognize the existence of delicate mental processes which entirely
+escape the crude methods of speech. Reverie as a genuine thought process
+is beginning to be studied with the attention it deserves, and new
+understanding of prayer must result. By its means powers of perception
+and response ordinarily latent are roused to action; and thus the whole
+life is enriched. That faculty in us which corresponds, not with the
+busy life of succession but with the eternal sources of power, gets its
+chance. "Though the soul," says Von Huegel, "cannot abidingly abstract
+itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself
+in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of direct
+preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and simplification
+to the soul."[93]
+
+True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet surrender to reality, "is
+rest to the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body;
+nourishment and refreshment."[94] Psychology endorses the constant
+statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one need hope to live
+a spiritual life who cannot find a little time each day for this retreat
+from the window, this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen "with
+the forces of the soul," as Ruysbroeck puts it, "gathered into unity of
+the Spirit."[95] Under these conditions, and these only, the intuitive,
+creative, artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the highest
+ends: and in these powers rather than the rational our best chance of
+apprehending eternal values abides, "Taste and _see_ that the Lord is
+sweet." "Be still! be still! and _know_ that I am God!"
+
+Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activities are of such
+paramount interest to the spiritual life, we may before we go on glance
+at one or two of its characteristics. And first we notice that the fact
+that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge in the mental and
+contemplative type of prayer explains why it is that even the most
+devout persons are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst
+engaged in it. Very often, they are utterly unable to keep their
+attention fixed; and the reason of this is, that conscious attention and
+thought are not the faculties primarily involved. What is involved, is
+reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to depart from its assigned
+end and drift into mere day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or
+some intruding image starts a new train of associations. The religious
+mind is distressed by this constant failure to look steadily at that
+which alone it wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that
+the machinery used is affective, and obedient to the rise and fall of
+feeling rather than the control of the will. "By love shall He be gotten
+and holden, by thought never."
+
+Next, consider for a moment the way in which the foreconscious does and
+must present its apprehensions to consciousness. Its cognitions of the
+spiritual are in the nature of pure immediacy, of uncriticized contacts:
+and the best and greatest of them seem to elude altogether that
+machinery of speech and image which has been developed through the life
+of sense. The well-known language of spiritual writers about the divine
+darkness or ignorance is an acknowledgment of this. God is "known
+darkly." Our experience of Eternity is "that of which nothing can be
+said." It is "beyond feeling" and "beyond knowledge," a certitude known
+in the ground of the soul, and so forth. It is indeed true that the
+spiritual world is for the human mind a transcendent world, does differ
+utterly in kind from the best that the world of succession is able to
+give us; as we know once for all when we establish a contact with it,
+however fleeting. But constantly the foreconscious--which, as we shall
+do well to remember, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of the
+poem, and the creative phantasy--works up its transcendent intuitions in
+symbolic form. For this purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of
+speech, sometimes that of image. As our ordinary reveries constantly
+proceed by way of an interior conversation or narrative, so the content
+of spiritual contemplation is often expressed in dialogue, in which
+memory and belief are fused with the fruit of perception. The "Dialogue
+of St. Catherine of Siena," the "Life of Suso," and the "Imitation of
+Christ," all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed
+illustrations of it might be found in every school and period of
+religious literature.
+
+Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spontaneous forms of autistic
+thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their
+consciousness of direct communion with God. I need not point out how
+easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and
+Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their
+characteristic experience. "Blessed is that soul," says a Kempis, "that
+heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of
+consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and
+take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the
+Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the
+most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such
+a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate
+presence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the
+contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as
+it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude
+thrown open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have
+already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.
+
+Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the
+experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather
+than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the
+material. Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it
+is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in
+those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of
+those experiences. But many minds are, as it were, their own religious
+artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to
+their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes
+be for them that--to revert again to our original simile--the self turns
+from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the
+time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the
+room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this
+happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious
+day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout
+people who tend to visualization have probably known. When the break
+with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in
+which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.
+The Bible is full of examples of this. Good historic instances are the
+visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first
+contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and
+emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the
+visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this
+type.[97]
+
+I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme
+types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is
+with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may
+live it. But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within
+limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is
+inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is
+neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as
+superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our
+neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic world of traditional
+piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial
+heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than
+the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy. We may be sure
+that both are more characteristic of the image-making and
+structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate
+and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value--or the value of
+any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived--abides wholly in
+the content: the quality of the material thus worked up. The rich
+nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will
+express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a
+veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life. Its psychic
+structures--however logic may seek to discredit them--will convey
+spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak
+of illumination. The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the
+religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored. It
+is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the
+field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a
+revelation. The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with
+amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than
+ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the
+Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life. But the
+crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in
+from those visions and contacts, that intercourse? Is transcendental
+feeling involved in them? "What fruits dost thou bring back from this
+thy vision?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real
+test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of
+contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and
+perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought. In the
+second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking
+is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and
+actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of
+the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many
+choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its
+true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully
+performed. It is to this region that poetry, art and music--and even, if
+I dare say so, philosophy--make their fundamental appeal. No life is
+whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.
+
+We must now go on--and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful
+experience must lead us on--to the subject of suggestion, and its
+relation to the inner life. By suggestion of course is here meant, in
+conformity with current psychological doctrine, the process by which an
+idea enters the deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there becomes
+fruitful. Its real nature, and in consequence something of its
+far-reaching importance, is now beginning to be understood by us: a fact
+of great moment for both the study and the practice of the spiritual
+life. Since the transforming work of the Spirit must be done through
+man's ordinary psychic machinery and in conformity with the laws which
+govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of that machinery must
+serve the interests of religion, and show its teachers the way to
+success. Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds. The first is
+hetero-suggestion, in which the self-realizing idea is received either
+wittingly or unwittingly from the outer world. During the whole of our
+conscious lives for good or evil we are at the mercy of such
+hetero-suggestions, which are being made to us at every moment by our
+environment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, a dominant
+factor in corporate religious exercises. The second type is
+auto-suggestion. In this, by means of the conscious mind, an idea is
+implanted in the unconscious and there left to mature. Thus do willingly
+accepted beliefs, religious, social, or scientific, gradually and
+silently permeate the whole being and show their results in character.
+
+A little reflection shows, however, that these two forms of suggestion
+shade into one another; and that no hetero-suggestion, however
+impressively given, becomes active in us until we have in some sort
+accepted it and transformed it into an auto-suggestion. Theology
+expresses this fact in its own special language, when it says that the
+will must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious. Thus the
+primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It stands, or should stand, at the
+door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and
+bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of
+the self.
+
+As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the incoming suggestions.
+They allow uncriticized beliefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred,
+anxiety or ill-health, free entrance. They fail to seize and affirm the
+ideas of power, renovation, joy. They would be more careful, did they
+grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted
+suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic
+deeps are plastic to ideas. Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily
+life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the
+suggestion of other peoples' feeling-states; and next under the conative
+form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their
+appearance, habits, deeds. All political creeds, panics, fashion and
+good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion. We are so
+accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the
+strangeness of the process: but it is now known to reach a degree
+previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.
+
+In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this
+psychic suggestibility have long been notorious. Obvious instances are
+those ecstatics--some of them true saints, some only religious
+invalids--whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced
+in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ. In less
+extreme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, together with that
+eager emotional desire to be united with the sufferings of the Redeemer
+which mediaeval religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole life
+of the contemplative; shaping the plastic mind, and often the body too,
+to its own mould. A good historic example of this law of religious
+suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a young girl, Julian
+prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a
+closer knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the prayer: but it worked
+below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was
+thirty the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be recognized in
+her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of
+that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of
+the Passion to which we owe the "Revelations of Divine Love."[99]
+
+This is simply a striking instance of a process which is always taking
+place in every one of us, for good or evil. The deeper mind opens to all
+who knock; provided only that the new-comers be not the enemies of some
+stronger habit or impression already within. To suggestions which
+coincide with the self's desires or established beliefs it gives an easy
+welcome; and these, once within, always tend to self-realization. Thus
+the French Carmelite Therese de l'Enfant-Jesus, once convinced that she
+was destined to be a "victim of love," began that career of suffering
+which ended in her death at the age of twenty-four.[100] The lives of
+the Saints are full of incidents explicable on the same lines:
+exhibiting again and again the dramatic realization of traditional ideas
+or passionate desires. We see therefore that St. Paul's admonition
+"Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
+things be of good report, think on these things" is a piece of practical
+advice of which the importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it deals
+with the conditions under which man makes his own mentality.
+
+Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful agents either of
+self-destruction or of self-advancement which are within our grasp: and
+those who speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the certitudes of
+religious experience, as "mere suggestion" are unfortunate in their
+choice of an adjective. If then we wish to explore all those mental
+resources which can be turned to the purposes of the spiritual life,
+this is one which we must not neglect. The religious idea, rightly
+received into the mind and reinforced by the suggestion of regular
+devotional exercises, always tends to realize itself. "Receive His
+leaven," says William Penn, "and it will change thee, His medicine and
+it will cure thee. He is as infallible as free; without money and with
+certainty. Yield up the body, soul and spirit to Him that maketh all
+things new: new heaven and new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new
+works, a new life and conversation."[101] This is fine literature, but
+it is more important to us to realize that it is also good psychology:
+and that here we are given the key to those amazing regenerations of
+character which are the romance and glory of the religious life.
+Pascal's too celebrated saying, that if you will take holy water
+regularly you will presently believe, witnesses on another level to the
+same truth.
+
+Fears have been expressed that, by such an application of the laws of
+suggestion to religious experience, we shall reduce religion itself to a
+mere favourable subjectivism, and identify faith with suggestibility.
+But here the bearing of this series of facts on bodily health provides
+us with a useful analogy. Bodily health is no illusion. It does not
+consist in merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condition of
+well-being and of power; depending on the state of our tissues and
+correct balance and working of our physical and psychical life. And this
+correct and wholesome working will be furthered and steadied--or if
+broken may often be restored--by good suggestions; it may be disturbed
+by bad suggestions; because the controlling factor of life is mind, not
+chemistry, and mind is plastic to ideas. So too the life of the Spirit
+is a concrete fact; a real response to a real universe. But this
+concrete life of faith, with its growth and its experiences, its richly
+various working of one principle in every aspect of existence, its
+correspondences with the Eternal World, its definitely ontological
+references, is lived here and now; in and through the self's psychic
+life, and indeed his bodily life too--a truth which is embodied in
+sacramentalism. Therefore, sharing as it does life's plastic character,
+it too is amenable to suggestion and can be helped or hindered by it. It
+is indeed characteristic of those in whom this life is dominant, that
+they are capable of receiving and responding to the highest and most
+vivifying suggestions which the universe in its totality pours in on us.
+This movement of response, often quietly overlooked, is that which makes
+them not spiritual hedonists but men and women of prayer. Grace--to give
+these suggestions of Spirit their conventional name--is perpetually
+beating in on us. But if it is to be inwardly realized, the Divine
+suggestion must be transformed by man's will and love into an
+auto-suggestion; and this is what seems to happen in meditation and
+prayer.
+
+Everything indeed points to a very close connection between what might
+be called the mechanism of prayer and of suggestion. To say this, is in
+no way to minimize the transcendental character of prayer. In both
+states there is a spontaneous or deliberate throwing open of the deeper
+mind to influences which, fully accepted, tend to realize themselves.
+Look at the directions given by all great teachers of prayer and
+contemplation; and these two acts, rightly performed, fuse one with the
+other, they are two aspects of the single act of communion with God.
+Look at their insistence on a stilling and recollecting of the mind, on
+surrender, a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful: on the need
+of meek yielding to a greater inflowing power, and its regenerating
+suggestions. Then compare this with the method by which health-giving
+suggestions are made to the bodily life. "In the deeps of the soul His
+word is spoken." Is not this an exact description of the inward work of
+the self-realizing idea of holiness, received in the prayer of quiet
+into the unconscious mind, and there experienced as a transforming
+power? I think that we may go even further than this, and say that
+grace, is, in effect, the direct suggestion of the spiritual affecting
+our soul's life. As we are commonly docile to the countless
+hetero-suggestions, some of them helpful, some weakening, some actually
+perverting, which our environment is always making to us; so we can and
+should be so spiritually suggestible that we can receive those given to
+us by all-penetrating Divine life. What is generally called sin,
+especially in the forms of self-sufficiency, lack of charity and the
+indulgence of the senses, renders us recalcitrant to these living
+suggestions of the Spirit. The opposing qualities, humility, love and
+purity, make us as we say accessible to grace.
+
+"Son," says the inward voice to Thomas a Kempis, "My grace is precious,
+and suffereth not itself to be mingled with strange things nor earthly
+consolations. Wherefore it behoveth thee to cast away impediments to
+grace, if thou willest to receive the inpouring thereof. Ask for thyself
+a secret place, love to dwell alone with thyself, seek confabulation of
+none other ... put the readiness for God before all other things, for
+thou canst not both take heed to Me and delight in things transitory....
+This grace is a light supernatural and a special gift of God, and a
+proper sign of the chosen children of God, and the earnest of
+everlasting health; for God lifteth up man from earthly things to love
+heavenly things, and of him that is fleshly maketh a spiritual
+man."[102] Could we have a more vivid picture than this of the
+conditions of withdrawal and attention under which the psyche is most
+amenable to suggestion, or of the inward transfiguration worked by a
+great self-realizing idea? Such transfiguration has literally on the
+physical plane caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to
+speak: and it seems to me that it is to be observed operating on highest
+levels in the work of salvation. When further a Kempis prays "Increase
+in me more grace, that I may fulfil Thy word and make perfect mine own
+health" is he not describing the right balance to be sought between our
+surrender to the vivifying suggestions of grace and our appropriation
+and manly use of them? This is no limp acquiescence and merely infantile
+dependence, but another aspect of the vital balance between the
+indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of
+prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which,
+as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are "receptive of God."
+
+It is, then, worth our while from the point of view of the spiritual
+life to inquire into the conditions in which a suggestion is most likely
+to be received and realized by us. These conditions, as psychologists
+have so far defined them, can be resumed under the three heads of
+quiescence, attention and feeling: outstanding characteristics, as I
+need not point out, of the state of prayer, all of which can be
+illustrated from the teaching and experience of the mystics.
+
+First, let us take _Quiescence_. In order fully to lay open the
+unconscious to the influence of suggested ideas, the surface mind must
+be called in from its responses to the outer world, or in religious
+language recollected, till the hum of that world is hardly perceived by
+it. The body must be relaxed, making no demands on the machinery
+controlling the motor system; and the conditions in general must be
+those of complete mental and bodily rest. Here is the psychological
+equivalent of that which spiritual writers call the Quiet: a state
+defined by one of them as "a rest most busy." "Those who are in this
+prayer," says St. Teresa, "wish their bodies to remain motionless, for
+it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose their sweet
+peace."[103] Others say that in this state we "stop the wheel of
+imagination," leave all that we can think, sink into our nothingness or
+our ground. In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are "inwardly abiding in
+simplicity and stillness and utter peace";[104] and this is man's state
+of maximum receptivity. "The best and noblest way in which thou mayst
+come into this work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "is by keeping
+silence and letting God work and speak ... when we simply keep ourselves
+receptive we are more perfect than when at work."[105]
+
+But this preparatory state of surrendered quiet must at once be
+qualified by the second point: _Attention_. It is based upon the right
+use of the will, and is not a limp yielding to anything or nothing. It
+has an ordained deliberate aim, is a behaviour-cycle directed to an end;
+and this it is that marks out the real and fruitful quiet of the
+contemplative from the non-directed surrender of mere quietism.
+"Nothing," says St. Teresa, "is learnt without a little pains. For the
+love of God, sisters, account that care well employed that ye shall
+bestow on this thing."[106]
+
+The quieted mind must receive and hold, yet without discursive thought,
+the idea which it desires to realize; and this idea must interest and be
+real for it, so that attention is concentrated on it spontaneously. The
+more completely the idea absorbs us, the greater its transforming power:
+when interest wavers, the suggestion begins to lose ground. In spite of
+her subsequent relapse into quietism Madame Guyon accurately described
+true quiet when she said, "Our activity should consist in endeavouring
+to acquire and maintain such a state as may be most susceptible of
+divine impressions, most flexible to all the operations of the Eternal
+Word."[107] Such concentration can be improved by practice; hence the
+value of regular meditation and contemplation to those who are in
+earnest about the spiritual life, the quiet and steady holding in the
+mind of the thought which it is desired to realize.
+
+Psycho-therapists tell us that, having achieved quiescence, we should
+rapidly and rythmically, but with intention, repeat the suggestion that
+we wish to realize; and that the shorter, simpler and more general this
+verbal formula, the more effective it will be.[108] The spiritual aspect
+of this law was well understood by the mediaeval mystics. Thus the author
+of "The Cloud of Unknowing" says to his disciple, "Fill thy spirit with
+ghostly meaning of this word Sin, and without any special beholding unto
+any kind of sin, whether it be venial or deadly. And cry thus ghostly
+ever upon one: Sin! Sin! Sin! out! out! out! This ghostly cry is better
+learned of God by the proof than of any man by word. For it is best when
+it is in pure spirit, without special thought or any pronouncing of
+word. On the same manner shalt thou do with this little word God: and
+mean God all, and all God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy
+will but only God."[109] Here the directions are exact, and such as any
+psychologist of the present day might give. So too, religious teachers
+informed by experience have always ascribed a special efficacy to "short
+acts" of prayer and aspiration: phrases repeated or held in the mind,
+which sum up and express the self's penitence, love, faith or adoration,
+and are really brief, articulate suggestions parallel in type to those
+which Baudouin recommends to us as conducive to bodily well-being.[110]
+The repeated affirmation of Julian of Norwich "All shall be well! all
+shall be well! all shall be well!"[111] fills all her revelations with
+its suggestion of joyous faith; and countless generations of Christians
+have thus applied to their soul's health those very methods by which we
+are now enthusiastically curing indigestion and cold in the head. The
+articulate repetition of such phrases increases their suggestive power;
+for the unconscious is most easily reached by way of the ear. This fact
+throws light on the immemorial insistence of all great religions on the
+peculiar value of vocal prayer, whether this be the _mantra_ of the
+Hindu or the _dikr_ of the Moslem; and explains the instinct which
+causes the Catholic Church to require from her priests the verbal
+repetition, not merely the silent reading of their daily office. Hence,
+too, there is real educative value, in such devotions as the rosary; and
+the Protestant Churches showed little psychological insight when they
+abandoned it. Such "vain" repetitions, however much the rational mind
+may dislike, discredit or denounce them, have power to penetrate and
+modify the deeper psychic levels; always provided that they conflict
+with no accepted belief, are weighted with meaning and desire, with the
+intent stretched towards God, and are not allowed to become merely
+mechanical--the standing danger alike of all verbal suggestion and all
+vocal prayer.
+
+Here we touch the third character of effective suggestion: _Feeling_.
+When the idea is charged with emotion, it is far more likely to be
+realized. War neuroses have taught us the dreadful potency of the
+emotional stimulus of fear; but this power of feeling over the
+unconscious has its good side too. Here we find psychology justifying
+the often criticized emotional element of religion. Its function is to
+increase the energy of the idea. The cool, judicious type of belief will
+never possess the life-changing power of a more fervid, though perhaps
+less rational faith. Thus the state of corporate suggestibility
+generated in a revival and on which the success of that revival depends,
+is closely related to the emotional character of the appeal which is
+made. And, on higher levels, we see that the transfigured lives and
+heroic energies of the great figures of Christian history all represent
+the realization of an idea of which the heart was an impassioned love of
+God, subduing to its purposes all the impulses and powers of the inner
+man, "If you would truly know how these things come to pass," said St.
+Bonaventura, "ask it of desire not of intellect; of the ardours of
+prayer, not of the teaching of the schools."[112] More and more
+psychology tends to endorse the truth of these words.
+
+Quiescence, attention, and emotional interest are then the conditions of
+successful suggestion. We have further to notice two characteristics
+which have been described by the Nancy school of psychologists; and
+which are of some importance for those who wish to understand the
+mechanism of religious experience. These have been called the law of
+Unconscious Teleology, and the law of Reversed Effort.
+
+The law of unconscious teleology means that when an end has been
+effectively suggested to it, the unconscious mind will always tend to
+work towards its realization. Thus in psycho-therapeutics it is found
+that a general suggestion of good health made to the sick person is
+often enough. The doctor may not himself know enough about the malady to
+suggest stage by stage the process of cure. But he suggests that cure;
+and the necessary changes and adjustments required for its realization
+are made unconsciously, under the influence of the dynamic idea. Here
+the direction of "The Cloud of Unknowing," "Look that nothing live in
+thy working mind but a naked intent directed to God"[113]--suggesting
+as it does to the psyche the ontological Object of faith--strikingly
+anticipates the last conclusions of science. Further, a fervent belief
+in the end proposed, a conviction of success, is by no means essential.
+Far more important is a humble willingness to try the method, give it a
+chance. That which reason may not grasp, the deeper mind may seize upon
+and realize; always provided that the intellect does not set up
+resistances. This is found to be true in medical practice, and religious
+teachers have always declared it to be true in the spiritual sphere;
+holding obedience, humility, and a measure of resignation, not spiritual
+vision, to be the true requisites for the reception of grace, the
+healing and renovation of the soul. Thus acquiescence in belief, and
+loyal and steady co-operation in the corporate religious life are often
+seen to work for good in those who submit to them; though these may
+lack, as they frequently say, the "spiritual sense." And this happens,
+not by magic, but in conformity with psychological law.
+
+This tendency of the unconscious self to realize without criticism a
+suggested end lays on religious teachers the obligation of forming a
+clear and vital conception of the spiritual ideals which they wish to
+suggest, whether to themselves in their meditations or to others by
+their teaching: to be sure that they are wholesome, and really tend to
+fullness of life. It should also compel each of us to scrutinize those
+religious thoughts and images which we receive and on which we allow
+our minds to dwell: excluding those that are merely sentimental, weak or
+otherwise unworthy, and holding fast the noblest and most beautiful that
+we can find. For these ideas, however generalized, will set up profound
+changes in the mind that receives them. Thus the wrong conception of
+self-immolation will be faithfully worked out by the unconscious--and
+has been too often in the past--in terms of misery, weakness, or
+disease. We remember how the idea of herself as a victim of love worked
+physical destruction in Therese de L'Enfant Jesus: and we shall never
+perhaps know all the havoc wrought by the once fashionable doctrines of
+predestination and of the total depravity of human nature. All this
+shows how necessary it is to put hopeful, manly, constructive
+conceptions before those whom we try to help or instruct; constantly
+suggesting to them not the weak and sinful things that they are, but the
+living and radiant things which they can become.
+
+Further, this tendency of the received suggestion to work out its whole
+content for good or evil within the unconscious mind, shows the
+importance which we ought to attach to the tone of a religions service,
+and how close too many of our popular hymns are to what one might call
+psychological sin; stressing as they do a childish weakness love of
+shelter and petting, a neurotic shrinking from full human life, a morbid
+preoccupation with failure and guilt. Such hymns make devitalizing
+suggestions, adverse to the health and energy of the spiritual life;
+and are all the more powerful because they are sung collectively and in
+rhythm, and are cast in an emotional mould.[114] There was some truth in
+the accusation of the Indian teacher Ramakrishna, that the books of the
+Christians insisted too exclusively on sin. He said, "He who repeats
+again and again 'I am bound! I am bound!' remains in bondage. He who
+repeats day and night 'I am a sinner! I am a sinner!' becomes a sinner
+indeed."[115]
+
+I go on to the law of Reversed Effort; a psychological discovery which
+seems to be of extreme importance for the spiritual life. Briefly this
+means, that when any suggestion has entered the unconscious mind and
+there become active, all our conscious and anxious resistances to it are
+not merely useless but actually tend to intensify it. If it is to be
+dislodged, this will not be accomplished by mere struggle but by the
+persuasive power of another and superior auto-suggestion. Further, in
+respect of any habit that we seek to establish, the more desperate our
+struggle and sense of effort, the smaller will be our success. In small
+matters we have all experienced the working of this law: in frustrated
+struggles to attend to that which does not interest us, to check a
+tiresome cough, to keep our balance when learning to ride a bicycle. But
+it has also more important applications. Thus it indicates that a
+deliberate struggle to believe, to overcome some moral weakness, to keep
+attention fixed in prayer, will tend to frustration: for this anxious
+effort gives body to our imaginative difficulties and sense of
+helplessness, fixing attention on the conflict, not on the desired end.
+True, if this end is to be achieved the will must be directed to it, but
+only in the sense of giving steadfast direction to the desires and acts
+of the self, keeping attention orientated towards the goal. The pull of
+imaginative desire, not the push of desperate effort, serves us best.
+St. Teresa well appreciated this law and applied it to her doctrine of
+prayer. "If your thought," she says to her daughters, "runs after all
+the fooleries of the world, laugh at it and leave it for a fool and
+continue in your quiet ... if you seek by force of arms to bring it to
+you, you lose the strength which you have against it."[116]
+
+This same principle is implicitly recognized by those theologians who
+declare that man can "do nothing of himself," that mere voluntary
+struggle is useless, and regeneration comes by surrender to grace: by
+yielding, that is, to the inner urge, to those sources of power which
+flow in, but are not dragged in. Indications of its truth meet us
+everywhere in spiritual literature. Thus Jacob Boehme says, "Because
+thou strivest against that out of which thou art come, thou breakest
+thyself off with thy own willing from God's willing."[117] So too the
+constant invitations to let God work and speak, to surrender, are all
+invitations to cease anxious strife and effort and give the Divine
+suggestions their chance. The law of reversed effort, in fact, is valid
+on every level of life; and warns us against the error of making
+religion too grim and strenuous an affair. Certainly in all life of the
+Spirit the will is active, and must retain its conscious and steadfast
+orientation to God. Heroic activity and moral effort must form an
+integral part of full human experience. Yet it is clearly possible to
+make too much of the process of wrestling evil. An attention chiefly and
+anxiously concentrated on the struggle with sins and weaknesses, instead
+of on the eternal sources of happiness and power, will offer the
+unconscious harmful suggestions of impotence and hence tend to
+frustration. The early ascetics, who made elaborate preparations for
+dealing with temptations, got as an inevitable result plenty of
+temptations with which to deal. A sounder method is taught by the
+mystics. "When thoughts of sin press on thee," says "The Cloud of
+Unknowing," "look over their shoulders seeking another thing, the which
+thing is God."[118]
+
+These laws of suggestion, taken together, all seem to point, one way.
+They exhibit the human self as living, plastic, changeful; perpetually
+modified by the suggestions pouring in on it, the experiences and
+intuitions to which it reacts. Every thought, prayer, enthusiasm, fear,
+is of importance to it. Nothing leaves it as it was before. The soul,
+said Boehme, stands both in heaven and in hell. Keep it perpetually busy
+at the window of the senses, feed it with unlovely and materialistic
+ideas, and those ideas will realize themselves. Give the contemplative
+faculty its chance, let it breathe at least for a few moments of each
+day the spiritual atmosphere of faith, hope and love, and the spiritual
+life will at least in some measure be realized by it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 85: On all this, cf. J. Varendonck, "The Psychology of
+Day-dreams."]
+
+[Footnote 86: Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 87: Patmore: "The Rod, the Root and the Flower: Aurea Dicta,"
+13.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Ruysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 89: "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 90: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 91: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 39.]
+
+[Footnote 92: _Ibid_.]
+
+[Footnote 93: "Eternal Life," p. 396.]
+
+[Footnote 94: Penn: "No Cross, No Crown."]
+
+[Footnote 95: "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap, 7.]
+
+[Footnote 96: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. I]
+
+[Footnote 97: Streeter and Appasamy: "The Sadhu, a Study in Mysticism
+and Practical Religion," Pt. V.]
+
+[Footnote 98:
+
+    Que frutti reducene de esta tua visione?
+    Vita ordinata en onne nazione.
+
+--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 79.]
+
+[Footnote 99: Julian of Norwich: "Revelations of Divine Love," Caps. 2,
+3, 4.]
+
+[Footnote 100: "Soeur Therese de l'Enfant-Jesus," Cap. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 101: William Penn: "No Cross, No Crown."]
+
+[Footnote 102: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 58.]
+
+[Footnote 103: "Way of Perfection," Cap. 33.]
+
+[Footnote 104: "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 105: Meister Eckhart, Pred. I.]
+
+[Footnote 106: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 107: "A Short and Easy Method of Prayer," Cap. 21.]
+
+[Footnote 108: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Pt. II, Cap
+6.]
+
+[Footnote 109: Op. cit. Cap. 40.]
+
+[Footnote 110: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," loc. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 111: "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 112: "De Itinerario Mentis in Deo," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 113: Op. cit., Cap. 43.]
+
+[Footnote 114: Hymns of the Weary Willie type: e.g.
+
+    "O Paradise, O Paradise
+    Who does not sigh for rest?"
+
+should never be sung in congregations where the average age is less than
+sixty. Equally unsuited to general use are those expressing
+disillusionment, anxiety, or impotence. Any popular hymnal will provide
+an abundance of examples.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Quoted by Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 116: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 117: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 118: Op. cit., Cap. 32.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+So far, in considering what psychology had to tell us about the
+conditions in which our spiritual life can develop, and the mental
+machinery it can use, we have been, deliberately, looking at men one by
+one. We have left on one side all those questions which relate to the
+corporate aspect of the spiritual life, and its expression in religious
+institutions; that is to say, in churches and cults. We have looked upon
+it as a personal growth and response; a personal reception of, and
+self-orientation to, Reality. But we cannot get away from the fact that
+this regenerate life does most frequently appear in history associated
+with, or creating for itself, a special kind of institution. Although it
+is impossible to look upon it as the appearance of a favourable
+variation within the species, it is also just as possible to look upon
+it as the formation of a new herd or tribe. Where the variation appears,
+and in its sense of newness, youth and vigour breaks away from the
+institution within which it has arisen, it generally becomes the nucleus
+about which a new group is formed. So that individualism and
+gregariousness are both represented in the full life of the Spirit; and
+however personal its achievement may seem to us, it has also a
+definitely corporate and institutional aspect.
+
+I now propose to take up this side of the subject, and try to suggest
+one or two lines of thought which may help us to discover the meaning
+and worth of such societies and institutions. For after all, some
+explanation is needed of these often strange symbolic systems, and often
+rigid mechanizations, imposed on the free responses to Eternal Reality
+which we found to constitute the essence of religious experience. Any
+one who has known even such direct communion with the Spirit as is
+possible to normal human nature must, if he thinks out the implications
+of his own experience, feel it to be inconsistent that this most
+universal of all acts should be associated by men with the most
+exclusive of all types of institution. It is only because we are so
+accustomed to this--taking churches for granted, even when we reject
+them--that we do not see how odd they really are: how curious it is that
+men do not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full of rules and
+regulations to enjoy the light of the sun in particular times and
+fashions, but do persistently set up such exclusives clubs full of rules
+and regulations, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God.
+
+When we look into history we see the life of the Spirit, even from its
+crudest beginnings, closely associated with two movements. First with
+the tendency to organize it in communities or churches, living under
+special sanctions and rules. Next, with the tendency of its greatest,
+most arresting personalities either to revolt from these organisms or to
+reform, rekindle them from within. So that the institutional life of
+religion persists through or in spite of its own constant tendency to
+stiffen and lose fervour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals
+which are occasioned by its greatest sons. Thus our Lord protested
+against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best
+of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against
+one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.
+This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional
+authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of
+all great historical faiths. In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in
+our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and
+denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led
+reforms within Islam. That which we are now concerned to discover is the
+necessity underlying this conflict: the extent in which the institution
+on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or
+opposes its free development. It is a truism that all such institutions
+tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize. Are they
+then, in spite of these adverse characters, to be looked on as
+essential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions of the spiritual
+life in man; or can this spiritual life flourish in pure freedom?
+
+This question, often put in the crucial form, "Did Jesus Christ intend
+to form a Church?" is well worth asking. Indeed, it is of great pressing
+importance to those who now have the spiritual reconstruction of society
+at heart. It means, in practice: can men best be saved, regenerated, one
+by one, by their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, is
+the life of the Spirit best found and actualized through submission to
+tradition and contacts with other men--that is, in a group or church?
+And if in a group or church, what should the character of this society
+be? But we shall make no real movement towards solving this problem,
+unless we abandon both the standpoint of authority, and that of naive
+religious individualism; and consent to look at it as a part of the
+general problem of human society, in the light of history, of
+psychology, and of ethics.
+
+I think we may say without exaggeration that the general modern
+judgment--not, of course, the clerical or orthodox judgment--is adverse
+to institutionalism; at least as it now exists. In spite of the enormous
+improvement which would certainly be visible, were we to compare the
+average ecclesiastical attitude and average Church service in this
+country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense that religion
+involves submission to the rules and discipline of a closed
+society--that definite spiritual gains are attached to spiritual
+incorporation--that church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a
+normal and necessary part of the routine of a good life: all this has
+certainly ceased to be general amongst us. If we include the whole
+population, and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true both of
+so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries. Professor Pratt
+has lately described 80 per cent. of the population of the United States
+as being "unchurched"; and all who worked among our soldiers at the
+front were struck by the paradox of the immense amount of natural
+religion existing among them, combined with almost total alienation from
+religious institutions. Those, too, who study and care for the spiritual
+life seem most often to conceive it in the terms of William James's
+well-known definition of religion as "the feelings, acts and experiences
+of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves
+to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the Divine."[119]
+
+Such a life of the Spirit--and the majority of educated men would
+probably accept this description of it--seems little if at all
+conditioned by Church membership. It speaks in secret to its Father in
+secret; and private devotion and self-discipline seem to be all it
+needs. Yet looking at history, we see that this conception, this
+completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, this one-by-one
+achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the
+past. Where it seems so to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each
+great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul
+achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and
+contemporaries.[120] All great spiritual achievement, like all great
+artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however
+much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the
+racial past. If fulfills rather than destroys; and unless its free
+movement towards novelty, fresh levels of pure experience, be thus
+balanced by the stability which is given us by our hoarded traditions
+and formed habits, it will degenerate into eccentricity and fail of its
+full effect. Although nothing but first-hand discovery of and response
+to spiritual values is in the end of any use to us, that discovery and
+that response are never quite such a single-handed affair as we like to
+suppose. Memory and environment, natural and cultural, play their part.
+And the next most natural and fruitful movement after such a personal
+discovery of abiding Reality, such a transfiguration of life, is always
+back towards our fellow-men; to learn more from them, to unite with
+them, to help them,--anyhow to reaffirm our solidarity with them. The
+great men and women of the Spirit, then, either use their new power and
+joy to restore existing institutions to fuller vitality, as did the
+successive regenerators of the monastic life, such as St. Bernard and
+St. Teresa and many Sufi saints; or they form new groups, new organisms
+which they can animate, as did St. Paul, St. Francis, Kabir, Fox,
+Wesley, Booth. One and all, they feel that the full robust life of the
+Spirit demands some incarnation, some place in history and social
+outlet, and also some fixed discipline and tradition.
+
+In fact, not only the history of the soul, but that of all full human
+achievement, as studied in great creative personalities, shows us that
+such achievement has always two sides. (1) There is the solitary vision
+or revelation, and personal work in accordance with that vision. The
+religious man's direct experience of God and his effort to correspond
+with it; the artist's lonely and intense apprehension of beauty, and
+hard translation of it; the poet's dream and its difficult expression in
+speech; the philosopher's intuition of reality, hammered into thought.
+These are personal immediate experiences, and no human soul will reach
+its full stature unless it can have the measure of freedom and
+withdrawal which they demand. But (2) there are the social and
+historical contacts which are made by all these creative types with the
+past and with the present; all the big rich thick stream of human
+history and effort, giving them, however little they may recognize it,
+the very initial concepts with which they go to their special contact
+with reality, and which colour it; supporting them and demanding from
+them again their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the
+present too. Thus the artist, as, well as his solitary hours of
+contemplation and effort, ought to have his times alike of humble study
+of the past and of intercourse with other living artists; and great and
+enduring art forms more often arise within a school, than in complete
+independence of tradition. It seems, then, that the advocates of
+corporate and personal religion are both, in a measure, right: and that
+once again a middle path, avoiding both extremes of simplification,
+keeps nearest to the facts of life. We have no reason for supposing that
+these principles, which history shows us, have ceased to be operative:
+or that we can secure the best kind of spiritual progress for the race
+by breaking with the past and the institutions in which it is conserved.
+Institutions are in some sort needful if life's balance between
+stability and novelty, and our links with history and our fellow-men,
+are to be preserved; and if we are to achieve such a fullness both of
+individual and of corporate life on highest levels as history and
+psychology recommend to us.
+
+The question of this institutional side of religion and what we should
+demand from it falls into two parts, which will best be treated
+separately. First, that which concerns the character and usefulness of
+the group-organization or society: the Church. Secondly, that which
+relates to its peculiar practices: the Cult. We must enquire under each
+head what are their necessary characters, their essential gifts to the
+soul, and what their dangers and limitations.
+
+First, then, the Church. What does a Church really do for the
+God-desiring individual; the soul that wants to live a full, complete
+and real life, which has "felt in its solitude" the presence and
+compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other of the forms of
+religious experience?
+
+I think we can say that the Church or institution gives to its loyal
+members:--
+
+  (1) Group-consciousness.
+
+  (2) Religious union, not only with its contemporaries
+      but with the race, that is with
+      history. This we may regard as an extension
+      into the past--and so an enrichment--of
+      that group-consciousness.
+
+  (3) Discipline; and with discipline a sort of
+      spiritual grit, which carries our fluctuating
+      souls past and over the inevitably recurring
+      periods of slackness, and corrects subjectivism.
+
+  (4) It gives Culture, handing on the discoveries
+      of the saints.
+
+In so far as the free-lance gets any of these four things, he gets them
+ultimately, though indirectly, from some institutional source.
+
+On the other hand the institution, since it represents the element of
+stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give,
+direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty,
+freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its
+dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such
+freshness of discovery; the tendency to exalt the corporate and stable
+and discount the mobile and individual. Its natural instinct will be for
+exclusivism, the club-idea, conservatism and cosiness; it will, if left
+to itself, revel in the middle-aged atmosphere and exhibit the
+middle-aged point of view.
+
+We can now consider these points in greater detail: and first that of
+the religious group-consciousness which a church should give its
+members. This is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that
+group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life. History
+showed us the tendency of all spiritual movements to embody themselves,
+if not in churches at least in some group-form; the paradox of each
+successive revolt from a narrow or decadent institutionalism forming a
+group in its turn, or perishing when its first fervour died. But this
+social impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of master and
+disciples, valuable though they may be, do not fully exhibit all that is
+meant or done by a church. True, the Church is or should be at each
+moment of its career such a living spiritual society or household of
+faith. It is, essentially, a community of persons, who have or should
+have a common sentiment--belief in, and reverence for, their God--and a
+common defined aim, the furtherance of the spiritual life under the
+special religious sanctions which they accept. But every sect, every
+religious order or guild, every class-meeting, might claim this much;
+yet none of these can claim to be a church.
+
+A church is far more than this. In so far as it is truly alive, it is a
+real organism, as distinguished from a crowd or collection of persons
+with a common purpose. It exhibits on the religious plane the ruling
+characters of such organized life: that is to say, the development of
+tradition and complex habits, the differentiation of function, the
+docility to leadership, the conservation of values, or carrying forward
+of the past into the present. It is, like the State, embodied history;
+and as such lives with its own life, a life transcending and embracing
+that of the individual souls of which it is built. And here, in its
+combined social and historic character, lie the sources alike of its
+enormous importance for human life and of its inevitable defects.
+
+Professor McDougall, in his discussion of national groups,[121] has laid
+down the conditions which are necessary to the development of such a
+true organic group life as is seen in a living church. These are: first,
+continuity of existence, involving the development of a body of
+traditions, customs and practices--that is, for religion, a Cultus.
+Next, an authoritative organization through which custom and belief can
+be transmitted--that is, a Hierarchy, order of ministers, or its
+equivalent. Third, a conscious common interest, belief, or idea--Creed.
+Last, the existence of antagonistic groups or conditions, developing
+loyalty or keenness. These characters--continuity, authority, common
+belief and loyalty--which are shown, as he says, in their completeness
+in a patriot army, are I think no less marked features of a living
+spiritual society. Plain examples are the primitive Christian
+communities, the great religious orders in their flourishing time, the
+Society of Friends. They are on the whole more fully evident in the
+Catholic than in the Protestant type of church. But I think that we may
+look upon them, in some form or another, as essential to any
+institutional framework which shall really help the spiritual life in
+man.
+
+We find ourselves, then, committed to the picture of a church or
+spiritual institution which is in essence Liturgic, Ecclesiastical,
+Dogmatic, and Militant, as best fulfilling the requirements of group
+psychology. Four decidedly indigestible morsels for the modern mind.
+Yet, group-feeling demands common expression if it is to be lifted from
+notion to fact. Discipline requires some authority, and some devotion to
+it. Culture involves a tradition handed on. And these, we said, were the
+chief gifts which the institution had to give to its members. We may
+therefore keep them in mind, as representing actual values, and warning
+us that neither history nor psychology encourages the belief that an
+amiable fluidity serves the highest purposes of life. Some common
+practice and custom, keeping the individual in line with the main
+tendencies of the group, providing rails on which the instinctive life
+can run and machinery by which fruitful suggestions can be spread. Some
+real discipline and humbling submission to rule. Some traditional and
+theological standard. Some missionary effort and enthusiasm. For these
+four things we must find place in any incorporation of the spiritual
+life which is to have its full effect upon the souls of men. And as a
+matter of fact, the periodical revolts against churches and
+ecclesiasticism, are never against societies in which all these
+characteristics are still alive; but against those which retain and
+exaggerate formal tradition and authority, whilst they have lost zest
+and identity of aim.
+
+A real Church has therefore something to give to, and something to
+demand from each of its members, and there is a genuine loss for man in
+being unchurched. Because it endures through a perpetual process of
+discarding and renewal, those members will share the richness and
+experience of a spiritual life far exceeding their own time-span; a
+truth which is enshrined in the beautiful conception of the Communion of
+Saints. They enter a group consciousness which reinforces their own in
+the extent to which they surrender to it; which surrounds them with
+favourable suggestions and gives the precision of habit to their
+instinct for Eternity. The special atmosphere, the hoarded beauty, the
+evocative yet often archaic symbolism, of a Gothic Cathedral, with its
+constant reminiscences of past civilizations and old levels of culture,
+its broken fragments and abandoned altars, its conservation of eternal
+truths--the intimate union in it of the sublime and homely, the
+successive and abiding aspects of reality--make it the most fitting of
+all images of the Church, regarded as the spiritual institution of
+humanity. And the perhaps undue conservatism commonly associated with
+Cathedral circles represents too the chief reproach which can be brought
+against churches--their tendency to preserve stability at the expense of
+novelty, to crystallize, to cling to habits and customs which no longer
+serve a useful end. In this a church is like a home; where old bits of
+furniture have a way of hanging on, and old habits, sometimes absurd,
+endure. Yet both the home and the church can give something which is
+nowhere else obtainable by us, and represent values which it is perilous
+to ignore. When once the historical character of reality is fully
+grasped by us, we see that some such organization through which achieved
+values are conserved and carried forward, useful habits are learned and
+practised, the direct intuitions of genius, the prophet's revelation of
+reality are interpreted and handed on, is essential to the spiritual
+continuity of the race; and that definite churchmanship of some sort, or
+its equivalent, must be a factor in the spiritual reconstruction of
+society. As, other things being equal, a baby benefits enormously by
+being born within the social framework rather than in the illusory
+freedom of "pure" nature; so the growth of the soul is, or should be,
+helped and not hindered by the nurture it receives from the religious
+society in which it is born. Only indeed by attachment, open or virtual,
+through life or through literature, to some such group can the new soul
+link itself with history, and so participate in the hoarded spiritual
+values of humanity. Thus even a general survey of life inclines us at
+least to some appreciation of the principle laid down by Baron von Huegel
+in "Eternal Life"--namely, that "souls who live an heroic spiritual life
+_within_ great religious traditions and institutions, attain to a rare
+volume and vividness of religious insight, conviction and
+reality"[122]--seldom within reach of the contemplative, however ardent,
+who walks by himself.
+
+History has given one reason for this; psychology gives another. These
+souls, living it is true with intensity their own life towards God,
+share and are bathed in the group consciousness of their church; as
+members of a family, distinct in temperament, share and are modified by
+the group consciousness of the home. The mental process of the
+individual is profoundly affected when he thus thinks and acts as a
+member of a group. Suggestibility is then enormously increased; and we
+know how much suggestion means to us. Moreover, suggestions emanating
+from the group always take priority of those of the outside world: for
+man is a gregarious animal, intensely sensitive to the mentality of the
+herd.[123] The Mind of the Church is therefore a real thing. The
+individual easily takes colour from it and the tradition it embodies,
+tends to imitate his fellow-members: and each such deed and thought is a
+step taken in the formation of habit, and leaves him other than he was
+before.
+
+To say this is not to discredit church-membership as placing us at the
+mercy of emotional suggestion, reducing spontaneity to custom, and
+lessening the energy and responsibility of the individual soul towards
+God. On the contrary, right group suggestion reinforces, stimulates,
+does not stultify such individual action. If the prayerful attitude of
+my fellow worshippers helps me to pray better, surely it is a very mean
+kind of conceit on my part which would prompt me to despise their help,
+and refuse to acknowledge Creative Spirit acting on me through other
+men? It is one of the most beautiful features of a real and living
+corporate religion, that within it ordinary people at all levels help
+each other to be a little more supernatural than would have been alone.
+I do not now speak of individuals possessing special zeal and special
+aptitude; though, as the lives of the Saints assure us, even the best of
+these fluctuate, and need social support at times. Anyhow such persons
+of special spiritual aptitude, as life is now, are as rare as persons of
+special aptitude in other walks of life. But that which we seek for the
+life of to-day and of the future, is such a planning of it as shall give
+all men their spiritual chance. And it is abundantly clear upon all
+levels of life, that men are chiefly formed and changed by the power of
+suggestion, sympathy and imitation; and only reach full development when
+assembled in groups, giving full opportunity for the benevolent action
+of these forces. So too in the life of the Spirit, incorporation plays a
+part which nothing can replace. Goodness and devotion are more easily
+caught than taught; by association in groups, holy and strong
+souls--both living and dead--make their full gift to society, weak,
+undeveloped, and arrogant souls receive that of which they are in need.
+On this point we may agree with a great ecclesiastical scholar of our
+own day that "the more the educated and intellectual partake with
+sympathy of heart in the ordinary devotions and pious practices of the
+poor, the higher will they rise in the religion of the Spirit."[124]
+
+Yet this family life of the ideal religious institution, with its
+reasonable and bracing discipline, its gift of shelter, its care for
+tradition, its habit-formation and group consciousness--all this is
+given, as we may as well acknowledge, at the price which is exacted by
+all family life; namely, mutual accommodation and sacrifice, place made
+for the childish, the dull, the slow, and the aged, a toning-down of the
+somewhat imperious demands of the entirely efficient and clear-minded, a
+tolerance of imperfection. Thus for these efficient and clear-minded
+members there is always, in the church as in the family, a perpetual
+opportunity of humility, self-effacement, gentle acceptance; of exerting
+that love which must be joined to power and a sound mind if the full
+life of the Spirit is to be lived. In the realm of the supernatural this
+is a solid gain; though not a gain which we are very quick to appreciate
+in our vigorous youth. Did we look upon the religious institution not as
+an end in itself, but simply as fulfilling the function of a
+home--giving shelter and nurture, opportunity of loyalty and mutual
+service on one hand, conserving stability and good custom on the
+other--then, we should better appreciate its gifts to us, and be more
+merciful to its necessary defects. We should be tolerant to its
+inevitable conservatism, its tendency to encourage dependence and
+obedience to distrust individual initiative. We should no longer expect
+it to provide or specially to approve novelty and freedom, to be in the
+van of life's forward thrust. For this we must go not to the
+institution, which is the vehicle of history; but to the adventurous,
+forward moving soul, which is the vehicle of progress--to the prophet,
+not to the priest. These two great figures, the Keeper and the Revealer,
+which are prominent in every historical religion, represent the two
+halves of the fully-lived spiritual life. The progress of man depends
+both on conserving and on exploring: and any full incorporation of that
+life which will serve man's spiritual interests now, must find place for
+both.
+
+Such an application of the institutional idea to present needs is
+required, in fact, to fulfil at least four primary conditions:--
+
+(1) It must give a social life that shall develop group consciousness in
+respect of our eternal interests and responsibilities: using for this
+real discipline, and the influences of liturgy and creed.
+
+(2) Yet it must not so standardize and socialize this life as to leave
+no room for personal freedom in the realm of Spirit: for those
+"experiences of men in their solitude" which form the very heart of
+religion.
+
+(3) It must not be so ring-fenced, so exclusive, so wholly conditioned
+by the past, that the voice of the future, that is of the prophet giving
+fresh expression to eternal truths, cannot clearly be heard in it; not
+only from within its own borders but also from outside. But
+
+(4) On the other hand, it must not be so contemptuous of the past and
+its priceless symbols that it breaks with tradition, and so loses that
+very element of stability which it is its special province to preserve.
+
+I go on now to the second aspect of institutional religion: Cultus.
+
+We at once make the transition from Church to Cultus, when we ask
+ourselves: how does, how can, the Church as an organized and enduring
+society do its special work of creating an atmosphere and imparting a
+secret? How is the traditional deposit of spiritual experience handed
+on, the individual drawn into the stream of spiritual history and held
+there? Remember, the Church exists to foster and hand on, not merely the
+moral life, the life of this-world perfection; but the spiritual life in
+all its mystery and splendour--the life of more than this-world
+perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this,
+not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct
+contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of
+men, who _do_ need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that
+it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and
+imitation.
+
+All organized churches find themselves committed sooner or later to an
+organized cultus. It may be rudimentary. It may reach a high pitch of
+aesthetic and symbolic perfection. But even the successive rebels against
+dead ceremony are found as a rule to invent some ceremony in their turn.
+They learn by experience the truth that men most easily form religious
+habits and tend, to have religious experiences when they are assembled
+in groups, and caused to perform the same acts. This is so because as we
+have already seen, the human psyche is plastic to the suggestions made
+to it; and this suggestibility is greatly increased when it is living a
+gregarious life as a member of a united congregation or flock, and is
+engaged in performing corporate acts. The soldiers' drill is essential
+to the solidarity of the army, and the religious service in some form
+is--apart from all other considerations--essential to the solidarity of
+the Church.
+
+We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the
+psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious
+ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man: or that one
+of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the
+threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind. As
+the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her
+sleeping child[125] so the Church takes her children at their moment of
+least resistance, and suggests to them all that she desires them to be.
+It is interesting to note how perfectly adapted the rituals of historic
+Christianity are to this end, of provoking the emergence of the
+intuitive mind and securing a state of maximum suggestibility. The more
+complex and solemn the ritual, the more archaic and universal the
+symbols it employs, so much the more powerful--for those natures able to
+yield to it--the suggestion becomes. Music, rhythmic chanting, symbolic
+gesture, the solemn periods of recited prayer, are all contributory to
+this, effect In churches of the Catholic type every object that meets
+the eye, every scent, every attitude that we are encouraged to assume,
+gives us a push in the same direction if we let it do its rightful work.
+For other temperaments the collective, deliberate, and really ceremonial
+silence of the Quakers--the hush of the waiting mind, the unforced
+attitude of expectation, the abstraction from visual image--works to the
+same end. In either case, the aim is the production of a special
+group-consciousness; the reinforcing of languid or undeveloped
+individual feeling and aptitude by the suggestion of the crowd. This,
+and its result, is seen of course in its crudest form in revivalism: and
+on higher levels, in such elaborate dramatic ceremonies as those which
+are a feature of the Catholic celebrations of Holy Week. But the nice
+warm devotional feeling with which what is called a good congregation
+finishes the singing of a favourite hymn belongs to the same order of
+phenomena. The rhythmic phrases--not as a rule very full of meaning or
+intellectual appeal--exercise a slightly hypnotic effect on the
+analyzing surface-mind; and induce a condition of suggestibility open to
+all the influences of the place and of our fellow worshippers. The
+authorized translation of Ephesians v. 19: "_speaking to yourselves_ in
+psalms and hymns and spiritual songs," whatever we may think of its
+accuracy does as it stands describe one of the chief functions of
+religious services of the "hearty congregational" sort. We do speak to
+ourselves--our deeper, and more plastic selves--in our psalms and hymns;
+so too in the common recitation, especially the chanting, of a creed. We
+administer through these rhythmic affirmations, so long as we sing them
+with intention, a powerful suggestion to ourselves and every one else
+within reach. We gather up in them--or should do--the whole tendency of
+our worship and aspiration, and in the very form in which it can most
+easily sink in. This lays a considerable responsibility on those who
+choose psalms and hymns for congregational singing; for these can as
+easily be the instruments of fanatical melancholy and devitalizing, as
+of charitable life-giving and constructive ideas.
+
+In saying all this I do not seek to discredit religious ceremony; either
+of the naive or of the sophisticated type. On the contrary, I think that
+in effecting this change in our mental tone and colour, in prompting
+this emergence of a mood which, in the mass of men, is commonly
+suppressed, these ceremonies do their true work. They should stimulate
+and give social expression to that mood of adoration which is the very
+heart of religion; helping those who cannot be devotional alone to
+participate in the common devotional feeling. If, then, we desire to
+receive the gifts which corporate worship can most certainly make to us,
+we ought to yield ourselves without resistance or criticism to its
+influence; as we yield ourselves to the influence of a great work of
+art. That influence is able to tune us up, at least to a fleeting
+awareness of spiritual reality; and each such emergence of
+transcendental feeling is to the good. It is true that the objects which
+immediately evoke this feeling will only be symbolic; but after all, our
+very best conceptions of God are bound to be that. We do not, or should
+not, demand scientific truth of them. Their business is rather to give
+us poetry, a concrete artistic intuition of reality, and to place us in
+the mood of poetry. The great thing is, that by these corporate liturgic
+practices and surrenders, we can prevent that terrible freezing up of
+the deep wells of our being which so easily comes to those who must lead
+an exacting material or intellectual life. We keep ourselves supple; the
+spiritual faculties are within reach, and susceptible to education.
+
+Organized ceremonial religion insists upon it, that at least for a
+certain time each day or week we shall attend to the things of the
+Spirit. It offers us its suggestions, and shuts off as well as it can
+conflicting suggestions: though, human as we are, the mere appearance of
+our neighbours is often enough to bring these in. Nothing is more
+certain than this: first that we shall never know the spiritual world
+unless we give ourselves the chance of attending to it, clear a space
+for it in our busy lives; and next, that it will not produce its real
+effect in us, unless it penetrates below the conscious surface into the
+deeps of the instinctive mind, and moulds this in accordance with the
+regnant idea. If we are to receive the gifts of the cultus, we on our
+part must bring to it at the very least what we bring to all great works
+of art that speak to us: that is to say, attention, surrender,
+sympathetic emotion. Otherwise, like all other works of art, it will
+remain external to us. Much of the perfectly sincere denunciation and
+dislike of religious ceremony which now finds frequent utterance comes
+from those who have failed thus to do their share. They are like the
+hasty critics who dismiss some great work of art because it is not
+representative, or historically accurate; and so entirely miss the
+aesthetic values which it was created to impart.
+
+Consider a picture of the Madonna. Minds at different levels may find in
+this pure representation, Bible history, theology, aesthetic
+satisfaction, spiritual truth. The peasant may see in it the portrait of
+the Mother of God, the critic a phase in artistic evolution; whilst the
+mystic may pass through it to new contacts with the Spirit of life. We
+shall receive according to the measure of what we bring. Now consider
+the parallel case of some great dramatic liturgy, rich with the meanings
+which history has poured into it. Take, as an example which every one
+can examine for themselves, the Roman Mass. Different levels of mind
+will find here magic, theology, deep mystery, the commemoration under
+archaic symbols of an event. But above and beyond all these, they can
+find the solemn incorporated emotion, of the Christian Church, and a
+liturgic recapitulation of the movement of the human soul towards
+fullness of life: through confession and reconciliation to adoration and
+intercession--that is, to charity--and thence to direct communion with
+and feeding on the Divine World.
+
+To the mind which refuses to yield to it, to move with its movement, but
+remains in critical isolation, the Mass like all other ceremonies will
+seem external, dead, unreal; lacking in religious content. But if we do
+give ourselves completely and unselfconsciously to the movement of such
+a ceremony, at the end of it we may not have learnt anything, but we
+have lived something. And when we remember that no experience of our
+devotional life is lost, surely we may regard it as worth while to
+submit ourselves to an experience by which, if only for a few minutes,
+we are thus lifted to richer levels of life and brought into touch with
+higher values? We have indeed only to observe the enrichment of life so
+often produced in those who thus dwell meekly and without inner conflict
+in the symbolic world of ceremonial religion, and accept its discipline
+and its gifts, to be led at least to a humble suspension of judgment as
+to its value. A whole world of spiritual experience separates the humble
+little church mouse rising at six every morning to attend a service
+which she believes to be pleasing to a personal God, from the
+philosopher who meditates on the Absolute in a comfortable armchair;
+and no one will feel much doubt as to which side the advantage lies.
+
+Here we approach the next point. The cultus, with its liturgy and its
+discipline, exists for and promotes the repetition of acts which are
+primarily the expression of man's instinct for God; and by these--or any
+other repeated acts--our ductile instinctive life is given a definite
+trend. We know from Semon's researches[126] that the performance of any
+given act by a living creature influences all future performances of
+similar acts. That is to say, memory combines with each fresh stimulus
+to control our reaction to it. "In the case of living organisms," says
+Bertrand Russell, "practically everything that is distinctive both of
+their physical and mental behaviour is bound up with this persistent
+influence of the past": and most actions and responses "can only be
+brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the history
+of the organism as part of the causes of the present response."[127] The
+phenomena of apperception, in fact, form only one aspect of a general
+law. As that which we have perceived conditions what we can now
+perceive, so that which we have done conditions what we shall do. It
+therefore appears that in spite of angry youthful revolts or mature
+sophistications, early religious training, and especially repeated
+religious _acts_, are likely to influence the whole of our future
+lives. Though all they meant to us seems dead or unreal, they have
+retreated to the dark background of consciousness and there live on. The
+tendency which they have given persists; we never get away from them. A
+church may often seem to lose her children, as human parents do; but in
+spite of themselves they retain her invisible seal, and are her children
+still. In nearly all conversions in middle life, or dramatic returns
+from scepticism to traditional belief, a large, part is undoubtedly
+played by forgotten childish memories and early religious discipline,
+surging up and contributing their part to the self's new apprehensions
+of Reality.
+
+If, then, the cultus did nothing else, it would do these two highly
+important things. It would influence our whole present attitude by its
+suggestions, and our whole future attitude through unconscious memory of
+the acts which it demands. But it does more than this. It has as perhaps
+its greatest function the providing of a concrete artistic expression
+for our spiritual perceptions, adorations and desires. It links the
+visible with the invisible, by translating transcendent fact into
+symbolic and even sensuous terms. And for this reason men, having bodies
+no less surely than spirits, can never afford wholly to dispense with
+it. Hasty transcendentalists often forget this; and set us spiritual
+standards to which the race, so long as it is anchored to this planet
+and to the physical order, cannot conform.
+
+A convert from agnosticism with whom I was acquainted, was once
+receiving religious instruction from a devout and simple-minded nun.
+They were discussing the story of the Annunciation, which presented some
+difficulties to her. At last she said to the nun, "Well, anyhow, I
+suppose that one is not obliged to believe that the Blessed Virgin was
+visited by a solid angel, dressed in a white robe?" To this the nun
+replied doubtfully, "No, dear, perhaps not. But still, you know, he
+would have to wear _something_."
+
+Now here, as it seems to me, we have a great theological truth in a few
+words. The elusive contacts and subtle realities of the world of spirit
+have got to wear something, if we are to grasp them at all. Moreover, if
+the mass of men are to grasp them ever so little, they must wear
+something which is easily recognized by the human eye and human heart;
+more, by the primitive, half-conscious folk-soul existing in each one of
+us, stirring in the depths and reaching out in its own way towards God.
+It is a delicate matter to discuss religious symbols. They are like our
+intimate friends: though at the bottom of our hearts we may know that
+they are only human, we hate other people to tell us so. And, even as
+the love of human beings in its most perfect state passes beyond its
+immediate object, is transfigured, and merged in the nature of all
+love; so too, the devotion which a purely symbolic figure calls forth
+from the ardently religious nature--whether this figure be the divine
+Krishna of Hinduism, the Buddhist's Mother of Mercy, the S[=u]fi's
+Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian piety which are
+familiar to all of us--this devotion too passes beyond its immediate
+goal and the relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized. It is
+characteristic of the primitive mind that it finds a difficulty about
+universals, and is most at home with particulars. The success of
+Christianity as a world-religion largely abides in the way in which it
+meets this need. It is notorious that the person of Jesus, rather than
+the Absolute God, is the object of average Protestant devotion. So too
+the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach God through and in
+his special saint, or even a special local form of the Madonna. This is
+the inevitable corollary of the psychic level at which he lives; and to
+speak contemptuously of his "superstition" is wholly beside the point.
+Other great faiths have been compelled by experience to meet need of a
+particular object on which the primitive religious consciousness can
+fasten itself: conspicuous examples being the development within
+Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and within pore Brahminism of
+Krishna worship. Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that the
+life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently from our simplest human
+impulses and needs. Yet, since the Universal, the Idea, is manifested in
+each such particular, we need not refuse to allow that the mass of men
+do thus enjoy--in a way that their psychic level makes natural to
+them--their own measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of God;
+and already live according to their measure a spiritual life.
+
+These objects of religious cultus, then, and the whole symbolic
+faith-world which is built up of them, with its angels and demons, its
+sharply defined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications which
+embody certain attributes of God for us, the purity and gentleness of
+the Mother, the simplicity and infinite possibility of the Child, the
+divine self-giving of the Cross;--more, the Lamb, the Blood and the Fire
+of the revivalists, the oil and water, bread and wine, of a finished
+Sacramentalism--all these may be regarded as the vestures placed by man,
+at one stage or another of his progress, on the freely-given but
+ineffable spiritual fact. Like other clothes, they have now become
+closely identified with that which wears them. And we strip them off at
+our own peril: for this proceeding, grateful as it may be to our
+intellects, may leave us face to face with a mystery which we dare not
+look at, and cannot grasp.
+
+So, cultus has done a mighty thing for humanity, in evolving and
+conserving the system of symbols through which the Infinite and Eternal
+can be in some measure expressed. The history of these symbols goes
+back, as we now know, to the infancy of the race, and forward to the
+last productions of the religious imagination; all of which bear the
+image of our past They are like coins, varying in beauty, and often of
+slight intrinsic value; but of enormous importance for our spiritual
+currency, because accepted as the representatives of a real wealth. In
+its symbols, the cultus preserves all the past levels of religious
+response achieved by the race; weaving them into the fabric of religion,
+and carrying them forward into the present. All the instinctive
+movements of the primitive mind; its fear of the invisible, its
+self-subjection, its trust in ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices,
+its tendency to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy off
+the unknown, to set up magicians and mediators, are represented in it.
+Its function is racial more than individual. It is the art-work of the
+folk-soul in the religious sphere. Here man's inveterate creative
+faculty seizes on the raw material given him by religious-intuition, and
+constructs from it significant shapes. We misunderstand, then, the whole
+character of religious symbolism if we either demand rationality from
+it, or try to adapt its imagery to the lucid and probably mistaken
+conclusions of the sophisticated, modern mind.
+
+We are learning to recognize these primitive and racial elements in
+popular religion, and to endure their presence with tolerance; because
+they are necessary, and match a level of mental life which is still
+active in the race. This more primitive life emerges to dominate all
+crowds--where the collective mental level is inevitably lower than that
+of the best individuals immersed in it--and still conditions many of our
+beliefs and deeds. There is the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine
+powers; which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, insists on
+regarding as somehow hostile to us and wanting to be bought off. There
+is the whole idea and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more than
+the big apples and vegetable marrows of the harvest festival be involved
+in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be
+persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by
+famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases
+can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further
+the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical
+efficacy which some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites,
+shrines, liturgic formulae and religious objects; others, to the texts of
+their scriptures.[128] These things, and others like them, are not only
+significant survivals from the past. They also represent the religious
+side of something that continues active in us at present. Since, then,
+it should clearly be the object of all spiritual endeavor to win the
+whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in
+language that they understand, we should not too hurriedly despise or
+denounce these things. Far better that our primitive emotions, with
+their vast store of potential energy, should be won for spiritual
+interests on the only terms which they can grasp, than that they should
+be left to spend themselves on lower objects.
+
+If therefore the spiritual or the regenerate life is not likely to
+prosper without some incorporation in institutions, some definite link
+with the past, it seems also likely to need for its full working-out and
+propaganda the symbols and liturgy of a cultus. Here again, the right
+path will be that of fulfilment, not of destruction; a deeper
+investigation of the full meaning of cultus, the values it conserves and
+the needs it must meet, a clearer and humbler understanding of our human
+limitations. We must also clearly realize as makers of the future, that
+as the Church has its special dangers of conservatism, cosiness,
+intolerance, a checking of initiative, the domestic tendency to enclose
+itself and shirk reality; so the cultus has also its special dangers, of
+which the chief are perhaps formalism, magic, and spiritual sloth.
+Receiving and conserving as it does all the successive deposits of
+racial experience, it is the very home of magic: of the archaic tendency
+to attribute words and deeds, special power to a priestly caste, and to
+make of itself the essential mediator between Creative Spirit and the
+soul. Further, using perpetually as it does and must symbols of the most
+archaic sort, directly appealing to the latent primitive in each of us,
+it offers us a perpetual temptation to fall back into something below
+our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always
+at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to
+traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back
+into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the
+way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty
+congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting owner to the
+revivalists' penitent-bench.
+
+But on the other hand, Creative Spirit is not merely conservative. The
+Lord and Giver of Life presses forward, and perpetually brings novelty
+to birth; and in so far as we are dedicated to Him, we must not make an
+unconditional surrender to psychic indolence, or to the pull-back of the
+religious past. We may not, as Christians, accept easy emotions in the
+place of heroic and difficult actualizations: make external religion an
+excuse for dodging reality, immerse ourselves in an exquisite dream, or
+tolerate any real conflict between old cultus and actual living faith. A
+most delicate discrimination is therefore demanded from us; the striking
+of a balance between the rightful conservatism of the cultus and the
+rightful independence of the soul. Yet, this is not to justify even in
+the most advanced a wholesale iconoclasm. Time after time, experience
+has proved that the attempt to approach God "without means," though it
+may seem to describe the rare and sacred moments of the personal life of
+the Spirit, is beyond the power of the mass of men; and even those who
+do achieve it are, as it were, most often supported from behind by
+religious history and the religious culture of their day. I do not think
+it can be doubted that the right use of cultus does-increase religious
+sensitiveness. Therefore here the difficult task of the future must be
+to preserve and carry forward its essential elements, all the symbolic
+significance, all the incorporated emotion, which make it one of man's
+greatest works of art; whilst eliminating those features which are, in
+the bad sense, conventional and no longer answer to experience or
+communicate life.
+
+Were we truly reasonable human beings, we should perhaps provide openly
+and as a matter of course within the Christian frame widely different
+types of ceremonial religion, suited to different levels of mind and
+different developments of the religious consciousness. To some extent
+this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism,
+revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. But these varying
+types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the
+complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in
+the relative though none in the absolute sense. Did we more openly
+acknowledge the character of that life, the historic Churches would no
+longer invite the sophisticated to play down to their own primitive
+fantasies; to sing meaningless hymns and recite vindictive psalms, or
+lull themselves by the recitation of litany or rosary which, admirable
+as the instruments of suggestion, are inadequate expressions of the
+awakened spiritual life. On the one hand, they would not require the
+simple to express their corporate religious feeling in Elizabethan
+English or Patristic Latin; on the other, expect the educated to accept
+at face-value symbols of which the unreal character is patent to them.
+Nor would they represent these activities as possessing absolute value
+in themselves.
+
+To join in simplicity and without criticism in the common worship,
+humbly receiving its good influences, is one thing. This is like the
+drill of the loyal soldier; welding him to his neighbours, giving him
+the corporate spirit and forming in him the habits he needs. But to stop
+short at that drill, and tell the individual that drill is the essence
+of his life and all his duty, is another thing altogether. It confuses
+means and end; destroys the balance between liberty and law. If the
+religious institution is to do its real work in furthering the life of
+the Spirit, it must introduce a more rich variety into its methods; and
+thus educate souls of every type not only to be members of the group but
+also to grow up to the full richness of the personal life. It must
+offer them--as indeed Catholicism does to some extent already--both easy
+emotion and difficult mystery; both dramatic ceremony and ceremonial
+silence. It must also give to them all its hoarded knowledge of the
+inner life of prayer and contemplation, of the remaking of the moral
+nature on supernatural levels: all the gold that there is in the deposit
+of faith. And it must not be afraid to impart that knowledge in modern
+terms which all can understand. All this it can and will do if its
+members sufficiently desire it: which means, if those who care intensely
+for the life of the Spirit accept their corporate responsibilities. In
+the last resort, criticism of the Church, of Christian institutionalism,
+is really criticism of ourselves. Were we more spiritually alive, our
+spiritual homes would be the real nesting places of new life. That which
+the Church is to us is the result of all that we bring to, and ask from,
+history: the impact of our present and its past.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 119: William James: "The Varieties of Religious Experience,"
+p. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 120: On this point compare Von Huegel: "Essays and Addresses on
+the Philosophy of Religion," pp. 230 et seq.]
+
+[Footnote 121: W. McDougall: "The Group Mind," Cap. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 122: Von Huegel "Eternal Life," p. 377.]
+
+[Footnote 123: Cf. Trotter: "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War."]
+
+[Footnote 124: Dom Cuthbert Butler in the "Hibbert Journal," 1906, p.
+502.]
+
+[Footnote 125: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Cap. VII.]
+
+[Footnote 126: Cf. R. Semon: "Die Mneme."]
+
+[Footnote 127: Bertrand Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," p. 78.]
+
+[Footnote 128: A quaint example of this occurred in a recent revival,
+where the exclamation "We believe in the Word of God from cover to
+cover, Alleluia!" received the fervent reply, "And the covers too!"]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL
+
+
+In the last three chapters we have been concerned, almost exclusively,
+with those facts of psychic life and growth, those instruments and
+mechanizations, which bear upon or condition our spiritual life. But
+these wanderings in the soul's workshops, and these analyses of the
+forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of
+that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life. I wish
+now to come out of the workshop, and try to see this spiritual life as
+the individual man may and should achieve it, from another angle of
+approach.
+
+What are we to regard as the heart of spirituality? When we have
+eliminated the accidental characters with which varying traditions have
+endowed it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its
+possessor from the best, most moral citizen or devoted altruist? Why do
+the Christian saint, Indian _rishi,_ Buddhist _arhat,_ Moslem _S[=u]fi,_
+all seem to us at bottom men of one race, living under different
+sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact? This life, which they show
+in its various perfections, includes it is true the ethical life, but
+cannot be equated with it. Wherein do its differentia consist? We are
+dealing with the most subtle of realities and have only the help of
+crude words, developed for other purposes than this. But surely we come
+near to the truth, as history and experience show it to us, when we say
+again that the spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest
+beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life that means God in all
+His richness, immanent and transcendent: the whole response to the
+Eternal and Abiding of which any one man is capable, expressed in and
+through his this-world life. It requires then an objective vision or
+certitude, something to aim at; and also a total integration of the
+self, its dedication to that aim. Both terms, vision and response, are
+essential to it.
+
+This definition may seem at first sight rather dull. It suggests little
+of that poignant and unearthly beauty, that heroism, that immense
+attraction, which really belong to the spiritual life. Here indeed we
+are dealing with poetry in action: and we need not words but music to
+describe it as it really is. Yet all the forms, all the various beauties
+and achievements of this life of the Spirit, can be resumed as the
+reactions of different temperaments to the one abiding and inexhaustibly
+satisfying Object of their love. It is the answer made by the whole
+supple, plastic self, rational and instinctive, active and
+contemplative, to any or all of those objective experiences of religion
+which we considered in the first chapter; whether of an encompassing
+and transcendent Reality, of a Divine Companionship or of Immanent
+Spirit. Such a response we must believe to be itself divinely actuated.
+Fully made, it is found on the one hand to call forth the most heroic,
+most beautiful, most tender qualities in human nature; all that we call
+holiness, the transfiguration of mere ethics by a supernatural
+loveliness, breathing another air, satisfying another standard, than
+those of the temporal world. And on the other hand, this response of the
+self is repaid by a new sensitiveness and receptivity, a new influx of
+power. To use theological language, will is answered by grace: and as
+the will's dedication rises towards completeness the more fully does new
+life flow in. Therefore it is plain that the smallest and humblest
+beginning of such a life in ourselves--and this inquiry is useless
+unless it be made to speak to our own condition--will entail not merely
+an addition to life, but for us too a change in our whole scale of
+values, a self-dedication. For that which we are here shown as a
+possible human achievement is not a life of comfortable piety, or the
+enjoyment of the delicious sensations of the armchair mystic. We are
+offered, it is true, a new dower of life; access to the full
+possibilities of human nature. But only upon terms, and these terms
+include new obligations in respect of that life; compelling us, as it
+appears, to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual refusal to
+sink back into the next-best, to slide along a gentle incline. The
+spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe
+distance from the Fire of Love. It demands, indeed, very often things so
+hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman: immensely
+generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant
+purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means a complete conquest of life's
+perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance
+of hardship and pain. And if we ask how this can be, what it is that
+makes possible such enhancement of human will and of human courage, the
+only answer seems to be that of the Johannine Christ: that it does
+consist in a more abundant life.
+
+In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding
+of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its
+general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely
+physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral
+conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full
+integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in
+fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and
+for the new ideals. There was something of the penitent, something of
+the contemplative, and something of the apostle in every man or woman
+who thus grew to their full stature and realized all their latent
+possibilities. But above all there was a fortitude, an all-round power
+of tackling existence, which comes from complete indifference to
+personal suffering or personal success. And further, psychology showed
+us, that those workings and readjustments which we saw preparing this
+life of the Spirit, were in line with those which prepare us for
+fullness of life on other levels: that is to say the harnessing of the
+impulsive nature to the purposes chosen by consciousness, the resolving
+of conflicts, the unification of the whole personality about one's
+dominant interest. These readjustments were helped by the deliberate
+acceptance of the useful suggestions of religion, the education of the
+foreconscious, the formation of habits of charity and prayer.
+
+The greatest and most real of living writers on this subject, Baron von
+Huegel, has given us another definition of the personal spiritual life
+which may fruitfully be compared with this. It must and shall, he says,
+exhibit rightful contact with and renunciation of the Particular and
+Fleeting; and with this ever seeks and finds the Eternal--deepening and
+incarnating within its own experience this "transcendent
+Otherness."[129] Nothing which we are likely to achieve can go beyond
+this profound saying. We see how many rich elements are contained in it:
+effort and growth, a temper both social and ascetic, a demand for and a
+receiving of power. True, to some extent it restates the position at
+which we arrived in the first chapter: but we now wish to examine more
+thoroughly into that position and discover its practical applications.
+Let us then begin by unpacking it, and examining its chief characters
+one by one.
+
+If we do this, we find that it demands of us:--(1) Rightful contact with
+the Particular and Fleeting. That is, a willing acceptance of all
+this-world tasks, obligations, relations, and joys; in fact, the Active
+Life of Becoming in its completeness.
+
+(2) But also, a certain renunciation of that Particular and Fleeting. A
+refusal to get everything out of it that we can for ourselves, to be
+possessive, or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a sense of
+detachment or asceticism; of further destiny and obligation for the soul
+than complete earthly happiness or here-and-now success.
+
+(3) And with this ever--not merely in hours of devotion--to seek and
+find the Eternal; penetrating our wholesome this-world action through
+and through with the very spirit of contemplation.
+
+(4) Thus deepening and incarnating--bringing in, giving body to, and in
+some sense exhibiting by means of our own growing and changing
+experience--that transcendent Otherness, the fact of the Life of the
+Spirit in the here-and-now.
+
+The full life of the Spirit, then, is once more declared to be active,
+contemplative, ascetic and apostolic; though nowadays we express these
+abiding human dispositions in other and less formidable terms. If we
+translate them as work, prayer, self-discipline and social service they
+do not look quite so bad. But even so, what a tremendous programme to
+put before the ordinary human creature, and how difficult it looks when
+thus arranged! That balance to be discovered and held between due
+contact with this present living world of time, and due renunciation of
+it. That continual penetration of the time-world with the spirit of
+Eternity.
+
+But now, in accordance with the ruling idea which has occupied us in
+this book, let us arrange these four demands in different order. Let us
+put number three first: "ever seeking and finding the Eternal."
+Conceive, at least, that we do this really, and in a practical way. Then
+we discover that, placed as we certainly are in a world of succession,
+most of the seeking and finding has got to be done there; that the times
+of pure abstraction in which we touch the non-successive and
+supersensual must be few. Hence it follows that the first and second
+demands are at once fully met; for, if we are indeed faithfully seeking
+and finding the Eternal whilst living--as all sane men and women must
+do--in closest contact with the Particular and Fleeting, our acceptances
+and our renunciations will be governed by this higher term of
+experience. And further, the transcendent Otherness, perpetually
+envisaged by us as alone giving the world of sense its beauty, reality
+and value, will be incarnated and expressed by us in this sense-life,
+and thus ever more completely tasted and known. It will be drawn by us,
+as best we can, and often at the cost of bitter struggle, into the
+limitations of humanity; entincturing our attitude and our actions. And
+in the degree in which we thus appropriate it, it will be given out by
+us again to other men.
+
+All this, of course, says again that which men have been constantly told
+by those who sought to redeem them from their confusions, and show them
+the way to fullness of life. "Seek first the Kingdom of God," said
+Jesus, "and all the rest shall be added to you." "Love," said St.
+Augustine, "and _do_ what you like"; "Let nothing," says Thomas a
+Kempis, "be great or high or acceptable to thee but purely God";[130]
+and Kabir, "Open your eyes of love, and see Him who pervades this world!
+consider it well, and know that this is your own country."[131] "Our
+whole teaching," says Boehme, "is nothing else than how man should
+kindle in himself God's light-world."[132] I do not say that such a
+presentation of it makes the personal spiritual life any easier: nothing
+does that. But it does make its central implicit rather clearer, shows
+us at once its difficulty and its simplicity; since it depends on the
+consistent subordination of every impulse and every action to one
+regnant aim and interest--in other words, the unification of the whole
+self round one centre, the highest conceivable by man. Each of man's
+behaviour-cycles is always directed towards some end, of which he may
+or may not be vividly conscious. But in that perfect unification of the
+self which is characteristic of the life of Spirit, all his behaviour is
+brought into one stream of purpose, and directed towards one
+transcendent end. And this simplification alone means for him a release
+from conflicting wishes, and so a tremendous increase of power.
+
+If then we admit this formula, "ever seeking and finding the
+Eternal"--which is of course another rendering of Ruysbroeck's "aiming
+at God"--as the prime character of a spiritual life, the secret of human
+transcendence; what are the agents by which it is done?
+
+Here, men and women of all times and all religions, who have achieved
+this fullness of life, agree in their answer: and by this answer we are
+at once taken away from dry philosophic conceptions and introduced into
+the very heart of human experience. It is done, they say, on man's part
+by Love and Prayer: and these, properly understood in their
+inexhaustible richness, joy, pain, dedication and noble simplicity,
+cover the whole field of the spiritual life. Without them, that life is
+impossible; with them, if the self be true to their implications, some
+measure of it cannot be escaped. I said, Love and Prayer properly
+understood: not as two movements of emotional piety, but as fundamental
+human dispositions, as the typical attitude and action which control
+man's growth into greater reality. Since then they are of such primary
+importance to us, it will be worth while at this stage to look into them
+a little more closely.
+
+First, Love: that over-worked and ill-used word, often confused on the
+one hand with passion and on the other with amiability. If we ask the
+most fashionable sort of psychologist what love is, he says that it is
+the impulse urging us towards that end which is the fulfilment of any
+series of deeds or "behaviour-cycle"; the psychic thread, on which all
+the apparently separate actions making up that cycle are strung and
+united. In this sense love need not be fully conscious, reach the level
+of feeling; but it _must_ be an imperative, inward urge. And if we ask
+those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say
+that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul
+towards its Source;[133] which impels every living thing to pursue the
+most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of
+self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God. Love is
+for them much more than its emotional manifestations. It is "the
+ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things"--no less.
+This definition, which I take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas
+Aquinas,[134] would be agreeable to the most modern psychologist; he
+might give the hidden steersman of the psyche in its perpetual movement
+towards novelty a less beautiful and significant name. "This indwelling
+Love," says Plotinus, "is no other than the Spirit which, as we are
+told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several
+nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular soul,
+strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Love, the
+guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its being."[135]
+
+Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at whatever level it be
+experienced, the psychic craving, the urgent spirit within us pressing
+out to life, is always _one;_ and that the sublimation of this vital
+craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regeneration? There, in
+our instinctive nature--which, as we know, makes us the kind of animal
+we are--abides that power of loving which is, really, the power of
+living; the cause of our actions, the controlling factor in our
+perceptions, the force pressing us into any given type of experience,
+turning aside for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater
+vigour. Each level of the universe makes solicitations to this power:
+the worlds of sense, of thought, of beauty, and of action. According to
+the degree of our development, the trend of the conscious will, is our
+response; and according to that response will be our life. "The world to
+which a man turns himself," says Boehme, "and in which he produces
+fruit, the same is lord in him, and this world becomes manifest in
+him."[136]
+
+From all this it becomes clear what the love of God is; and what St.
+Augustine meant when he said that all virtue--and virtue after all means
+power not goodness--lay in the right ordering of love, the conscious
+orientation of desire. Christians, on the authority of their Master,
+declare that such love of God requires all that they have, not only of
+feeling, but also of intellect and of power; since He is to be loved
+with heart and mind and strength. Thought and action on highest levels
+are involved in it, for it means, not religious emotionalism, but the
+unflickering orientation of the whole self towards Him, ever seeking and
+finding the Eternal; the linking up of all behaviour on that string, so
+that the apparently hard and always heroic choices which are demanded,
+are made at last because they are inevitable. It is true that this
+dominant interest will give to our lives a special emotional colour and
+a special kind of happiness; but in this, as in the best, deepest,
+richest human love, such feeling-tone and such happiness--though in some
+natures of great beauty and intensity--are only to be looked upon as
+secondary characters, and never to be aimed at.
+
+When St. Teresa said that the real object of the spiritual marriage was
+"the incessant production of work, work,"[137] I have no doubt that many
+of her nuns were disconcerted; especially the type of ease-loving
+conservatives whom she and her intimates were accustomed to refer to as
+the pussy-cats. But in this direct application to religious experience
+of St. Thomas' doctrine of love, she set up an ideal of the spiritual
+life which is as valid at the present day in the entanglements of our
+social order, as it was in the enclosed convents of sixteenth-century
+Spain. Love, we said, is the cause of action. It urges and directs our
+behaviour, conscious and involuntary, towards an end. The mother is
+irresistibly impelled to act towards her child's welfare, the ambitious
+man towards success, the artist towards expression of his vision. All
+these are examples of behaviour, love-driven towards ends. And religious
+experience discloses to us a greater more inclusive end, and this vital
+power of love as capable of being used on the highest levels,
+regenerated, directed to eternal interests; subordinating behaviour,
+inspiring suffering, unifying the whole self and its activities,
+mobilizing them for this transcendental achievement. This generous love,
+to go back to the quotation from Baron von Huegel which opened our
+inquiry, will indeed cause the behaviour it controls to exhibit both
+rightful contact with and renunciation of the particular and fleeting;
+because in and through this series of linked deeds it is uniting with
+itself all human activities, and in and through them is seeking and
+finding its eternal end. So, in that rightful bringing-in of novelty
+which is the business of the fully living soul, the most powerful agent
+is love, understood as the controlling factor of behaviour, the
+sublimation and union of will and desire. "Let love," says Boehme, "be
+the life of thy nature. It killeth thee not, but quickeneth thee
+according to its life, and then thou livest, yet not to thy own will but
+to its will: for thy will becometh its will, and then thou art dead to
+thyself but alive to God."[138] There is the true, solid and for us most
+fruitful doctrine of divine union, unconnected with any rapture, trance,
+ecstasy or abnormal state of mind: a union organic, conscious, and
+dynamic with the Creative Spirit of Life.
+
+If we now go on to ask how, specially, we shall achieve this union in
+such degree as is possible to each one of us; the answer must be, that
+it will be done by Prayer. If the seeking of the Eternal is actuated by
+love, the finding of it is achieved through prayer. Prayer, in
+fact--understood as a life or state, not an act or an asking--is the
+beginning, middle and end of all that we are now considering. As the
+social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the
+spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual
+world. And such humble yet ardent contact with the spiritual
+world--opening up to its suggestions our impulses, our reveries, our
+feelings, our most secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts-is
+the essence of prayer, understood in its widest sense. No more than
+surrender or love can prayer be reduced to "one act." Those who seek to
+sublimate it into "pure" contemplation are as limited at one end of the
+scale, as those who reduce it to articulate petition are at the other.
+It contains in itself a rich variety of human reactions and experiences.
+It opens the door upon an unwalled world, in which the self truly lives
+and therefore makes widely various responses to its infinitely varying
+stimuli. Into that world the self takes, or should take, its special
+needs, aptitudes and longings, and matches them against its apprehension
+of Eternal Truth. In this meeting of the human heart with all that it
+can apprehend of Reality, not adoration alone but unbounded contrition,
+not humble dependence alone but joy, peace and power, not rapture alone
+but mysterious darkness, must be woven into the fabric of love. In this
+world the soul may sometimes wander as if in pastures, sometimes is
+poised breathless and intent. Sometimes it is fed by beauty, sometimes
+by most difficult truth, and experiences the extremes of riches and
+destitution, darkness and light. "It is not," says Plotinus, "by
+crushing the Divine into a unity but by displaying its exuberance, as
+the Supreme Himself has displayed it, that we show knowledge of the
+might of God."[139]
+
+Thus, by that instinctive and warmly devoted direction of its behaviour
+which is love, and that willed attention to and communion with the
+spiritual world which is prayer, all the powers of the self are united
+and turned towards the seeking and finding of the Eternal. It is by
+complete obedience to this exacting love, doing difficult and unselfish
+things, giving up easy and comfortable things--in fact by living, living
+hard on the highest levels--that men more and more deeply feel,
+experience, and enter into their spiritual life. This is a fact which
+must seem rather awkward to those who put forward pathological
+explanations of it. And on the other hand it is only by constant
+contacts with and recourse to the energizing life of Spirit, that this
+hard vocation can be fulfilled. Such a power of reference to Reality, of
+transcending the world of succession and its values, can be cultivated
+by us; and this education of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of
+the discipline of prayer. True, it is only in times of recollection or
+of great emotion that this profound contact is fully present to
+consciousness. Yet, once fully achieved and its obligations accepted by
+us, it continues as a grave melody within our busy outward acts: and we
+must by right direction of our deepest instincts so find and feel the
+Eternal all the time, if indeed we are to actualize and incarnate it all
+the time. From this truth of experience, religion has deduced the
+doctrine of grace, and the general conception of man as able to do
+nothing of himself. This need hardly surprise us. For equally on the
+physical plane man can do nothing of himself, if he be cut off from his
+physical sources of power: from food to eat, and air to breathe.
+Therefore the fact that his spiritual life too is dependent upon the
+life-giving atmosphere that penetrates him, and the heavenly food which
+he receives, makes no fracture in his experience. Thus we are brought
+back by another path to the fundamental need for him, in some form, of
+the balanced active and contemplative life.
+
+In spite of this, many people seem to take it for granted that if a man
+believes in and desires to live a spiritual life, he can live it in
+utter independence of spiritual food. He believes in God, loves his
+neighbour, wants to do good, and just goes ahead. The result of this is
+that the life of the God-fearing citizen or the Social Christian, as now
+conceived and practised, is generally the starved life. It leaves no
+time for the silence, the withdrawal, the quiet attention to the
+spiritual, which is essential if it is to develop all its powers. Yet
+the literature of the Spirit is full of warnings on this subject.
+_Taste_ and see that the Lord is sweet. They that wait upon the Lord
+shall renew their _strength_. In quietness and confidence shall be your
+_strength_. These are practical statements; addressed, not to
+specialists but to ordinary men and women, with a normal psycho-physical
+make-up. They are literally true now, or can be if we choose. They do
+not involve any peculiar training, or unnatural effort. A sliding scale
+goes from the simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to that
+complete self-loss and complete self-finding, which is called the
+transforming union of the saint; and somewhere in this series, every
+human soul can find a place.
+
+If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to receive what St.
+Augustine called the food of the full-grown, to find and feel the
+Eternal, we must give time and place to it in our lives. I emphasize
+this, because its realization seems to me to be a desperate modern need;
+a need exhibited supremely in our languid and ineffectual spirituality,
+but also felt in the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of
+the artist, the reformer and the teacher. St. John of the Cross says in
+one of his letters: "What is wanting is not writing or talking--there is
+more than enough of that--but, silence and action. For silence joined to
+action produces recollection, and gives the spirit a marvellous
+strength." Such recollection, such a gathering up of our interior forces
+and retreat of consciousness to its "ground," is the preparation of all
+great endeavour, whatever its apparent object may be. Until we realize
+that it is better, more useful, more productive of strength, to spend,
+let us say, the odd ten minutes in the morning in feeling and finding
+the Eternal than in flicking the newspaper--that this will send us off
+to the day's work properly orientated, gathered together, recollected,
+and really endowed with new power of dealing with circumstance--we have
+not begun to live the life of the Spirit, or grasped the practical
+connection between such a daily discipline and the power of doing our
+best work, whatever it may be.
+
+I will illustrate this from a living example: that of the Sadhu Sundar
+Singh. No one, I suppose, who came into personal contact with the Sadhu,
+doubted that they were in the presence of a person who was living, in
+the full sense, the spiritual life. Even those who could not accept the
+symbols in which he described his experience and asked others to share
+it, acknowledged that there had been worked in him a great
+transformation; that the sense of the abiding and eternal went with him
+everywhere, and flowed out from him, to calm and to correct our feverish
+lives. He fully satisfies in his own person the demands of Baron von
+Huegel's definition: both contact with and renunciation of the Particular
+and Fleeting, seeking and finding of the Eternal, incarnating within his
+own experience that transcendent Otherness. Now the Sadhu has discovered
+for himself and practises as the condition of his extraordinary
+activity, power and endurance, just that balance of life which St.
+Benedict's rule ordained. He is a wandering missionary, constantly
+undertaking great journeys, enduring hardship and danger, and practising
+the absolute poverty of St. Francis. He is perfectly healthy, strong,
+extraordinarily attractive, full of power. But this power he is careful
+to nourish. His irreducible minimum is two hours spent in meditation and
+wordless communication with God at the beginning of each day. He prefers
+three or four hours when work permits; and a long period of prayer and
+meditation always precedes his public address. If forced to curtail or
+hurry these hours of prayer, he feels restless and unhappy, and his
+efficiency is reduced. "Prayer," he says, "is as important as breathing;
+and we never say we have no time to breathe."[140]
+
+All this has been explained away by critics of the muscular Christian
+sort, who say that the Sadhu's Christianity is of a typically Eastern
+kind. But this is simply not true. It were much better to acknowledge
+that we, more and more, are tending to develop a typically Western kind
+of Christianity, marked by the Western emphasis on doing and Western
+contempt for being; and that if we go sufficiently far on this path we
+shall find ourselves cut off from our source. The Sadhu's Christianity
+is fully Christian; that is to say, it is whole and complete. The power
+in which he does his works is that in which St. Paul carried through his
+heroic missionary career, St. Benedict formed a spiritual family that
+transformed European culture, Wesley made the world his parish,
+Elizabeth Fry faced the Newgate criminals. It is idle to talk of the
+revival of a personal spiritual life among ourselves, or of a spiritual
+regeneration of society--for this can only come through the individual
+remaking of each of its members--unless we are willing, at the sacrifice
+of some personal convenience, to make a place and time for these acts of
+recollection; this willing and loving--and even more fruitful, the more
+willing and loving--communion with, response to Reality, to God. It is
+true that a fully lived spiritual life involves far more than this. But
+this is the only condition on which it will exist at all.
+
+Love then, which is a willed tendency to God; prayer, which is willed
+communion with and experience of Him; are the two prime essentials in
+the personal life of the Spirit. They represent, of course, only our
+side of it and our obligation. This love is the outflowing response to
+another inflowing love, and this prayer the appropriation of a
+transcendental energy and grace. As the "German Theology" reminds us, "I
+cannot do the work without God, and God may not or will not without
+me."[141] And by these acts alone, faithfully carried through, all their
+costly demands fulfilled, all their gifts and applications accepted
+without resistance and applied to each aspect of life, human nature can
+grow up to its full stature, and obtain access to all its sources of
+power.
+
+Yet this personal inward life of love and prayer shall not be too
+solitary. As it needs links with cultus and so with the lives of its
+fellows, it also needs links with history and so with the living past.
+These links are chiefly made by the individual through his reading; and
+such reading--such access to humanity's hoarded culture and
+experience--has always been declared alike by Christian and
+non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper helps of the spiritual
+life. Though Hoeffding perhaps exaggerates when he reminds us that
+mediaeval art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in their
+books, and suggests that such brooding study directly induces
+contemplative states,[142] yet it is true that the soul gains greatly
+from such communion with, and meek learning from, its cultural
+background. Ever more and more as it advances, it will discover within
+that background the records of those very experiences which it must now
+so poignantly relive; and which seem to it, as his own experience seems
+to every lover, unique. There it can find, without any betrayal of its
+secret, the wholesome assurance of its own normality; standards of
+comparison; companionship, alike in its hours of penitence, of light,
+and of deprivation. Yet such fruitful communion with the past is not the
+privilege of an aristocratic culture. It is seen in its perfection in
+many simple Christians who have found in the Bible all the spiritual
+food they need. The great literature of the Spirit tells its secrets to
+those alone who thus meet it on its own ground. Not only the works of
+Thomas a Kempis, of Ruysbroeck, or of St. Teresa, but also the Biblical
+writers--and especially, perhaps, the Psalms and the Gospels--are read
+wholly anew by us at each stage of our advance. Comparative study of
+Hindu and Moslem writers proves that this is equally true of the great
+literatures of other faiths.[143] Beginners may find in all these
+infinite stimulus, interest, and beauty. But to the mature soul they
+become road-books, of which experience proves the astonishing
+exactitude; giving it descriptions which it can recognize and directions
+that it needs, and constituting a steady check upon individualism.
+
+Now let us look at the emergence of this life which we have been
+considering, and at the typical path which it will or may follow, in an
+ordinary man or woman of our own day. Not a saint or genius, reaching
+heroic levels; but a member of that solid wholesome spiritual population
+which ought to fill the streets of the City of God. We noticed when we
+were studying its appearance in history, that often this life begins in
+a sort of restlessness, a feeling that there is something more in
+existence, some absolute meaning, some more searching obligation, that
+we have not reached. This dissatisfaction, this uncertainty and hunger,
+may show itself in many different forms. It may speak first to the
+intellect, to the moral nature, to the social conscience, even to the
+artistic faculty; or, directly, to the heart. Anyhow, its abiding
+quality is a sense of contraction, of limitation; a feeling of something
+more that we could stretch out to, and achieve, and be. Its impulsion is
+always in one direction; to a finding of some wider and more enduring
+reality, some objective for the self's life and love. It is a seeking of
+the Eternal, in some form. I allow that thanks to the fog in which we
+live muffled, such a first seeking, and above all such a finding of the
+Eternal is not for us a very easy thing. The sense of quest, of
+disillusion, of something lacking, is more common among modern men than
+its resolution in discovery. Nevertheless the quest does mean that there
+is a solution: and that those who are persevering must find it in the
+end. The world into which our desire is truly turned, is somehow
+revealed to us. The revelation, always partial and relative, is of
+course conditioned by our capacity, the character of our longing and the
+experiences of our past. In spiritual matters we behold that which we
+are: here following, on higher levels, the laws which govern aesthetic
+apprehension.
+
+So, dissatisfied with its world-view and realizing that it is
+incomplete, the self seeks at first hand, though not always with clear
+consciousness of its nature, the Reality which is the object of
+religion. When it finds this Reality, the discovery, however partial, is
+for it the overwhelming revelation of an objective Fact; and it is swept
+by a love and awe which it did not know itself to possess. And now it
+sees; dimly, yet in a sufficiently disconcerting way, the Pattern in the
+Mount; the rich complex of existence as it were transmuted, full of
+charity and beauty, governed by another series of adjustments. Life
+looks different to it. As Fox said, "Creation gives out another smell
+than before."[144] There is only one thing more disconcerting than this,
+and that is seeing the pattern actualized in a fellow human being:
+living face to face with human sanctity, in its great simplicity and
+supernatural love, joy, peace. For, when we glimpse Eternal Beauty in
+the universe, we can say with the hero of "Callista," "It is beyond me!"
+But, when we see it transfiguring human character, we know that it is
+not beyond the power of the race. It is here, to be had. Its existence
+as a form of life creates a standard, and lays an obligation on us all.
+
+Suppose then that the self, urged by this new pressure, accepts the
+obligation and measures itself by the standard. It then becomes apparent
+that this Fact which it sought for and has seen is not merely added to
+its old universe, as in mediaeval pictures Paradise with its circles
+over-arches the earth. This Reality is all-penetrating and has
+transfigured each aspect of the self's old world. It now has a new and
+most exacting scale of values, which demand from it a new series of
+adjustments; ask it--and with authority--to change its life.
+
+What next? The next thing, probably, is that the self finds itself in
+rather a tight place. It is wedged into a physical order that makes
+innumerable calls on it, and innumerable suggestions to it: which has
+for years monopolized its field of consciousness and set up habits of
+response to its claims. It has to make some kind of a break with this
+order, or at least with its many attachments thereto; and stretch to the
+wider span demanded by the new and larger world. And further, it is in
+possession of a complex psychic life, containing many insubordinate
+elements, many awkward bequests from a primitive past. That psychic life
+has just received the powerful and direct suggestion of the Spirit; and
+for the moment, it is subdued to that suggestion. But soon it begins to
+experience the inevitable conflict between old habits, and new
+demands--between a life lived in the particular and in the universal
+spirit--and only through complete resolution of that conflict will it
+develop its full power. So the self quickly realizes that the
+theologian's war between Nature and Grace is a picturesque way of
+stating a real situation; and further that the demand of all religions
+for a change of heart--that is, of the deep instinctive nature--is the
+first condition of a spiritual life. And hence, that its hands are
+fairly full. It is true that an immense joy and hope come with it to
+this business of tackling imperfection, of adjusting itself to the newly
+found centre of life. It knows that it is committed to the forward
+movement of a Power, which may be slow but which nothing can gainsay.
+Nevertheless the first thing that power demands from it is courage; and
+the next an unremitting vigorous effort. It will never again be able to
+sink back cosily into its racial past. Consciousness of disharmony and
+incompleteness now brings the obligation to mend the disharmony and
+achieve a fresh synthesis.
+
+This is felt with a special sharpness in the moral life, where the
+irreconcilable demands of natural self-interest and of Spirit assume
+their most intractable shape. Old habits and paths of discharge which
+have almost become automatic must now, it seems, be abandoned. New
+paths, in spite of resistances, must be made. Thus it is that
+temptation, hard conflict, and bewildering perplexities usher in the
+life of the Spirit. These are largely the results of our biological past
+continuing into our fluctuating half-made present; and they point
+towards a psychic stability, an inner unity we have not yet attained.
+
+This realization of ourselves as we truly are--emerging with difficulty
+from our animal origin, tinctured through and through with the
+self-regarding tendencies and habits it has imprinted on us--this
+realization or self-knowledge, is Humility; the only soil in which the
+spiritual life can germinate. And modern man with his great horizons,
+his ever clearer vision of his own close kinship with life's origin, his
+small place in the time-stream, in the universe, in God's hand, the
+relative character of his best knowledge and achievement, is surely
+everywhere being persuaded to this royal virtue. Recognition of this his
+true creaturely status, with its obligations--the only process of pain
+and struggle needed if the demands of generous love are ever to be
+fulfilled in him and his many-levelled nature is to be purified and
+harmonized and develop all its powers--this is Repentance. He shows not
+only his sincerity, but his manliness and courage by his acceptance of
+all that such repentance entails on him; for the healthy soul, like the
+healthy body, welcomes some trial and roughness and is well able to bear
+the pains of education. Psychologists regard such an education,
+harmonizing the rational or ideal with the instinctive life--the change
+of heart which leaves the whole self working together without inner
+conflict towards one objective--as the very condition of a full and
+healthy life. But it can only be achieved in its perfection by the
+complete surrender of heart and mind to a third term, transcending alike
+the impulsive and the rational. The life of the Spirit in its supreme
+authority, and its identification with the highest interests of the
+race, does this: harnessing man's fiery energies to the service of the
+Light.
+
+Therefore, in the rich, new life on which the self enters, one strand
+must be that of repentance, catharsis, self-conquest; a complete
+contrition which is the earnest of complete generosity, uncalculated
+response. And, dealing as we are now with average human nature, we can
+safely say that the need for such ever-renewed self-scrutiny and
+self-purgation will never in this life be left behind. For sin is a
+fact, though a fact which we do not understand; and now it appears and
+must evermore remain an offence against love, hostile to this intense
+new attraction, and marring the self's willed tendency towards it.
+
+The next strand we may perhaps call that of Recollection: for the
+recognizing and the cure of imperfection depends on the compensating
+search for the Perfect and its enthronement as the supreme object of our
+thought and love. The self, then, soon begins to feel a strong impulsion
+to some type of inward withdrawal and concentration, some kind of
+prayer; though it may not use this name or recognize the character of
+its mood. As it yields to this strange new drawing, such recollection
+grows easier. It finds that there is a veritable inner world, not merely
+of phantasy, but of profound heart-searching experience; where the soul
+is in touch with another order of realities and knows itself to be an
+inheritor of Eternal Life. Here unique things happen. A power is at
+work, and new apprehensions are born. And now for the first time the
+self discovers itself to be striking a balance between this inner and
+the outer life, and in its own small way--but still, most
+fruitfully--enriching action with the fruits of contemplation. If it
+will give to the learning of this new art--to the disciplining and
+refining of this affective thought--even a fraction of the diligence
+which it gives to the learning of a new game, it will find itself repaid
+by a progressive purity of vision, a progressive sense of assurance, an
+ever-increasing delicacy of moral discrimination and demand.
+Psychologists, as we have seen, divide men into introverts and
+extroverts; but as a matter of fact we must regard both these extreme
+types as defective. A whole man should be supple in his reactions both
+to the inner and to the outer world.
+
+The third strand in the life of the Spirit, for this normal self which
+we are considering; must be the disposition of complete Surrender. More
+and more advancing in this inner life, it will feel the imperative
+attraction of Reality, of God; and it must respond to this attraction
+with all the courage and generosity of which it is capable. I am trying
+to use the simplest and the most general language, and to avoid
+emotional imagery: though it is here, in telling of this perpetually
+renewed act of self-giving and dedication, that spiritual writers most
+often have recourse to the language of the heart. It is indeed in a
+spirit of intensest and humble adoration that generous souls yield
+themselves to the drawing of that mysterious Beauty and unchanging Love,
+with all that it entails. But the form which the impulse to surrender
+takes will vary with the psychic make-up of the individual. To some it
+will come as a sense of vocation, a making-over of the will to the
+purposes of the Kingdom; a type of consecration which may not be overtly
+religious, but may be concerned with the self-forgetting quest of
+social excellence, of beauty, or of truth. By some it will be felt as an
+illumination of the mind, which now discerns once for all true values,
+and accepting these, must uphold and strive for them in the teeth of all
+opportunism. By some--and these are the most blessed--as a breaking and
+re-making of the heart. Whatever the form it takes, the extent in which
+the self experiences the peace, joy and power of living at the level of
+Spirit will depend on the completeness and singlemindedness of this, its
+supreme act of self-simplification. Any reserves, anything in its
+make-up which sets up resistances--and this means generally any form of
+egotism--will mar the harmony of the process. And on the other hand,
+such a real simplification of the self's life as is here
+demanded--uniting on one object, the intellect, will and feeling too
+often split among contradictory attractions--is itself productive of
+inner harmony and increased power: productive too of that noble
+endurance which counts no pain too much in the service of Reality.
+
+Here then we come to the fact, valid for every level of spiritual life,
+which lies behind all the declarations concerning surrender, self-loss,
+dying to live, dedication, made by writers on this theme. All involve a
+relaxing of tension, letting ourselves go without reluctance in the
+direction in which we are most profoundly drawn; a cessation of our
+struggles with the tide, our kicks against the pricks that spur us on.
+The inward aim of the self is towards unification with a larger life; a
+mergence with Reality which it may describe under various contradictory
+symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but which it feels to be
+the fulfilment of existence. It has learnt--though this knowledge may
+not have passed beyond the stage of feeling--that the universe is one
+simple texture, in which all things have their explanation and their
+place. Combing out the confusions which enmesh it, losing its sham and
+separate life and finding its true life there, it will know what to love
+and how to act. The goal of this process, which has been called entrance
+into the freedom of the Will of God, is the state described by the
+writer of the "German Theology" when he said "I would fain be to the
+Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man."[145] For such a
+declaration not only means a willed and skilful working for God, a
+practical siding with Perfection, becoming its living tool, but also
+close union with, and sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual
+order: a feeding on and using of its power, its very life blood;
+complete docility to its inward direction, abolition of separate desire.
+The surrender is therefore made not in order that we may become limp
+pietists, but in order that we may receive more energy and do better
+work: by a humble self-subjection more perfectly helping forward the
+thrust of the Spirit and the primal human business of incarnating the
+Eternal here and now. Its justification is in the arduous but untiring,
+various but harmonious, activities that flow from it: the enhancement of
+life which it entails. It gives us access to our real sources of power;
+that we may take from them and, spending generously, be energized anew.
+
+So the cord on which those events which make up the personal life of the
+Spirit are to be strung is completed, and we see that it consists of
+four strands. Two are dispositions of the self; Penitence and Surrender.
+Two are activities; inward Recollection and outward Work. All four make
+stern demands on its fortitude and goodwill. And each gives strength to
+the rest: for they are not to be regarded as separate and successive
+states, a discrete series through which we must pass one by one, leaving
+penitence behind us when we reach surrendered love; but as the variable
+yet enduring and inseparable aspects of one rich life, phases in one
+complete and vital effort to respond more and more closely to Reality.
+
+Nothing, perhaps, is less monotonous than the personal life of the
+Spirit. In its humility and joyous love, its adoration and its industry,
+it may find self-expression in any one of the countless activities of
+the world of time. It is both romantic and austere, both adventurous and
+holy. Full of fluctuation and unearthly colour, it yet has its dark
+patches as well as its light. Since perfect proof of the supersensual is
+beyond the span of human consciousness, the element of risk can never
+be eliminated: we are obliged in the end to trust the universe and live
+by faith. Therefore the awakened soul must often suffer perplexity,
+share to the utmost the stress and anguish of the physical order; and,
+chained as it is to a consciousness accustomed to respond to that order,
+must still be content with flashes of understanding and willing to bear
+long periods of destitution when the light is veiled.
+
+The further it advances the more bitter will these periods of
+destitution seem to it. It is not from the real men and women of the
+Spirit that we hear soft things about the comfort of faith. For the true
+life of faith gives everything worth having and takes everything worth
+offering: with unrelenting blows it welds the self into the stuff of the
+universe, subduing it to the universal purpose, doing away with the
+flame of separation. Though joy and inward peace even in desolation are
+dominant marks of those who have grown up into it, still it offers to
+none a succession of supersensual delights. The life of the Spirit
+involves the sublimation of that pleasure-pain rhythm which is
+characteristic of normal consciousness, and if for it pleasure becomes
+joy, pain becomes the Cross. Toil, abnegation, sacrifice, are therefore
+of its essence; but these are not felt as a heavy burden, because they
+are the expression of love. It entails a willed tension and choice, a
+noble power of refusal, which are not entirely covered by being "in tune
+with the Infinite." As our life comes to maturity we discover to our
+confusion that human ears can pick up from the Infinite many
+incompatible tunes, but cannot hear the whole symphony. And the melody
+confided to our care, the one which we alone perhaps can contribute and
+which taxes our powers to the full, has in it not only the notes of
+triumph but the notes of pain. The distinctive mark therefore is not
+happiness but vocation: work demanded and power given, but given only on
+condition that we spend it and ourselves on others without stint. These
+propositions, of course, are easily illustrated from history: but we can
+also illustrate them in our own persons if we choose.
+
+Should we choose this, and should life of the Spirit be achieved by
+us--and it will only be done through daily discipline and attention to
+the Spiritual, a sacrifice of comfort to its interests, following up the
+intuition which sets us on the path--what benefits may we as ordinary
+men expect it to bring to us and to the community that we serve? It will
+certainly bring into life new zest and new meaning; a widening of the
+horizon and consciousness of security; a fresh sense of joys to be had
+and of work to be done. The real spiritual consciousness is positive and
+constructive in type: it does not look back on the past sins and
+mistakes of the individual or of the community, but in its other-world
+faith and this-world charity is inspired by a forward-moving spirit of
+hope. Seeking alone the honour of Eternal Beauty, and because of its
+invulnerable sense of security, it is adventurous. The spiritual man and
+woman can afford to take desperate chances, and live dangerously in the
+interests of their ideals; being delivered from the many unreal fears
+and anxieties which commonly torment us, and knowing the unimportance of
+possessions and of so-called success. The joy which waits on
+disinterested love and the confidence which follows surrender, cannot
+fail them. Moreover, the inward harmony and assurance, the consciousness
+of access to that Spirit who is in a literal sense "health's eternal
+spring" means a healing of nervous miseries, and invigoration of the
+usually ill-treated mind and body, and so an all-round increase in
+happiness and power.
+
+"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering,
+gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." This, said St. Paul,
+who knew by experience the worlds of grace and of nature, is what a
+complete man ought to be like. Compare this picture of an equable and
+fully harmonized personality with that of a characteristic neurasthenic,
+a bored sensualist, or an embittered worker, concentrated on the
+struggle for a material advantage: and consider that the central
+difference between these types of human success and human failure abides
+in the presence or absence of a spiritual conception of life. We do not
+yet know the limits of the upgrowth into power and happiness which
+complete and practical surrender to this conception can work in us; or
+what its general triumph might do for the transformation of the world.
+And it may even be that beyond the joy and renewal which come from
+self-conquest and unification, a level of spiritual life most certainly
+open to all who will really work for it; and beyond that deeper insight,
+more widespreading love, and perfection of adjustment to the
+here-and-now which we recognize and reverence as the privilege of the
+pure in heart--beyond all these, it may be that life still reserves for
+man another secret and another level of consciousness; a closer
+identification with Reality, such as eye hath not seen, or ear heard.
+
+And note, that this spiritual life which we have here considered is not
+an aristocratic life. It is a life of which the fundamentals are given
+by the simplest kinds of traditional piety, and have been exhibited over
+and over again by the simplest souls. An unconditional self-surrender to
+the Divine Will, under whatever symbols it may be thought of; for we
+know that the very crudest of symbols is often strong enough to make a
+bridge between the heart and the Eternal, and so be a vehicle of the
+Spirit of Life. A little silence and leisure. A great deal of
+faithfulness, kindness, and courage. All this is within the reach of
+anyone who cares enough for it to pay the price.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 129: This doctrine is fully worked out in the last two
+sections of "Eternal Life."]
+
+[Footnote 130: De Imit. Christi, Bk. II, Cap. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 131: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75.]
+
+[Footnote 132: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 78.]
+
+[Footnote 133: Cl. Ruysbroeck: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap.
+VIII]
+
+[Footnote 134: "In Librum B. Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus
+commentaria."]
+
+[Footnote 135: Ennead III. 5, 4.]
+
+[Footnote 136: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75.]
+
+[Footnote 137: "The Interior Castle"; Seventh Habitation, Cap. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 138: Boehme; "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 139: Ennead II. 9. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 140: "Streeter and Appasamy: The Sadhu," pp. 98, 100 et seq.,
+213.]
+
+[Footnote 141: "Theologia Germanica," Cap. III.]
+
+[Footnote 142: Hoeffding, "The Philosophy of Religion," III, B.]
+
+[Footnote 143: There are, for instance, several striking instances in
+the Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore.]
+
+[Footnote 144: "Fox's Journal," Vol. I, Cap. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 145: "Theologia Germanica," Cap. 10.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION
+
+
+In the past six chapters we have been considering in the main our own
+position, and how, here in the present, we as adults may actualize and
+help on the spiritual life in ourselves. But our best hope of giving
+Spirit its rightful, full expression within the time-world lies in the
+future. It is towards that, that those who really care must work.
+Anything which we can do towards persuading into better shape our own
+deformed characters, compelling our recalcitrant energy into fresh
+channels, is little in comparison with what might be achieved in the
+plastic growing psychic life of children did we appreciate our full
+opportunity and the importance of using it. This is why I propose now to
+consider one or two points in the relation of education to the spiritual
+life.
+
+Since it is always well, in a discussion of this kind, to be quite clear
+about the content of the words with which we deal, I will say at once,
+that by Education I mean that deliberate adjustment of the whole
+environment of a growing creature, which surrounds it with the most
+favourable influences and educes all its powers; giving it the most
+helpful conditions for its full growth and development. Education
+should be the complete preparation of the young thing for fullness of
+life; involving the evolution and the balanced training of all its
+faculties, bodily, mental and spiritual. It should train and refine
+senses, instincts, intellect, will and feeling; giving a world-view
+based on real facts and real values and encouraging active
+correspondence therewith. Thus the educationist, if he be convinced, as
+I think most of us must be, that all isn't quite right with the world of
+mankind, has the priceless opportunity of beginning the remaking of
+humanity from the right end. In the child he has a little, supple thing,
+which can be made into a vital, spiritual thing; and nothing again will
+count so much for it as what happens in these its earliest years. To
+start life straight is the secret of inward happiness: and to a great
+extent, the secret of health and power.
+
+That conception of man upon which we have been working, and which
+regards his psychic life on all its levels as the manifold expressions
+of one single energy or urge in the depths of his being, a life-force
+seeking fulfilment, has obvious and important applications in the
+educational sphere. It indicates that the fundamental business of
+education is to deal with this urgent and untempered craving, discipline
+it, and direct it towards interests of permanent value: helping it to
+establish useful habits, removing obstacles in its path, blocking the
+side channels down which it might run. Especially is it the task of such
+education, gradually to disclose to the growing psyche those spiritual
+correspondences for which the religious man and the idealist must hold
+that man's spirit was made. Such an education as this has little in
+common with the mere crude imparting of facts. It represents rather the
+careful and loving induction of the growing human creature into the rich
+world of experience; the help we give it in the great business of
+adjusting itself to reality. It operates by means of the moulding
+influences of environment, the creation of habit. Suggestion, not
+statement, is its most potent instrument; and such suggestion begins for
+good or ill at the very dawn of consciousness. Therefore the child whose
+infancy is not surrounded by persons of true outlook is handicapped from
+the start; and the training in this respect of the parents of the future
+is one of the greatest services we can render to the race.
+
+We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile
+impressions: how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop
+underground, and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poisoning the
+body and the mind of the adult. But here good is at least as potent as
+ill. What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil;
+a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for
+good. Moreover, we can bury good seed in the unconscious minds of
+children and reasonably look forward to the fruit. Babyish prayers,
+simple hymns, trace whilst the mind is ductile the paths in which
+feelings shall afterwards tend to flow; and it is only in maturity that
+we realize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps afterwards
+abandoned beliefs and deeds. So the veritable education of the Spirit
+begins at once, in the cradle, and its chief means will be the
+surroundings within which that childish spirit first develops its little
+awareness of the universe; the appeals which are made to its instincts,
+the stimulations of its life of sense. The first factor of this
+education is the family: the second the society within which that family
+is formed.
+
+Though we no longer suppose it to possess innate ideas, the baby has
+most surely innate powers, inclinations and curiosities, and is reaching
+out in every direction towards life. It is brimming with will power,
+ready to push hard into experience. The environment in which it is
+placed and the responses which the outer world makes to it--and these
+surroundings and responses in the long run are largely of our choosing
+and making--represent either the helping or thwarting of its tendencies,
+and the sum total of the directions in which its powers can be exercised
+and its demands satisfied: the possibilities, in fact, which life puts
+before it. We, as individuals and as a community, control and form part
+of this environment. Under the first head, we play by influence or
+demeanour a certain part in the education of every child whom we meet.
+Under the second head, by acquiescence in the social order, we accept
+responsibility for the state of life in which it is born. The child's
+first intimations of the spiritual must and can only come to it through
+the incarnation of Spirit in its home and the world that it knows. What,
+then, are we doing about this? It means that the influences which shape
+the men and women of the future will be as wholesome and as spiritual as
+we ourselves are: no more, no less. Tone, atmosphere are the things
+which really matter; and these are provided by the group-mind, and
+reflect its spiritual state.
+
+The child's whole educational opportunity is contained in two factors;
+the personality it brings and the environment it gets. Generations of
+educationists have disputed their relative importance: but neither party
+can deny that the most fortunate nature, given wrongful or insufficient
+nurture, will hardly emerge unharmed. Even great inborn powers atrophy
+if left unused, and exceptional ability in any direction may easily
+remain undeveloped if the environment be sufficiently unfavourable: a
+result too often achieved in the domain of the spiritual life. We must
+have opportunity and encouragement to try our powers and inclinations,
+be helped to understand their nature and the way to use them, unless we
+are to begin again, each one of us, in the Stone Age of the soul. So
+too, even small powers may be developed to an astonishing degree by
+suitable surroundings and wise education--witness the results obtained
+by the expert training of defective children--and all this is as
+applicable to the spiritual as to the mental and bodily life. That life
+is quick to respond to the demands made on it: to take every opportunity
+of expression that comes its way. If you make the right appeal to any
+human faculty, that faculty will respond, and begin to grow. Thus it is
+that the slow quiet pressure of tradition, first in the home and then in
+the school, shapes the child during his most malleable years. We,
+therefore, are surely bound to watch and criticize the environment, the
+tradition, the customs we are instrumental in providing for the infant
+future: to ask ourselves whether we are _sure_ the tradition is right,
+the conventions we hand on useful, the ideal we hold up complete. The
+child, whatever his powers, cannot react to something which is not
+there; he can't digest food that is not given to him, use faculties for
+which no objective is provided. Hence the great responsibility of our
+generation, as to providing a complete, balanced environment _now_, a
+fully-rounded opportunity of response to life physical, mental and
+spiritual, for the generation preparing to succeed us. Such education as
+this has been called a preparation for citizenship. But this conception
+is too narrow, unless the citizenship be that of the City of God; and
+the adjustments involved be those of the spirit, as well as of the body
+and the mind.
+
+Herbert Spencer, whom one would hardly accuse of being a spiritual
+philosopher, was accustomed to group the essentials of a right
+education under four heads:[146]
+
+First, he said, we must teach self-preservation in all senses: how to
+keep the body and the mind healthy and efficient, how to be
+self-supporting, how to protect oneself against external dangers and
+encroachments.
+
+Next, we must train the growing creature in its duties towards the life
+of the future: parenthood and its responsibilities, understood in the
+widest sense.
+
+Thirdly; we must prepare it to take its place in the present as a member
+of the social order into which it is born.
+
+Last: we must hand on to it all those refinements of life which the past
+has given to us--the hoarded culture of the race.
+
+Only if we do these four things thoroughly can we dare to call ourselves
+educators in the full sense of the word.
+
+Now, turning to the spiritual interests of the child:--and unless we are
+crass materialists we must believe these interests to exist, and to be
+paramount--what are we doing to further them in these four fundamental
+directions? First, does the average good education train our young
+people in spiritual self-preservation? Does it send them out equipped
+with the means of living a full and efficient spiritual life? Does it
+furnish them with a health-giving type of religion; that is, a solid
+hold on eternal realities, a view of the universe capable of
+withstanding hostile criticism, of supporting them in times of
+difficulty and of stress? Secondly, does it give them a spiritual
+outlook in respect of their racial duties, fit them in due time to be
+parents of other souls? Does it train them to regard humanity, and their
+own place in the human life-stream, from this point of view? This point
+is of special importance, in view of the fact that racial and biological
+knowledge on lower levels is now so generally in the possession of boys
+and girls; and is bound to produce a distorted conception of life,
+unless the spirit be studied by them with at least the same respectful
+attention that is given to the flesh. Thirdly, what does our education
+do towards preparing them to solve the problems of social and economic
+life in a spiritual sense--our only reasonable chance of extracting the
+next generation from the social muddle in which we are plunged to-day?
+Last, to what extent do we try to introduce our pupils into a full
+enjoyment of their spiritual inheritance, the culture and tradition of
+the past?
+
+I do not deny that there are educators--chiefly perhaps educators of
+girls--who can give favourable answers to all these questions. But they
+are exceptional, the proportion of the child population whom they
+influence is small, and frequently their proceedings are looked
+upon--not without some justice--as eccentric. If then in all these
+departments our standard type of education stops short of the spiritual
+level, are not we self-convicted as at best theoretical believers in the
+worth and destiny of the human soul?
+
+Consider the facts. Outside the walls of definitely religious
+institutions--where methods are not always adjusted to the common stuff
+and needs of contemporary human life--it does not seem to occur to many
+educationists to give the education of the child's soul the same expert
+delicate attention so lavishly bestowed on the body and the intellect.
+By expert delicate attention I do not mean persistent religious
+instruction; but a skilled and loving care for the growing spirit,
+inspired by deep conviction and helped by all the psychological
+knowledge we possess. If we look at the efforts of organized religion we
+are bound to admit that in thousands of rural parishes, and in many
+towns too, it is still possible to grow from infancy to old age as a
+member of church or chapel without once receiving any first-hand
+teaching on the powers and needs of the soul or the technique of prayer;
+or obtaining any more help in the great religious difficulties of
+adolescence than a general invitation to believe, and trust God.
+Morality--that is to say correctness of response to our neighbour and
+our temporal surroundings--is often well taught.
+Spirituality--correctness of response to God and our eternal
+surroundings--is most often ignored. A peculiar British bashfulness
+seems to stand in the way of it. It is felt that we show better taste
+in leaving the essentials of the soul's development to chance, even that
+such development is not wholly desirable or manly: that the atrophy of
+one aspect of "man's made-trinity" is best. I have heard one eminent
+ecclesiastic maintain that regular and punctual attendance at morning
+service in a mood of non-comprehending loyalty was the best sort of
+spiritual experience for the average Englishman. Is not that a statement
+which should make the Christian teachers who are responsible for the
+average Englishman, feel a little bit uncomfortable about the type which
+they have produced? I do not suggest that education should encourage a
+feverish religiosity; but that it ought to produce balanced men and
+women, whose faculties are fully alert and responsive to all levels of
+life. As it is, we train Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in the principles of
+honour and chivalry. Our Bible-classes minister to the hungry spirit
+much information about the journeys of St. Paul (with maps). But the
+pupils are seldom invited or assisted to _taste_, and see that the Lord
+is sweet.
+
+Now this indifference means, of course, that we do not as educators, as
+controllers of the racial future, really believe in the spiritual
+foundations of our personality as thoroughly and practically we believe
+in its mental and physical manifestations. Whatever the philosophy or
+religion we profess may be, it remains for us in the realm of idea, not
+in the realm of fact. In practice, we do not aim at the achievement of
+a spiritual type of consciousness as the crown of human culture. The
+best that most education does for our children is only what the devil
+did for Christ. It takes them up to the top of a high mountain and shows
+them all the kingdoms of this world; the kingdom of history, the kingdom
+of letters, the kingdom of beauty, the kingdom of science. It is a
+splendid vision, but unfortunately fugitive: and since the spirit is not
+fugitive, it demands an objective that is permanent. If we do not give
+it such an objective, one of two things must happen to it. Either it
+will be restless and dissatisfied, and throw the whole life out of key;
+or it will become dormant for lack of use, and so the whole life will be
+impoverished, its best promise unfulfilled. One line leads to the
+neurotic, the other to the average sensual man, and I think it will be
+agreed that modern life produces a good crop of both these kind of
+defectives.
+
+But if we believe that the permanent objective of the spirit is God--if
+He be indeed for us the Fountain of Life and the sum of Reality--can we
+acquiesce in these forms of loss? Surely it ought to be our first aim,
+to make the sense of His universal presence and transcendent worth, and
+of the self's responsibility to Him, dominant for the plastic youthful
+consciousness confided to our care: to introduce that consciousness into
+a world which is really a theocracy and encourage its aptitude for
+generous love? If educationists do not view such a proposal with
+favour, this shows how miserable and distorted our common conception of
+God has become; and how small a part it really plays in our practical
+life. Most of us scramble through that practical life, and are prepared
+to let our children scramble too, without any clear notions of that
+hygiene of the soul which has been studied for centuries by experts; and
+few look upon this branch of self-knowledge as something that all men
+may possess who will submit to education and work for its achievement.
+Thus we have degenerated from the mediaeval standpoint; for then at least
+the necessity of spiritual education was understood and accepted, and
+the current psychology was in harmony with it. But now there is little
+attempt to deepen and enlarge the spiritual faculties, none to encourage
+their free and natural development in the young, or their application to
+any richer world of experience than the circle of pious images with
+which "religious education" generally deals. The result of this is seen
+in the rawness, shallowness and ignorance which characterize the
+attitude of many young adults to religion. Their beliefs and their
+scepticism alike are often the acceptance or rejection of the obsolete.
+If they be agnostics, the dogmas which they reject are frequently
+theological caricatures. If they be believers, both their religious
+conceptions and their prayers are found on investigation still to be of
+an infantile kind, totally unrelated to the interests and outlook of
+modern men.
+
+Two facts emerge from the experience of all educationists. The first is,
+that children are naturally receptive and responsive; the second, that
+adolescents are naturally idealistic. In both stages, the young human
+creature is full of interests and curiosities asking to be satisfied, of
+energies demanding expression; and here, in their budding, thrusting
+life--for which we, by our choice of surroundings and influence, may
+provide the objective--is the raw material out of which the spiritual
+humanity of the future might be made. The child has already within it
+the living seed wherein all human possibilities are contained; our part
+is to give the right soil, the shelter, and the watering-can. Spiritual
+education therefore does not consist in putting into the child something
+which it has not; but in educing and sublimating that which it has--in
+establishing habits, fostering a trend of growth which shall serve it
+well in later years. Already, all the dynamic instincts are present, at
+least in germ; asking for an outlet. The will and the emotions, ductile
+as they will never be again, are ready to make full and ungraduated
+response to any genuine appeal to enthusiasm. The imagination will
+accept the food we give, if we give it in the right way. What an
+opportunity! Nowhere else do we come into such direct contact with the
+plastic stuff of life; never again shall we have at our disposal such a
+fund of emotional energy.
+
+In the child's dreams and fantasies, in its eager hero-worship--later,
+in the adolescent's fervid friendships or devoted loyalty to an adored
+leader--we see the search of the living growing creature for more life
+and love, for an enduring object of devotion. Do we always manage or
+even try to give it that enduring object, in a form it can accept? Yet
+the responsibility of providing such a presentation of belief as shall
+evoke the spontaneous reactions of faith and love--for no compulsory
+idealism ever succeeds--is definitely laid on the parent and the
+teacher. It is in the enthusiastic imitation of a beloved leader that
+the child or adolescent learns best. Were the spiritual life the most
+real of facts to us, did we believe in it as we variously believe in
+athletics, physical science or the arts, surely we should spare no
+effort to turn to its purposes these priceless qualities of youth? Were
+the mind's communion with the Spirit of God generally regarded as its
+natural privilege and therefore the first condition of its happiness and
+health, the general method and tone of modern education would inevitably
+differ considerably from that which we usually see: and if the life of
+the Spirit is to come to fruition, here is one of the points at which
+reformation must begin. When we look at the ordinary practice of modern
+"civilized" Europe, we cannot claim that any noticeable proportion of
+our young people are taught during their docile and impressionable years
+the nature and discipline of their spiritual faculties, in the open and
+common-sense way in which they are taught languages, science, music or
+gymnastics. Yet it is surely a central duty of the educator to deepen
+and enrich to the fullest extent possible his pupil's apprehension of
+the universe; and must not all such apprehension move towards the
+discovery of that universe as a spiritual fact?
+
+Again, in how many schools is the period of religious and idealistic
+enthusiasm which so commonly occurs in adolescence wisely used,
+skilfully trained, and made the foundation of an enduring spiritual
+life? Here is the period in which the relation of master and pupil is or
+may be most intimate and most fruitful; and can be made to serve the
+highest interests of life. Yet, no great proportion of those set apart
+to teach young people seem to realize and use this privilege.
+
+I am aware that much which I am going to advocate will sound fantastic;
+and that the changes involved may seem at first sight impossible to
+accomplish. It is true that if these changes are to be useful, they must
+be gradual. The policy of the "clean sweep" is one which both history
+and psychology condemn. But it does seem to me a good thing to envisage
+clearly, if we can, the ideal towards which our changes should lead. A
+garden city is not Utopia. Still, it is an advance upon the Victorian
+type of suburb and slum; and we should not have got it if some men had
+not believed in Utopia, and tried to make a beginning here and now.
+Already in education some few have tried to make such a beginning and
+have proved that it is possible if we believe in it enough: for faith
+can move even that mountainous thing, the British parental mind.
+
+Our task--and I believe our most real hope for the future--is, as we
+have already allowed, to make the idea of God dominant for the plastic
+youthful consciousness: and not only this, but to harmonize that
+conception, first with our teachings about the physical and mental sides
+of life, and next with the child's own social activities, training body,
+mind and spirit together that they may take each their part in the
+development of a whole man, fully responsive to a universe which is at
+bottom a spiritual fact. Such training to be complete must, as we have
+seen, begin in the nursery and be given by the atmosphere and
+opportunities of the home. It will include the instilling of childish
+habits of prayer and the fostering of simple expressions of reverence,
+admiration and love. The subconscious knowledge implicit in such
+practice must form the foundation, and only where it is present will
+doctrine and principle have any real meaning for the child. Prayer must
+come before theology, and kindness, tenderness and helpfulness before
+ethics.
+
+But we have now to consider the child of school age, coming--too often
+without this, the only adequate preparation--into the teacher's hands.
+How is he to be dealt with, and the opportunities which he presents used
+best?
+
+"When I see a right man," said Jacob Boehme, "there I see three worlds
+standing." Since our aim should be to make "right men" and evoke in them
+not merely a departmental piety but a robust and intelligent
+spirituality, we ought to explain in simple ways to these older children
+something at least of that view of human nature on which our training is
+based. The religious instruction given in most schools is divided, in
+varying proportions, between historical or doctrinal teaching and
+ethical teaching. Now a solid hold both on history and on morals is a
+great need; but these are only realized in their full importance and
+enter completely into life when they are seen within the spiritual
+atmosphere, and already even in childhood, and supremely in youth, this
+atmosphere can be evoked. It does not seem to occur to most teachers
+that religion contains anything beyond or within the two departments of
+historical creed and of morals: that, for instance, the greatest
+utterances of St. John and St. Paul deal with neither, but with
+attainable levels of human life, in which a new and fuller kind of
+experience was offered to mankind. Yet surely they ought at least to
+attempt to tell their pupils about this. I do not see how Christians at
+any rate can escape the obligation, or shuffle out of it by saying that
+they do not know how it can be done. Indeed, all who are not
+thorough-going materialists must regard the study of the spiritual life
+as in the truest sense a department of biology; and any account of man
+which fails to describe it, as incomplete. Where the science of the body
+is studied, the science of the soul should be studied too. Therefore, in
+the upper forms at least, the psychology of religious experience in its
+widest sense, as a normal part of all full human existence, and the
+connection of that experience with practical life, as it is seen in
+history, should be taught. If it is done properly it will hold the
+pupil's interest, for it can be made to appeal to those same mental
+qualities of wonder, curiosity and exploration which draw so many boys
+and girls to physical science. But there should be no encouragement of
+introspection, none of the false mystery or so-called reverence with
+which these subjects are sometimes surrounded, and above all no spirit
+of exclusivism.
+
+The pupil should be led to see his own religion as a part of the
+universal tendency of life to God. This need not involve any reduction
+of the claims made on him by his own church or creed; but the emphasis
+should always be on the likeness rather than the differences of the
+great religions of the world. Moreover, higher education cannot be
+regarded as complete unless the mind be furnished with some _rationale_
+of its own deepest experiences, and a harmony be established between
+impulse and thought. Advanced pupils should, then, be given a simple and
+general philosophy of religion, plainly stated in language which
+relates it with the current philosophy of life. This is no counsel of
+perfection. It has been done, and can be done again. It is said of
+Edward Caird, that he placed his pupils "from the beginning at a point
+of view whence the life of mankind could be contemplated as one
+movement, single though infinitely varied, unerring though wandering,
+significant yet mysterious, secure and self-enriching although tragical.
+There was a general sense of the spiritual nature of reality and of the
+rule of mind, though what was meant by spirit or mind was hardly asked.
+There was a hope and faith that outstripped all save the vaguest
+understanding but which evoked a glad response that somehow God was
+immanent in the world and in the history of all mankind, making it
+sane." And the effect of this teaching on the students was that "they
+received the doctrine with enthusiasm, and forgot themselves in the
+sense of their partnership in a universal enterprise."[1] Such teaching
+as this is a real preparation for citizenship, an introduction to the
+enduring values of the world.
+
+[1 Jones and Muirhead: "Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird," pp. 64,
+65.]
+
+Every human being, as we know, inevitably tends to emphasize some
+aspects of that world, and to ignore others: to build up for himself a
+relative universe. The choices which determine the universe of maturity
+are often made in youth; then the foundations are laid of that
+apperceiving mass which is to condition all the man's contacts with
+reality. We ought, therefore, to show the universe to our young people
+from such an angle and in such a light, that they tend quite simply and
+without any objectionable intensity to select, emphasize and be
+interested in its spiritual aspect. For this purpose we must never try
+to force our own reading of that universe upon them; but respect on the
+one hand their often extreme sensitiveness and on the other the
+infinitely various angles of approach proper to our infinitely various
+souls. We should place food before them and leave them to browse. Only
+those who have tried this experiment know what such an enlargement of
+the horizon and enrichment of knowledge means to the eager, adolescent
+mind: how prompt is the response to any appeal which we make to its
+nascent sense of mystery. Yet whole schools of thought on these subjects
+are cheerfully ignored by the majority of our educationists; hence the
+unintelligent and indeed babyish view of religion which is harboured by
+many adults, even of the intellectual class.
+
+Though the spiritual life has its roots in the heart not in the head,
+and will never be brought about by merely academic knowledge; yet, its
+beginnings in adolescence are often lost, because young people are
+completely ignorant of the meaning of their own experiences, and the
+universal character of those needs and responses which they dimly feel
+stirring within them. They are too shy to ask, and no one ever tells
+them about it in a business-like and unembarrassing way. This infant
+mortality in the spiritual realm ought not to be possible. Experience of
+God is the greatest of the rights of man, and should not be left to
+become the casual discovery of the few. Therefore prayer ought to be
+regarded as a universal human activity, and its nature and difficulties
+should be taught, but always in the sense of intercourse rather than of
+mere petition: keeping in mind the doctrine of the mystics that "prayer
+in itself properly is not else but a devout intent directed unto
+God."[147] We teach concentration for the purposes of study; but too
+seldom think of applying it to the purposes of prayer. Yet real prayer
+is a difficult art; which, like other ways of approaching Perfect
+Beauty, only discloses its secrets to those who win them by humble
+training and hard work. Shall we not try to find some method of showing
+our adolescents their way into this world, lying at our doors and
+offered to us without money and without price?
+
+Again, many teachers and parents waste the religious instinct and
+emotional vigour which are often so marked in adolescence, by allowing
+them to fritter themselves upon symbols which cannot stand against
+hostile criticism: for instance, some of, the more sentimental and
+anthropomorphic aspects of Christian devotion. Did we educate those
+instincts, show the growing creature their meaning, and give them an
+objective which did not conflict with the objectives of the developing
+intellect and the will, we should turn their passion into power, and lay
+the foundations of a real spiritual life. We must remember that a good
+deal of adolescent emotion is diverted by the conditions of school-life
+from its obvious and natural objective. This is so much energy set free
+for other uses. We know how it emerges in hero-worship or in ardent
+friendships; how it reinforces the social instinct and produces the
+team-spirit, the intense devotion to the interests of his own gang or
+group which is rightly prominent in the life of many boys. The teacher
+has to reckon with this funded energy and enthusiasm, and use it to
+further the highest interests of the growing child. By this I do not
+mean that he is to encourage an abnormal or emotional concentration on
+spiritual things. Most of the impulses of youth are wholesome, and
+subserve direct ends. Therefore, it is not by taking away love,
+self-sacrifice, admiration, curiosity, from their natural objects that
+we shall serve the best interests of spirituality: but, by enlarging the
+range over which these impulses work--impulses, indeed, which no human
+object can wholly satisfy, save in a sacramental sense. Two such natural
+tendencies, specially prominent in childhood, are peculiarly at the
+disposal of the religious teacher: and should be used by him to the
+full. It is in the sublimation of the instinct of comradeship that the
+social and corporate side of the spiritual life takes its rise, and in
+closest connection with this impulse that all works of charity should be
+suggested and performed. And on the individual side, all that is best,
+safest and sweetest in the religious instinct of the child can be
+related to a similar enlargement of the instinct of filial trust and
+dependence. The educator is therefore working within the two most
+fundamental childish qualities, qualities provoked and fostered by all
+right family life, with its relation of love to parents, brothers,
+sisters and friends; and may gently lead out these two mighty impulses
+to a fulfilment which, at maturity, embrace God and the whole world. The
+wise teacher, then, must work with the instincts, not against them:
+encouraging all kindly social feelings, all vigorous self-expression,
+wonder, trustfulness, love. Recognizing the paramount importance of
+emotion--for without emotional colour no idea can be actual to us, and
+no deed thoroughly and vigorously performed--yet he must always be on
+his guard against blocking the natural channels of human feeling, and
+giving them the opportunity of exploding under pious disguises in the
+religious sphere.
+
+Here it is that the danger of too emotional a type of religious training
+comes in. Sentimentalism of all kinds is dangerous and objectionable,
+especially in the education of girls, whom it excites and debilitates.
+Boys are more often merely alienated by it. In both cases, the method
+of presentation which regards the spiritual life simply as a normal
+aspect of full human life is best. No artificial barrier should be set
+up between the sacred and the profane. The passion for truth and the
+passion for God should be treated as one: and that pursuit of knowledge
+for its own sake, those adventurous explorations of the mind, in which
+the more intelligent type of adolescent loves to try his growing powers,
+ought to be encouraged in the spiritual sphere as elsewhere. The results
+of research into religious origins should be explained without
+reservation, and no intellectual difficulty should be dodged. The
+putting-off method of meeting awkward questions, now generally
+recognized as dangerous in matters of natural history, is just as
+dangerous in the religious sphere. No teacher who is afraid to state his
+own position with perfect candour should ever be allowed to undertake
+this side of education; nor any in whom there is a marked cleavage
+between the standard of conduct and the standard of thought. The healthy
+adolescent is prompt to perceive inconsistency and unsparing in its
+condemnation.
+
+Moreover, a most careful discrimination is daily becoming more
+necessary, in the teaching of traditional religion of a supernatural and
+non-empirical type. Many of its elements must no doubt be retained by
+us, for the child-mind demands firm outlines and examples and imagery
+drawn from the world of sense. Yet grave dangers are attached to it.
+On, the one hand an exclusive reliance on tradition paves the way for
+the disillusion which is so often experienced towards the end of
+adolescence, when it frequently causes a violent reaction to
+materialism. On the other hand it exposes us to a risk which we
+particularly want to avoid: that of reducing the child's nascent
+spiritual life to the dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies
+wishes that outward life leaves unfulfilled. Many pious people,
+especially those who tell us that their religion is a "comfort" to them,
+go through life in a spiritual day-dream of this kind. Concrete life has
+starved them of love, of beauty, of interest--it has given them no
+synthesis which satisfies the passionate human search for meaning--and
+they have found all this in a dream-world, made from the materials of
+conventional piety. If religion is thus allowed to become a ready-made
+day-dream it will certainly interest adolescents of a certain sort. The
+naturally introverted type will become meditative; whilst their
+opposites, the extroverted or active type, will probably tend to be
+ritualistic. But here again we are missing the essence of spiritual
+life.
+
+Our aim should be to induce, in a wholesome way, that sense of the
+spiritual in daily experience which the old writers called the
+consciousness of the of God. The monastic training in spirituality,
+slowly evolved under pressure of experience, nearly always did this. It
+has bequeathed to us a funded wisdom of which we make little use; and
+this, reinterpreted in the light of psychological knowledge, might I
+believe cast a great deal of light on the fundamental problems of
+spiritual education. We could if we chose take many hints from it, as
+regards the disciplining of the attention, the correct use of
+suggestion, the teaching of meditation, the sublimation and direction to
+an assigned end of the natural impulse to reverie; above all, the
+education of the moral life. For character-building as understood by
+these old specialists was the most practical of arts.
+
+Further, in all this teaching, those inward activities and responses to
+which we can give generally the name of prayer, and those outward
+activities and deeds of service to which we can give the name of work,
+ought to be trained together and never dissociated. They are the
+complementary and balanced expressions of one spirit of life: and must
+be given together, under appropriately simple forms. Concrete
+application of the child's energies, aptitudes and ideals must from the
+first run side by side with the teaching of principle. Young people
+therefore should constantly be encouraged to face as practical and
+interesting facts, not as formulae, those reactions to eternal and
+this-world reality which used to be called our duty to God and our
+neighbour; and do concrete things proper to a real citizen of a really
+theocratic world. They must be made to realize that nothing is truly
+ours until we have expressed it in our deeds. Moreover, these deeds
+should not be easy. They should involve effort and self-sacrifice; and
+also some drudgery, which is worse. The spiritual life is only valued by
+those on whom it makes genuine demands. Almost any kind of service will
+do, which calls for attention, time and hard work. Though voluntary, it
+must not be casual: but, once undertaken, should be regarded as an
+honourable obligation. The Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have shown us how
+wide a choice of possible "good deeds" is offered by every community:
+and such a banding together of young people for corporate acts of
+service is strongly to be commended. It encourages unselfish
+comradeship, satisfies that "gang-instinct" which is a well-known
+character of adolescence, and should leave no opening for
+self-consciousness, rivalry, and vanity in well-doing or in abnegation.
+
+Wise educators find that a combined system of organized games in which
+the social instinct can be expressed and developed, and of independent
+constructive work, in which the creative impulse can find satisfaction,
+best meets the corporate and creative needs of adolescence, favours the
+right development of character, and produces a harmonized life. On the
+level of the spiritual life too this principle is valid; and, guided by
+it, we should seek to give young people both corporate and personal work
+and experience. On the one hand, gregariousness is at its strongest in
+the healthy adolescent, the force of public opinion is more intensely
+felt than at any other time of life, that priceless quality the spirit
+of comradeship is most easily educed. We must therefore seek to give the
+spiritual life a vigorous corporate character; to make it "good form"
+for the school, and to use the team-spirit in the choir and the guild as
+well as in the cricket field. By an extension of this principle and
+under the influence of a suitable teacher, the school-mob may be
+transformed into a co-operative society animated by one joyous and
+unselfish spirit: all the great powers of social suggestion being freely
+used for the highest ends. Thus we may introduce the pupil, at his most
+plastic age, into a spiritual-social order and let him grow within it,
+developing those qualities and skills on which it makes demands. The
+religious exercises, whatever they are, should be in common, in order to
+develop the mass consciousness of the school and weld it into a real
+group. Music, songs, processions, etc., produce a feeling of unity, and
+encourage spiritual contagion. Services of an appropriate kind, if there
+be a chapel, or the opening of school with prayer and a hymn (which
+ought always to be followed by a short silence) provide a natural
+expression for corporate religious feeling: and remember that to give a
+feeling opportunity of voluntary expression is commonly to educe and
+affirm it. As regards active work, whilst school charities are an
+obvious field in which unselfish energies may be spent, many other
+openings will be found by enthusiastic teachers, and by the pupils whom
+their enthusiasm has inspired.
+
+On the other hand, the spare-time occupations of the adolescent; the
+independent and self-chosen work, often most arduous and always
+absorbing, of making, planning, learning about things--and most of us
+can still remember how desperately important these seemed to us, whether
+our taste was for making engines, writing poetry, or collecting
+moths--these are of the greatest importance for his development. They
+give him something really his own, exercise his powers, train his
+attention, feed his creative instinct. They counteract those mechanical
+and conventional reactions to the world, which are induced by the merely
+traditional type of education, either of manners or of mind. And here,
+in the prudent encouragement of a personal interest in and dealing with
+the actual problems of conduct and even of belief--the most difficult of
+the educator's tasks--we guard against the merely acquiescent attitude
+of much adult piety, and foster from the beginning a vigorous personal
+interest, a first-hand contact with higher realities.
+
+The heroic aspect of history may well form the second line in this
+attempt to capture education and use it in the interests of the
+spiritual life. By it we can best link up the actual and the ideal, and
+demonstrate the single character of human greatness; whether it be
+exhibited, in the physical or the supersensual sphere. Such a
+demonstration is most important; for so long as the spiritual life is
+regarded as merely a departmental thing, and its full development as a
+matter for specialists or saints, it will never produce its full effect
+in human affairs. We must exhibit it as the full flower of that Reality
+which inspires all human life. _"All_ kinds of skill," said Tauler, "are
+gifts of the Holy Ghost," and he might have said, all kinds of beauty
+and all kinds of courage too.
+
+The heroic makes a direct appeal to lads and girls, and is by far the
+safest way of approach to their emotions. The chivalrous, the noble, the
+desperately brave, attract the adolescent far more than passive
+goodness. That strong instinct of subjection, of homage, which he shows
+in his hero-worship, is a most valuable tool in the hands of the teacher
+who is seeking to lead him into greater fullness of life. Yet the range
+over which we seek material for his admiration is often deplorably
+narrow. We have behind us a great spiritual history, which shows the
+highest faculties of the soul in action: the power and the happiness
+they bring. Do we take enough notice of it? What about our English
+saints? I mean the real saints, not the official ones. Not St. George
+and St. Alban, about whom we know practically nothing: but, for
+instance, Lancelot Andrewes, John Wesley, Elizabeth Fry, about whom we
+know a great deal. Children, who find difficulty in general ideas, learn
+best from particular instances. Yet boys and girls who can give a
+coherent account of such stimulating personalities as Julius Caesar,
+William the Conqueror, Henry VIII. and his wives, or Napoleon--none of
+whom have so very much to tell us that bears on the permanent interests
+of the soul--do not as a rule possess any vivid idea, say, of Gautama,
+St. Benedict, Gregory the Great, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis
+Xavier, George Fox, St. Vincent de Paul and his friends: persons at
+least as significant, and far better worth meeting, than the military
+commanders and political adventurers of their time. The stories of the
+early Buddhists, the Sufi saints, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius,
+the early Quakers, the African missionaries, are full of things which
+can be made to interest even a young child. The legends which have grown
+up round some of them satisfy the instinct that draws it to fairy tales.
+They help it to dream well; and give to the developing mind food which
+it could assimilate in no other way. Older boys and girls, could they be
+given some idea of the spiritual heroes of Christendom as real men and
+women, without the nauseous note of piety which generally infects their
+biographies, would find much to delight them: romance of the best sort,
+because concerned with the highest values, and stories of endurance and
+courage such as always appeal to them. These people were not
+objectionable pietists. They were persons of fullest vitality and
+immense natural attraction; the pick of the race. We know that, by the
+numbers who left all to follow them. Ought we not to introduce our
+pupils to them; not as stuffed specimens, but as vivid human beings?
+Something might be done to create the right atmosphere for this, on the
+lines suggested by Dr. Hayward in that splendid little book "The Lesson
+in Appreciation." All that he says there about aesthetics, is applicable
+to any lesson dealing with the higher values of life. In this way, young
+people would be made to realize the spiritual life; not as something
+abnormal and more or less conventionalized, but as a golden thread
+running right through human history, and making demands on just those
+dynamic qualities which they feel themselves to possess. The adolescent
+is naturally vigorous and combative, and wants, above all else,
+something worth fighting for. This, too often, his teachers forget to
+provide.
+
+The study of nature, and of aesthetics--including poetry--gives us yet
+another way of approach. The child should be introduced to these great
+worlds of life and of beauty, and encouraged but never forced to feed on
+the best they contain. By implication, but never by any method savouring
+of "uplift," these subjects should be related with that sense of the
+spiritual and of its immanence in creation, which ought to inspire the
+teacher; and with which it is his duty to infect his pupils if he can.
+Children may, very early, be taught or rather induced to look at natural
+things with that quietness, attention, and delight which are the
+beginnings of contemplation, and the conditions, under which nature
+reveals her real secrets to us. The child is a natural pagan, and often
+the first appeal to its nascent spiritual faculty is best made through
+its instinctive joy in the life of animals and flowers, the clouds and
+the winds. Here it may learn very easily that wonder and adoration,
+which are the gateways to the presence of God. In simple forms of verse,
+music, and rhythmical movement it can be encouraged--as the Salvation
+Army has discovered--to give this happy adoration a natural, dramatic,
+and rhythmic expression: for the young child, as we know, reproduces the
+mental condition of the primitive, and primitive forms of worship will
+suit it best.
+
+It need hardly be said that education of the type we have been
+considering demands great gifts in the teacher: simplicity, enthusiasm,
+sympathy, and also a vigorous sense of humour, keeping him sharply aware
+of the narrow line that divides the priggish from the ideal. This
+education ought to inspire, but it ought not to replace, the fullest and
+most expert training of the body and mind; for the spirit needs a
+perfectly balanced machine, through which to express its life in the
+physical world. The actual additions to curriculum which it demands may
+be few: it is the attitude, the spirit, which must be changed.
+Specifically moral education, the building of character, will of course
+form an essential part of it: in fact must be present within it from
+the first. But this comes best without observation, and will be found to
+depend chiefly on the character of the teacher, the love, admiration and
+imitation he evokes, the ethical tone he gives. Childhood is of all ages
+the one most open to suggestion, and in this fact the educator finds at
+once his best opportunity and greatest responsibility.
+
+Ruysbroeck has described to us the three outstanding moral dispositions
+in respect of God, of man, and of the conduct of life, which mark the
+true man or woman of the Spirit; and it is in the childhood that the
+tendency to these qualities must be acquired. First, he says,--I
+paraphrase, since the old terms of moral theology are no longer vivid to
+us--there comes an attitude of reverent love, of adoration, towards all
+that is holy, beautiful, or true. And next, from this, there grows up an
+attitude towards other men, governed by those qualities which are the
+essence of courtesy: patience, gentleness, kindness, and sympathy. These
+keep us both supple and generous in our responses to our social
+environment. Last, our creative energies are transfigured by an
+energetic love, an inward eagerness for every kind of work, which makes
+impossible all slackness and dullness of heart, and will impel us to
+live to the utmost the active life of service for which we are
+born.[148]
+
+But these moral qualities cannot be taught; they are learned by
+imitation and infection, and developed by opportunity of action. The
+best agent of their propagation is an attractive personality in which
+they are dominant; for we know the universal tendency of young people to
+imitate those whom they admire. The relation between parent and child or
+master and pupil is therefore the central factor in any scheme of
+education which seeks to further the spiritual life. Only those who have
+already become real can communicate the knowledge of Reality. It is from
+the sportsman that we catch the spirit of fair-play, from the humble
+that we learn humility. The artist shows us beauty, the saint shows us
+God. It should therefore be the business of those in authority to search
+out and give scope to those who possess and are able to impart this
+triumphing spiritual life. A head-master who makes his boys live at
+their highest level and act on their noblest impulses, because he does
+it himself, is a person of supreme value to the State. It would be well
+if we cleared our minds of cant, and acknowledged that such a man alone
+is truly able to educate; since the spiritual life is infectious, but
+cannot be propagated by artificial means.
+
+Finally, we have to remember that any attempt towards the education of
+the spirit--and such an attempt must surely be made by all who accept
+spiritual values as central for life--can only safely be undertaken with
+full knowledge of its special dangers and difficulties. These dangers
+and difficulties are connected with the instinctive and intellectual
+life of the child and the adolescent, who are growing, and growing
+unevenly, during the whole period of training. They are supple as
+regards other forces than those which we bring to bear on them; open to
+suggestion from many different levels of life.
+
+Our greatest difficulty abides in the fact that, as we have seen, a
+vigorous spiritual life must give scope to the emotions. It is above all
+the heart rather than the mind which must be won for God. Yet, the
+greatest care must be exercised to ensure that the appeal to the
+emotions is free from all possibility of appeal to latent and
+uncomprehended natural instincts. This peril, to which current
+psychology gives perhaps too much attention, is nevertheless real.
+Candid students of religious history are bound to acknowledge the
+unfortunate part which it has often played in the past. These natural
+instincts fall into two great classes: those relating to
+self-preservation and those relating to the preservation of the race.
+The note of fear, the exaggerated longing for shelter and protection,
+the childish attitude of mere clinging dependence, fostered by religion
+of a certain type, are all oblique expressions of the instinct of
+self-preservation: and the rather feverish devotional moods and
+exuberant emotional expressions with which we are all familiar have,
+equally, a natural origin. Our task in the training of young people is
+to evoke enthusiasm, courage and love, without appealing to either of
+these sources of excitement. Generally speaking, it is safe to say that
+for this reason all sentimental and many anthropomorphic religious ideas
+are bad for lads and girls. These have, indeed, no part in that austere
+yet ardent love of God which inspires the real spiritual life.
+
+Our aim ought to be, to teach and impress the reality of Spirit, its
+regnancy in human life, whilst the mind is alert and supple: and so to
+teach and impress it, that it is woven into the stuff of the mental and
+moral life and cannot seriously be injured by the hostile criticisms of
+the rationalist. Remember, that the prime object of education is the
+moulding of the unconscious and instinctive nature, the home of habit.
+If we can give this the desired tendency and tone of feeling, we can
+trust the rational mind to find good reasons with which to reinforce its
+attitudes and preferences. So it is not so much the specific belief, as
+the whole spiritual attitude to existence which we seek to affirm; and
+this will be done on the whole more effectively by the generalized
+suggestions which come to the pupil from his own surroundings, and the
+lives of those whom he admires, than by the limited and special
+suggestions of a creed. It is found that the less any desired motive is
+bound up with particular acts, persons, or ideas, the greater is the
+chance of its being universalized and made good for life all round. I do
+not intend by this statement to criticize any particular presentation
+of religion. Nevertheless, educators ought to remember that a religion
+which is first entirely bound up with narrow and childish theological
+ideas, and is then presented as true in the absolute sense, is bound to
+break down under greater knowledge or hostile criticism; and may then
+involve the disappearance of the religious impulse as a whole, at least
+for a long period.
+
+Did we know our business, we ought surely to be able to ensure in our
+young people a steady and harmonious spiritual growth. The "conversion"
+or psychic convulsion which is sometimes regarded as an essential
+preliminary of any vivid awakening of the spiritual consciousness, is
+really a tribute exacted by our wrong educational methods. It is a proof
+that we have allowed the plastic creature confided to us to harden in
+the wrong shape. But if, side by side and in simplest language, we teach
+the conceptions: first, of God as the transcendent yet indwelling Spirit
+of love, of beauty and of power; next, of man's constant dependence on
+Him and possible contact with His nature in that arduous and loving act
+of attention which is the essence of prayer; last, of unselfish work and
+fellowship as the necessary expressions of all human ideals--then, I
+think, we may hope to lay the foundations of a balanced and a wholesome
+life, in which man's various faculties work together for good, and his
+vigorous instinctive life is directed to the highest ends.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 146: Spencer: "Education," Cap. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 147: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 39.]
+
+[Footnote 148: Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage,"
+Bk. I, Caps. 12-24.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
+
+
+We have come to the last chapter of this book; and I am conscious that
+those who have had the patience to follow its argument from the
+beginning, may now feel a certain sense of incompleteness. They will
+observe that, though many things have been said about the life of the
+Spirit, not a great deal seems to have been said, at any rate directly,
+about the second half of the title--the life of to-day--and especially
+about those very important aspects of our modern active life which are
+resumed in the word Social. This avoidance has been, at least in part,
+intentional. We have witnessed in this century a violent revulsion from
+the individualistic type of religion; a revulsion which parallels
+upon-its own levels, and indeed is a part of, the revolt from Victorian
+individualism in political economic life. Those who come much into
+contact with students, and with the younger and more vigorous clergy,
+are aware how far this revolt has proceeded: how completely, in the
+minds of those young people who are interested in religion, the Social
+Gospel now overpowers all other aspects of the spiritual life. Again
+and again we are assured by the most earnest among them that in their
+view religion is a social activity, and service is its proper
+expression: that all valid knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly
+known in mankind: that the use of prayer is mainly social, in that it
+improves us for service, otherwise it must be condemned as a merely
+selfish activity: finally, that the true meaning and value of suffering
+are social too. A visitor to a recent Swanwick Conference of the Student
+Christian Movement has publicly expressed his regret that some students
+still seemed to be concerned with the problems of their own spiritual
+life; and were not prepared to let that look after itself, whilst they
+started straight off to work for the social realization of the Kingdom
+of God. When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this extent, and is
+held to the exclusion of its compensating opposite, it is in a fair way
+to becoming a lie. And we have here, I think, a real confusion of ideas
+which will, if allowed to continue, react unfavourably upon the religion
+of the future; because it gives away the most sacred conviction of the
+idealist, the belief in the absolute character of spiritual values, and
+in the effort to win them as the great activity of man. Social service,
+since it is one form of such an effort, a bringing in of more order,
+beauty, joy, is a fundamental duty--the fundamental duty--of the active
+life. Man does not truly love the Perfect until he is driven thus to
+seek its incarnation in the world of time. No one doubts this. All
+spiritual teachers have said it, in one way or another, for centuries.
+The mere fact that they feel impelled to teach at all, instead of saying
+"My secret to myself"--which is so much easier and pleasanter to the
+natural contemplative--is a guarantee of the claim to service which they
+feel that love lays upon them. But this does not make such service of
+man, however devoted, either the same thing as the search for, response
+to, intercourse with God; or, a sufficient substitute for these
+specifically spiritual acts.
+
+Plainly, we are called upon to strive with all our power to bring in the
+Kingdom; that is, to incarnate in the time world the highest spiritual
+values which we have known. But our ability to do this is strictly
+dependent on those values being known, at least by some of us, at
+first-hand; and for this first-hand perception, as we have seen, the
+soul must have a measure of solitude and silence. Therefore, if the
+swing-over to a purely social interpretation of religion be allowed to
+continue unchecked, the result can only be an impoverishment of our
+spiritual life; quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which
+follows from an unbridled individualism. Without the inner life of
+prayer and-meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian
+motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active
+social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the
+channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world of
+to-day.
+
+Christ, it is true, gives nobody any encouragement for supposing that a
+merely self-cultivating sort of spirituality, keeping the home fires
+burning and so on, is anybody's main job. The main job confided to His
+friends is the preaching of the Gospel. That is, spreading Reality,
+teaching it, inserting it into existence; by prayers, words, acts, and
+also if need be by manual work, and always under the conditions and
+symbolisms of our contemporary world. But since we can only give others
+that which we already possess, this presupposes that we have got
+something of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves. The soul's
+two activities of reception and donation must be held in balance, or
+impotence and unreality will result. It is only out of the heart of his
+own experience that man really helps his neighbour: and thus there is an
+ultimate social value in the most secret responses of the soul to grace.
+No one, for instance, can help others to repentance who has not known it
+at first-hand. Therefore we have to keep the home fires burning, because
+they are the fires which raise the steam that does the work: and we do
+this mostly by the fuel with which we feed them, though partly too by
+giving free access to currents of fresh air from the outer world.
+
+We cannot read St. Paul's letters with sympathy and escape the
+conviction that in the midst of his great missionary efforts he was
+profoundly concerned too with the problems of his own inner life. The
+little bits of self-revelation that break into the epistles and,
+threaded together, show us the curve of his growth, also show us how
+much, lay behind them, how intense, and how exacting was the inward
+travail that accompanied his outward deeds. Here he is representative of
+the true apostolic type. It is because St. Augustine is the man of the
+"Confessions" that he is also the creator of "The City of God." The
+regenerative work of St. Francis was accompanied by an unremitting life
+of penitence and recollection. Fox and Wesley, abounding in labours, yet
+never relaxed the tension of their soul's effort to correspond with a
+transcendent Reality. These and many other examples warn us that only by
+such a sustained and double movement can the man of the Spirit actualize
+all his possibilities and do his real work. He must, says Ruysbroeck,
+"both ascend and descend with love."[149] On any other basis he misses
+the richness of that fully integrated human existence "swinging between
+the unseen and the seen" in which the social and individual,
+incorporated and solitary responses to the demands of Spirit are fully
+carried through. Instead, he exhibits restriction and lack balance. This
+in the end must react as unfavourably on the social as on the personal
+side of life: since the place and influence of the spiritual life in the
+social order will depend entirely on its place in the individual
+consciousness of which that social order will be built, the extent in
+which loyalty to the one Spirit governs their reactions to common daily
+experience.
+
+Here then, as in so much else, the ideal is not an arbitrary choice but
+a struck balance. First, a personal contact with Eternal Reality,
+deepening, illuminating and enlarging all of our experience of fact, all
+our responses to it: that is, faith. Next, the fullest possible sense of
+our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely
+rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life: that is, charity. The
+dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that
+divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the
+human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.
+
+It is of course true that social groups may be regenerated. The success
+of such group-formations as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of
+God, the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this. But groups, in
+the last resort, consist of individuals, who must each be regenerated
+one by one; whose outlook, if they are to be whole men, must include in
+its span abiding values as well as the stream of time, and who, for the
+full development of this their two-fold destiny, require each a measure
+both of solitude and of association. Hence it follows, that the final
+answer to the repeated question: "Does God save men, does Spirit work
+towards the regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by one, or in
+groups?" is this: that the proposed alternative is illusory. We cannot
+say that the Divine action in the world as we know it, is either merely
+social or merely individual; but both. And the next question--a highly
+practical question--is, "How _both_?" For the answer to this, if we can
+find it, will give us at last a formula by which we can true up our own
+effort toward completeness of self-expression in the here-and-now.
+
+How, then, are groups of men moved up to higher spiritual levels; helped
+to such an actual possession of power and love and a sound mind as shall
+transfigure and perfect their lives? For this, more than all else, is
+what we now want to achieve. I speak in generalities, and of average
+human nature, not of these specially sensitive or gifted individuals who
+are themselves the revealers of Reality to their fellow-men.
+
+History suggests, I think, that this group-regeneration is effected in
+the last resort through a special sublimation of the herd-instinct; that
+is, the full and willing use on spiritual levels of the characters which
+are inherent in human gregariousness.[150] We have looked at some of
+these characters in past chapters. Our study of them suggests, that the
+first stage in any social regeneration is likely to be brought about by
+the instinctive rallying of individuals about a natural leader, strong
+enough to compel and direct them; and whose appeal is to the impulsive
+life, to an acknowledged of unacknowledged lack or craving, not to the
+faculty of deliberate choice. This leader, then, must offer new life and
+love, not intellectual solutions. He must be able to share with his
+flock his own ardour and apprehension of Reality; and evoke from them
+the profound human impulse to imitation. They will catch his enthusiasm,
+and thus receive the suggestions of his teaching and of his life. This
+first stage, supremely illustrated in the disciples of Christ, and again
+in the groups who gathered round such men as St. Francis, Fox, or Booth,
+is re-experienced in a lesser way in every successful revival: and each
+genuine restoration of the life of Spirit, whether its declared aim be
+social or religious, has a certain revivalistic character. We must
+therefore keep an eye on these principles of discipleship and contagion,
+as likely to govern any future spiritualization of our own social life;
+looking for the beginnings of true reconstruction, not to the general
+dissemination of suitable doctrines, but to the living burning influence
+of an ardent soul. And I may add here, as the corollary of this
+conclusion, first that the evoking and fostering of such ardour is in
+itself a piece of social service of the highest value, and next that it
+makes every individual socially responsible for the due sharing of even
+the small measure of ardour, certitude or power he or she has received.
+We are to be conductors of the Divine energy; not to insulate it. There
+is of course nothing new in all this: but there is nothing new
+fundamentally in the spiritual life, save in St. Augustine's sense of
+the eternal youth and freshness of all beauty.[151] The only novelty
+which we can safely introduce will be in the terms in which we describe
+it; the perpetual new exhibition of it within the time-world, the fresh
+and various applications which we can give to its abiding laws, in the
+special circumstances and opportunities of our own day.
+
+But the influence of the crowd-compeller, the leader, whether in the
+crude form of the revivalist or in the more penetrating and enduring
+form of the creative mystic or religious founder, the loyalty and
+imitation of the disciple, the corporate and generalized enthusiasm of
+the group can only be the first educative phase in any veritable
+incarnation of Spirit upon earth. Each member of the herd is now
+committed to the fullest personal living-out of the new life he has
+received. Only in so far as the first stage of suggestion and imitation
+is carried over to the next stage of personal actualization, can we say
+that there is any real promotion of spiritual _life_: any hope that this
+life will work a true renovation of the group into which it has been
+inserted and achieve the social phase.
+
+If, then, it does achieve the social phase what stages may we expect it
+to pass through, and by what special characters will it be graced?
+
+Let us look back for a moment at some of our conclusions about the
+individual life. We said that this life, if fully lived, exhibited the
+four characters of work and contemplation, self-discipline and service:
+deepening and incarnating within its own various this-world experience
+its other-world apprehensions of Eternity, of God. Its temper should
+thus be both social and ascetic. It should be doubly based, on humility
+and on given power. Now the social order--more exactly, the social
+organism--in which Spirit is really to triumph, can only be built up of
+individuals who do with a greater or less perfection and intensity
+exhibit these characters, some upon independent levels of creative
+freedom, some on those of discipleship: for here all men are not equal,
+and it is humbug to pretend that they are. This social order, being so
+built of regenerate units, would be dominated by these same implicits of
+the regenerate consciousness; and would tend to solve in their light the
+special problems of community life. And this unity of aim would really
+make of it one body; the body of a fully socialized _and_ fully
+spiritualized humanity, which perhaps we might without presumption
+describe as indeed the son of God.
+
+The life of such a social organism, its growth, its cycle of corporate
+behaviour, would be strung on that same fourfold cord which combined the
+desires and deeds of the regenerate self into a series: namely,
+Penitence, Surrender, Recollection, and Work. It would be actuated first
+by a real social repentance. That is, by a turning from that constant
+capitulation to its past, to animal and savage impulse, the power of
+which our generation at least knows only too well; and by the
+complementary effort to unify vigorous instinctive action and social
+conscience. I think every one can find for themselves some sphere,
+national, racial, industrial, financial, in which social penitence could
+work; and the constant corporate fall-back into sin, which we now
+disguise as human nature, or sometimes--even more insincerely--as
+economic and political necessity, might be faced and called by its true
+name. Such a social penitence--such a corporate realization of the mess
+that we have made of things--is as much a direct movement of the Spirit,
+and as great an essential of regeneration, as any individual movement of
+the broken and contrite heart.
+
+Could a quick social conscience, aware of obligations to Reality which
+do not end with making this world a comfortable place--though we have
+not even managed that for the majority of men--feel quite at ease, say,
+after an unflinching survey of our present system of State punishment?
+Or after reading the unvarnished record of our dealings with the problem
+of Indian immigration into Africa? Or after considering the inner nature
+of international diplomacy and finance? Or even, to come nearer home,
+after a stroll through Hoxton: the sort of place, it is true, which we
+have not exactly made on purpose but which has made itself because we
+have not, as a community, exercised our undoubted powers of choice and
+action in an intelligent and loving way. Can we justify the peculiar
+characteristics of Hoxton: congratulate ourselves on the amount of
+light, air and beauty which its inhabitants enjoy, the sort of children
+that are reared in it, as the best we can do towards furthering the
+racial aim? It is a monument of stupidity no less than of meanness. Yet
+the conception of God which the whole religious experience of growing
+man presses on us, suggests that both intelligence and love ought to
+characterize His ideal for human life. Look then at these, and all the
+other things of the same kind. Look at our attitude towards
+prostitution, at the drink traffic, at the ugliness and injustice of the
+many institutions which we allow to endure. Look at them in the
+Universal Spirit; and then consider, whether a searching corporate
+repentance is not really the inevitable preliminary of a social and
+spiritual advance. All these things have happened because we have as a
+body consistently fallen below our best possible, lacked courage to
+incarnate our vision in the political sphere. Instead, we have, acted on
+the crowd level, swayed by unsublimated instincts of acquisition,
+disguised lust, self-preservation, self-assertion, and ignoble fear: and
+such a fall-back is the very essence of social sin.
+
+We have made many plans and elevations; but we have not really tried to
+build Jerusalem either in our own hearts or in "England's pleasant
+land." Blake thought that the preliminary of such a building up of the
+harmonious social order must be the building up or harmonizing of men,
+of each man; and when this essential work was really done, Heaven's
+"Countenance Divine" would suddenly declare itself "among the dark
+Satanic mills."[152] What was wrong with man, and ultimately therefore
+with society, was the cleavage between his "Spectre" or energetic
+intelligence, and "Emanation" or loving imagination. Divided, they only
+tormented one another. United, they were the material of divine
+humanity. Now the complementary affirmative movement which shall balance
+and complete true social penitence will be just such a unification and
+dedication of society's best energies and noblest ideals, now commonly
+separated. The Spectre is attending to economics: the Emanation is
+dreaming of Utopia. We want to see them united, for from this union
+alone will come the social aspect for surrender. That is to say, a
+single-minded, unselfish yielding to those good social impulses which we
+all feel from time to time, and might take more seriously did, we
+realize them as the impulsions of holy and creative Spirit pressing us
+towards novelty, giving us our chance; our small actualization of the
+universal tendency to the Divine. As it is, we do feel a little
+uncomfortable when these stirrings reach us; but commonly console
+ourselves with the thought that their realization is at present outside
+the sphere of practical politics. Yet the obligation of response to
+those stirrings is laid on all who feel them; and unless some will first
+make this venture of faith, our possible future will never be achieved.
+Christ was born among those who _expected_ the Kingdom of God. The
+favouring atmosphere of His childhood is suggested by these words. It is
+our business to prepare, so far as we may, a favourable atmosphere and
+environment for the children who will make the future: and this
+environment is not anything mysterious, it is simply ourselves. The men
+and women who are now coming to maturity, still supple to experience and
+capable of enthusiastic and disinterested choice--that is, of surrender
+in the noblest sense--will have great opportunities of influencing those
+who are younger than themselves. The torch is being offered to them; and
+it is of vital importance to the unborn future that they should grasp
+and hand it on, without worrying about whether their fingers are going
+to be burnt. If they do grasp it, they may prove to be the bringers in
+of a new world, a fresh and vigorous social order, which is based upon
+true values, controlled by a spiritual conception of life; a world in
+which this factor is as freely acknowledged by all normal persons, as is
+the movement of the earth round the sun.
+
+I do not speak here of fantastic dreams about Utopias, or of the
+coloured pictures of the apocalyptic imagination; but of a concrete
+genuine possibility, at which clear-sighted persons have hinted again
+and again. Consider our racial past. Look at the Piltdown skull:
+reconstruct the person or creature whose brain that skull contained, and
+actualize the directions in which his imperious instincts, his vaguely
+conscious will and desire, were pressing into life. They too were
+expressions of Creative Spirit; and there is perfect continuity between
+his vital impulse and our own. Now, consider one of the better
+achievements of civilization; say the life of a University, with its
+devotion to disinterested learning, its conservation of old beauty and
+quest of new truth. Even if we take its lowest common measure, the
+transfiguration of desire is considerable. Yet in the things of the
+Spirit we must surely acknowledge ourselves still to be primitive men;
+and no one can say that it yet appears what we shall be. All really
+depends on the direction in which human society decides to push into
+experience, the surrender which it makes to the impulsion of the Spirit;
+how its tendency to novelty is employed, the sort of complex habits
+which are formed by it, as more and more crude social instinct is lifted
+up into conscious intention, and given the precision of thought.
+
+In our regenerate society, then, if we ever get it, the balanced moods
+of Repentance of our racial past and Surrender to our spiritual calling,
+the pull-forward of the Spirit of Life even in its most austere
+difficult demands, will control us; as being the socialized extensions
+of these same attitudes of the individual soul. And they will press the
+community to those same balanced expressions of its instinct for
+reality, which completed the individual life: that is to say, to
+Recollection and Work. In the furnishing of a frame for the regular
+social exercise of recollection--the gathering in of the corporate mind
+and its direction to eternal values, the abiding foundations of
+existence; the consideration of all its problems in silence and peace;
+the dramatic and sacramental expression of its unity and of its
+dependence on the higher powers of life--in all this, the institutional
+religion of the future will perhaps find its true sphere of action, and
+take its rightful place in the socialized life of the Spirit.
+
+Finally, the work which is done by a community of which the inner life
+is controlled by these three factors will be the concrete expression of
+these factors in the time-world; and will perpetuate and hand on all
+that is noble, stable and reasonable in human discovery and tradition,
+whether in the sphere of conduct, of thought, of creation, of manual
+labour, or the control of nature, whilst remaining supple towards the
+demands and gifts of novelty. New value will be given to craftsmanship
+and a sense of dedication--now almost unknown--to those who direct it.
+Consider the effect of this attitude on worker, trader, designer,
+employer: how many questions would then answer themselves, how many sore
+places would be healed.
+
+It is not necessary, in order to take sides with this possible new
+order and work for it, that we should commit ourselves to any one party
+or scheme of social reform. Still less is it necessary to suppose such
+reform the only field in which the active and social side of the
+spiritual life is to be lived. Repentance, surrender, recollection and
+industry can do their transfiguring work in art, science, craftsmanship,
+scholarship, and play: making all these things more representative of
+reality, nearer our own best possible, and so more vivid and worth
+while. If Tauler was right, and all kinds of skill are gifts of the Holy
+Ghost--a proposition which no thorough-going theist can refuse--then
+will not a reference back on the part of the worker to that fontal
+source of power make for humility and perfection in all work? Personally
+I am not at all afraid to recognize a spiritual element in all good
+craftsmanship, in the delighted and diligent creation of the fine
+potter, smith or carpenter, in the well-tended garden and beehive, the
+perfectly adjusted home; for do not all these help the explication of
+the one Spirit of Life in the diversity of His gifts?
+
+The full life of the Spirit must be more rich and various in its
+expression than any life that we have yet known, and find place for
+every worthy and delightful activity. It does not in the least mean a
+bloodless goodness; a refusal of fun and everlasting fuss about uplift.
+But it does mean looking at and judging each problem in a particular
+light, and acting on that judgment without fear. Were this principle
+established, and society poised on this centre, reforms would follow its
+application almost automatically; specific evils would retreat. New
+knowledge of beauty would reveal the ugliness of many satisfactions
+which we now offer to ourselves, and new love the defective character of
+many of our social relations. Certain things would therefore leave off
+happening, would go; because the direction of desire had changed. I do
+not wish to particularize, for this only means blurring the issue by
+putting forward one's own pet reforms. But I cannot help pointing out
+that we shall never get spiritual values out of a society harried and
+tormented by economic pressure, or men and women whose whole attention
+is given up to the daily task of keeping alive. This is not a political
+statement: it is a plain fact that we must face. Though the courageous
+lives of the poor, their patient endurance of insecurity may reveal a
+nobility that shames us, it still remains true that these lives do not
+represent the most favourable conditions of the soul. It is not poverty
+that matters; but strain and the presence of anxiety and fear, the
+impossibility of detachment. Therefore this oppression at least would
+have to be lightened, before the social conscience could be at ease.
+Moreover as society advances along this way, every--even the most
+subtle--kind of cruelty and exploitation of self-advantage obtained to
+the detriment of other individuals, must tend to be eliminated; because
+here the drag-back of the past will be more and more completely
+conquered, its instincts fully sublimated, and no one will care to do
+those things any more. Bringing new feelings and more real concepts to
+our contact with our environment, we shall, in accordance with the law
+of apperception, see this environment in a different way; and so obtain
+from it a fresh series of experiences. The scale of pain and pleasure
+will be altered. We shall feel a searching responsibility about the way
+in which our money is made, and about any disadvantages to others which
+our amusements or comforts may involve.
+
+Here, perhaps, it is well to register a protest against the curious but
+prevalent notion that any such concentrated effort for the
+spiritualization of society must tend to work itself out in the
+direction of a maudlin humanitarianism, a soft and sentimental reading
+of life. This idea merely advertises once more the fact that we still
+have a very mean and imperfect conception of God, and have made the
+mistake of setting up a water-tight bulkhead; between His revelation, in
+nature and His discovery in the life of prayer. It shows a failure to
+appreciate the stern, heroic aspect of Reality; the element of austerity
+in all genuine religion, the distinction between love and
+sentimentalism, the rightful place of risk, effort, even suffering, in
+all full achievement and all joy. If we are surrendered in love to the
+purposes of the Spirit, we are committed to the bringing out of the
+best possible in life; and this is a hard business, involving a quite
+definite social struggle with evil and atavism, in which some one is
+likely to be hurt. But surely that manly spirit of adventure which has
+driven men to the North Pole and the desert, and made them battle with
+delight against apparently impossible odds, can here find its
+appropriate sublimation?
+
+If anyone who has followed these arguments, and now desires to bring
+them from idea into practice, asks: "What next?" the answer simply
+is--Begin. Begin with ourselves; and if possible, do not begin in
+solitude. "The basal principles of all collective life," says McDougall,
+"are sympathetic contagion, mass suggestion, imitation":[153] and again
+and again the history of spiritual experience illustrates this law, that
+its propagation is most often by way of discipleship and the corporate
+life, not by the intensive culture of purely solitary effort. It is for
+those who believe in the spiritual life to take full advantage now of
+this social suggestibility of man; though without any detraction from
+the prime importance of the personal spiritual life. Therefore, join up
+with somebody, find fellowship; whether it be in a church or society, or
+among a few like-minded friends. Draw together for mutual support, and
+face those imperatives of prayer and work which we have seen to be the
+condition of the fullest living-out of our existence. Fix and keep a
+reasonably balanced daily rule. Accept leadership where you find
+it--give it, if you feel the impulse and the strength. Do not wait for
+some grand opportunity, and whilst you are waiting stiffen in the wrong
+shape. The great opportunity may not be for us, but for the generation
+whose path we now prepare: and we do our best towards such preparation,
+if we begin in a small and humble way the incorporation of our hopes and
+desires as for instance Wesley and the Oxford Methodists did. They
+sought merely to put their own deeply felt ideas into action quite
+simply and without fuss; and we know how far the resulting impulse
+spread. The Bab movement in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show
+us this principle still operative; what a "little flock" dominated by a
+suitable herd-leader and swayed by love and adoration can do--and these,
+like Christianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous groups. It
+may be that our hope for the future depends on the formation of such
+groups--hives of the Spirit--in which the worker of every grade, the
+thinker, the artist, might each have their place: obtaining from
+incorporation the herd-advantages of mutual protection and unity of aim,
+and forming nuclei to which others could adhere.
+
+Such a small group--and I am now thinking of something quite practical,
+say to begin with a study-circle, or a company of like-minded friends
+with a definite rule of life--may not seem to the outward eye very
+impressive. Regarded as a unit, it will even tend to be inferior to its
+best members: but it will be superior to the weakest, and with its
+leader will possess a dynamic character and reproductive power which he
+could never have exhibited alone. It should form a compact organization,
+both fervent and business-like; and might take as its ideal a
+combination of the characteristic temper of the contemplative order,
+with that of active and intelligent Christianity as seen in the best
+type of social settlement. This double character of inwardness and
+practicality seems to me to be essential to its success; and
+incorporation will certainly help it to be maintained. The rule should
+be simple and unostentatious, and need indeed be little more than the
+"heavenly rule" of faith, hope, and charity. This will involve first the
+realization of man's true life within a spiritual world-order, his utter
+dependence upon its realities and powers of communion with them; next
+his infinite possibilities of recovery and advancement; last his duty of
+love to all other selves and things. This triple law would be applied
+without shirking to every problem of existence; and the corporate spirit
+would be encouraged by meetings, by associated prayer, and specially I
+hope by the practice of corporate silence. Such a group would never
+permit the intrusion of the controversial element, but would be based on
+mutual trust; and the fact that all the members shared substantially the
+same view of human life, strove though in differing ways for the same
+ideals, were filled by the same enthusiasms, would allow the problems
+and experiences of the Spirit to be accepted as real, and discussed with
+frankness and simplicity. Thus oases of prayer and clear thinking might
+be created in our social wilderness, gradually developing such power and
+group-consciousness as we see in really living religious bodies. The
+group would probably make some definite piece of social work, or some
+definite question, specially its own. Seeking to judge the problem this
+presented in the Universal Spirit, it would work towards a solution,
+using for this purpose both heart and head. It would strive in regard to
+the special province chosen and solution reached to make its weight
+felt, either locally or nationally, in a way the individual could never
+hope to do; and might reasonably hope that its conclusions and its
+actions would exceed in balance and sanity those which any one of the
+members could have achieved alone.
+
+I think that these groups would develop their own discipline, not borrow
+its details from the past: for they would soon find that some drill was
+necessary to them, and that luxury, idleness, self-indulgence and
+indifference to the common-good were in conflict with the inner spirit
+of the herd. They would inevitably come to practise that sane
+asceticism, not incompatible with gaiety of heart, which consists in
+concentration on the real, and quiet avoidance of the attractive sham.
+Plainness and simplicity do help the spiritual life, and these are more
+easy and wholesome when practised in common than when they are displayed
+by individuals in defiance of the social order that surrounds them. The
+differences of temperament and of spiritual level in the group members
+would prevent monotony; and insure that variety of reaction to the life
+of the Spirit which we so much wish to preserve. Those whose chief gift
+was for action would thus be directly supported by those natural
+contemplatives who might, if they remained in solitude, find it
+difficult to make their special gift serve their fellows as it must.
+Group-consciousness would cause the spreading and equalization of that
+spiritual sensitiveness which is, as a matter of fact, very unequally
+distributed amongst men. And in the backing up of the predominantly
+active workers by the organized prayerful will of the group, all the
+real values of intercession would be obtained: for this has really
+nothing to do with trying to persuade God to do specific acts, it is a
+particular way of exerting love, and thus of reaching and using
+spiritual power.
+
+This incorporation, as I see it, would be made for the express purpose
+of getting driving force with which to act directly upon life. For
+spirituality, as we have seen all along, must not be a lovely fluid
+notion or a merely self-regarding education; but an education for
+action, for the insertion of eternal values into the time-world, in
+conformity with the incarnational philosophy which justifies it. Such
+action--such Insertion--depends on constant recourse to the sources of
+spiritual power. At present we tend to starve our possible centres of
+regeneration, or let them starve themselves, by our encouragement of the
+active at the expense of the contemplative life; and till this is
+mended, we shall get nothing really done. Forgetting St. Teresa's
+warning, that to give our Lord a perfect service, Martha and Mary must
+combine,[154] we represent the service of man as being itself an
+attention to God; and thus drain our best workers of their energies, and
+leave them no leisure for taking in Fresh supplies. Often they are
+wearied and confused by the multiplicity in which they must struggle;
+and they are not taught and encouraged to seek the healing experience of
+unity. Hence even our noblest teachers often show painful signs of
+spiritual exhaustion, and tend to relapse into the formal repetition of
+a message which was once a burning fire.
+
+The continued force of any regenerative movement depends above all else
+on continued vivid contact with the Divine order, for the problems of
+the reformer are only really understood and seen in true proportion in
+its light. Such contact is not always easy: it is a form of work. After
+a time the weary and discouraged will need the support of discipline if
+they are to do it. Therefore definite role of silence and
+withdrawal--perhaps an extension of that system of periodical retreats
+which is one of the most hopeful features of contemporary religious
+life--is essential to any group-scheme for the general and social
+furtherance of the spiritual life. It is not to be denied for a moment,
+that countless good men and women who love the world in the divine and
+not in the self-regarding sense, are busy all their lives long in
+forwarding the purposes of the Spirit: which is acting through them, as
+truly as through the conscious prophets and regenerators of the race.
+But, to return for a moment to psychological language, whilst the Divine
+impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is not doing all that
+it could for us nor we all that we could do for it; for we are not
+completely unified. We can by appropriate education bring up that
+imperative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, and wittingly
+dedicate to its uses our heart, mind and will; and such realization in
+its most perfect form appears to be the psychological equivalent of the
+state which is described by spiritual writers, in their own special
+language, as "union with God."
+
+I have been at some pains to avoid the use of this special language of
+the mystics; but now perhaps we may remind ourselves that, by the
+declaration of all who have achieved it, the mature spiritual life is
+such a condition of completed harmony--such a theopathetic state.
+Therefore here to-day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble,
+no less that in the Indian forest or the mediaeval cloister, man's really
+religious method and self-expression must be harmonious with a
+life-process of which this is the recognized if distant goal: and in all
+the work of restatement, this abiding objective must be kept in view.
+Such union, such full identification with the Divine purpose, must be a
+social as well as an individual expression of full life. It cannot be
+satisfied by the mere picking out of crumbs of perfection from the
+welter, but must mean in the end that the real interests of society are
+indentical with the interests of Creative Spirit, in so far as these are
+felt and known by man; the interests, that is, of a love that is energy
+and an energy that is love. Towards this identification, the willed
+tendency of each truly awakened individual must steadfastly be set; and
+also the corporate desire of each group, as expressed in its prayer and
+work. For the whole secret of life lies in directed desire.
+
+A wide-spreading love to all in common, says Ruysbroeck in a celebrated
+passage, is the authentic mark of a truly spiritual man.[155] In this
+phrase is concealed the link between the social and personal aspects of
+the spiritual life. It means that our passional nature with its cravings
+and ardours, instead of making self-centred whirlpools, flows out in
+streams of charity and power towards all life. And we observe too that
+the Ninth Perfection of the Buddhist is such a state of active charity.
+"In his loving, sympathizing, joyful and steadfast mind he will
+recognize himself in all things, and will shed warmth and light on the
+world in all directions out of his great, deep, unbounded heart."[156]
+
+Let this, then, be the teleological objective on which the will and the
+desire of individual and group are set: and let us ask what it involves,
+and how it is achieved. It involves all the ardour, tenderness and
+idealism of the lover, spent not on one chosen object but on all living
+things. Thus it means an immense widening of the arc of human sympathy;
+and this it is not possible to do properly, unless we have found the
+centre of the circle first. The glaring defect of current religion--I
+mean the vigorous kind, not the kind that is responsible for empty
+churches--is that it spends so much time in running round the arc, and
+rather takes the centre for granted. We see a great deal of love in
+generous-minded people, but also a good many gaps in it which reference
+to the centre might help us to find and to mend. Some Christian people
+seem to have a difficulty about loving reactionaries, and some about
+loving revolutionaries. And in institutional religion there are people
+of real ardour, called by those beautiful names Catholic and
+Evangelical, who do not seem able to see each other in the light of this
+wide-spreading love. Yet they would meet at the centre. And it is at the
+centre that the real life of the Spirit aims first; thence flowing out
+to the circumference--even to its most harsh, dark, difficult and
+rugged limits--in unbroken streams of generous love.
+
+Such love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending
+itself on the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed,
+and has as its special vocation--a vocation identical with that of the
+great artist--the "loving of the unlovely into lovableness." Thus does
+it participate according to its measure in the work of Divine
+incarnation. This does not mean a maudlin optimism, or any other kind of
+sentimentality; for as we delve more deeply into life, we always leave
+sentimentality behind. But it does mean a love which is based on a deep
+understanding of man's slow struggles and of the unequal movements of
+life, and is expressed in both arduous and highly skillful actions. It
+means taking the grimy, degraded, misshapen, and trying to get them
+right; because we feel that essentially they can be right. And further,
+of course, it means getting behind them to the conditions that control
+their wrongness; and getting these right if we can. Consider what human
+society would be if each of its members--not merely occasional
+philanthropists, idealists or saints, but financiers, politicians,
+traders, employers, employed--had this quality of spreading a creative
+love: if the whole impulse of life in every man and woman were towards
+such a harmony, first with God, and then with all other things and
+souls. There is nothing unnatural in this conception. It only means that
+our vital energy would flow in its real channel at last. Where then
+would be our most heart-searching social problems? The social order then
+would really be an order; tallying with St. Augustine's definition of a
+virtuous life as the ordering of love.
+
+What about the master and the worker in such a possibly regenerated
+social order? Consider alone the immense release of energy for work
+needing to be done, if the civil wars of civilized man could cease and
+be replaced by that other mental fight, for the upbuilding of Jerusalem:
+how the impulse of Creative Spirit, surely working in humanity, would
+find the way made clear. Would not this, at last, actualize the Pauline
+dream, of each single citizen as a member of the Body of Christ? It is
+because we are not thus attuned to life, and surrendered to it, that our
+social confusion arises; the conflict of impulse within society simply
+mirrors the conflict of impulse within each individual mind.
+
+We know that some of the greatest movements of history, veritable
+transformations of the group-mind, can be traced back to a tiny
+beginning in the faithful spiritual experience and response of some one
+man, his contact with the centre which started the ripples of creative
+love. If, then, we could elevate such universalized individuals into the
+position of herd-leaders, spread their secret, persuade society first to
+imitate them, and then to share their point of view, the real and sane,
+because love-impelled social revolution might begin. It will begin, when
+more and ever more people find themselves unable to participate in, or
+reap advantage from, the things which conflict with love: when tender
+emotion in man is so universalized, that it controls the instincts of
+acquisitiveness and of self-assertion. There are already for each of us
+some things in which we cannot participate, because they conflict too
+flagrantly with some aspect of our love, either for truth, or for
+justice, or for humanity, or for God; and these things each individual,
+according to his own level of realization, is bound to oppose without
+compromise. Most of us have enough widespreading love to be--for
+instance--quite free from temptation to be cruel, at any rate directly,
+to children or to animals. I say nothing about the indirect tortures
+which our sloth and insensitiveness still permit. Were these first
+flickers made ardent, and did they control all our reactions to
+life--and there is nothing abnormal, no break in continuity involved in
+this, only a reasonable growth--then, new paths of social discharge
+would have been made for-our chief desires and impulses; and along these
+they would tend more and more to flow freely and easily, establishing
+new social-habits, unhampered by solicitations from our savage past. To
+us already, on the whole, these solicitations are less insistent than
+they were to the men of earlier centuries. We see their gradual defeat
+in slave emancipation, factory acts, increased religious tolerance,
+every movement towards social justice, every increase of the arc over
+which our obligations to other men obtain. They must now disguise
+themselves as patriotic or economic necessities, if we are to listen to
+them: as, in the Freudian dream, our hidden unworthy wishes slip through
+into consciousness in a symbolic form. But when their energy has been
+fully sublimated, the social action will no longer be a conflict but a
+harmony. Then we shall live the life of Spirit; and from this life will
+flow all love-inspired reform.
+
+Yet we are, above all, to avoid the conclusion that the spiritual life,
+in its social expression, shall necessarily push us towards mere change;
+that novelty contains everything, and stability nothing, of the will of
+the Spirit for the race. Surely our aim shall be this: that religious
+sensitiveness shall spread, as our discovery of religion in the universe
+spreads, so that at last every man's reaction to the whole of experience
+shall be entinctured with Reality, coloured by this dominant
+feeling-tone. Spirit would then work from within outwards, and all life
+personal and social, mental and physical, would be moulded by its
+inspiring power. And in looking here for our best hope of development,
+we remain safely within history; and do not strive for any desperate
+pulling down or false simplification of our complex existence, such as
+has wrecked many attempts to spiritualize society in the past.
+
+Consider the way by which we have come. We found in man an instinct for
+a spiritual Reality. A single, concrete, objective Fact, transcending
+yet informing his universe, compels his adoration, and is apperceived by
+him in three main ways. First, as the very Being, Heart and Meaning of
+that universe, the universal of all universals, next as a Presence
+including and exceeding the best that personality can mean to him, last
+as an indwelling and energizing Life. We saw in history the persistent
+emergence of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as to subdue to
+its interests all the activities of life; ever seeking to incarnate its
+abiding values in the world of time. And further, psychology suggested
+to us, even in its tentative new findings, its exploration of our
+strange mental deeps, reason for holding such surrender to the purposes
+of the Spirit to represent the condition of man's fullest psychic
+health, and access to his real sources of power. We found in the
+universal existence of religious institutions further evidence of this
+profound human need of spirituality. We saw there the often sharp and
+sky-piercing intensity of the individual aptitude for Reality enveloped,
+tempered and made wholesome by the social influences of the cultus and
+the group: made too, available for the community by the symbolisms that
+cultus had preserved. So that gradually the life of the Spirit emerged
+for us as something most actual, not archaic: a perennial possibility of
+newness, of regeneration, a widening of our span of pain and joy. A
+human fact, completing and most closely linked with those other human
+facts, the vocation to service, to beauty, to truth. A fact, then,
+which must control our view of personal self-discipline, of education,
+and of social effort: since it refers to the abiding Reality which alone
+gives all these their meaning and worth, and which man, consciously or
+unconsciously, must pursue.
+
+And last, if we ask as a summing up of the whole matter: _Why_ man is
+thus to seek the Eternal, through, behind and within the ever-fleeting?
+The answer is that he cannot, as a matter of fact, help doing it sooner
+or later: for his heart is never at rest, till it finds itself there.
+But he often wastes a great deal of time before he realizes this. And
+perhaps we may find the reason why man--each man--is thus pressed
+towards some measure of union with Reality, in the fact that his
+conscious will thus only becomes an agent of the veritable purposes of
+life: of that Power which, in and through mankind, conserves and slowly
+presses towards realization the noblest aspirations of each soul. This
+power and push we may call if we like in the language of realism the
+tendency of our space-time universe towards deity; or in the language of
+religion, the working of the Holy Spirit. And since, so far as we know,
+it is only in man that life becomes self-conscious, and ever more and
+more self-conscious, with the deepening and widening of his love and his
+thought; so it is only in man that it can dedicate the will and desire
+which are life's central qualities to the furtherance of this Divine
+creative aim.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 149: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 150: A good general discussion in Tansley: "The New Psychology
+and its Relation to Life," Caps. 19, 20.]
+
+[Footnote 151: Aug. Conf., Bk. X, Cap. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 152: Blake; "Jerusalem."]
+
+[Footnote 153: "Social Psychology," Cap. i.]
+
+[Footnote 154: "The Interior Castle": Sleuth Habitation, Cap. IV.]
+
+[Footnote 155: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk. II, Cap.
+44.]
+
+[Footnote 156: Warren: "Buddhism in Translations," p. 28.]
+
+
+
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+--Theory and History of Historiography, trans. by D. Ainslie. London,
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+_Harold Hoeffding_. The Philosophy of Religion. London, 1906.
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+_Edmond Holmes_. What Is and What Might Be. London, 1911.
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+--Give me the Young, London, 1921.
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+_William James_. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London, 1902.
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+--Principles of Psychology. London, 1901.
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+Lewis. London, 1906.
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+--The Dark Night of the Soul, trans. by David Lewis. London, 1908.
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+--Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
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+Englished by R. Misyn (E.E.T.S. 106).London, 1896.
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+Truth, and the Sparkling Stone, trans. from the Flemish by C.A.
+Wynschenk Dom. London, 1916.
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+--The Book of the XII Beguines, trans. by John Francis. London, 1913.
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+Practical Religion. London, 1921.
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+1920.
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+London, 1912.
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+--The Way of Perfection, ed. by E.R. Waller. London, 1902.
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+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+  Abreaction, 109
+
+  Abu Said, 16
+
+  Adolescence, 240 seq.
+
+  Alexander, S. 26
+
+  Angela of Foligno, Blessed, 99, 130
+
+  Apperception, 179, 284
+
+  Aquinas, St. Thomas, 26, 58, 200
+
+  Asceticism, 69, 89, 288
+
+  Augustine, St., 8, 13, 27, 60, 198, 202, 208, 270, 273, 295
+
+  Autistic thought, 112, 117, seq.
+
+  Auto Suggestion _see_ Suggestion
+
+
+  Baudouin, C., 144, 173
+
+  Benedict, St. 48, 64, seq., 68, 210
+
+  Benedictine Order, 52, 61, 64, seq.
+
+  Bernard, St. 52
+
+  Bhakti Marga, 18, 21
+
+  Bible-reading, 212
+
+  Blake, W., 11, 33, 46, 71, 277
+
+  Boehme, Jacob, 4, 33, 55, 70, 84, 86, 89, 118, 150, seq., 198, 201,
+  204, 244
+
+  Bonaventura, St., 146
+
+  Booth, General, 54, 59, 63, 96
+
+  Bosanquet, Bernard 6
+
+  Brahmo Samaj, 155
+
+  Brothers of Common Life, 52
+
+  Buddhism, 72, 182, 258, 292
+
+  Butler, Dom C., 65, 169
+
+
+  Caird, Edward, 246
+
+  Catherine of Genoa, St., 55, 67, 70, 71
+
+  Catherine of Siena, St., 68, 71, 87, 128
+
+  Christianity, Primitive, 56, 164
+
+  Church, 155, seq.
+    essentials of, 164, seq., 171
+    future, 188, 281
+    gifts of, 161
+    limitations, 170
+
+  Cloud of Unknowing, The, 87, 96, 104, seq., 110, 123, 143, 145, 146,
+  147, 151, 248
+
+  Complex, 108, seq.
+
+  Conflict, Psychic, 81, 88, 100, 103, 216, seq.
+
+  Consciousness, 116, seq.
+    group, 162, seq., 288, seq.
+    spiritual, 219, 225
+
+  Contemplation, 17, 121, seq., 138, seq., 212, 219 in children, 260
+
+  Conversion, 68, 75, 89, 93, 103, 265
+
+  Croce, Benedetto, 41, 43
+
+  Cultus, 171, seq.
+
+
+  Dante, 9
+
+  Delatte, Abbot, 65
+
+  Dionysius, the Areopagite, 9, 141
+
+  Discipleship, 58, 271, seq.
+
+  Donne, John, 16, 46
+
+
+  Eckhart, Master, 9, 142
+
+  Education, 102, seq., 177 seq.
+    factors of, 231, seq.
+    Spencer on, 234
+    Spiritual, 179, 206, 228, seq., 243, seq., 251, 264
+    dangers of, 250, seq., 262
+
+  Emotion, Religious, 18, 99, 145, 250, 263
+
+  Eternal Life, 3, 48, 195, 271
+
+  Everard, John, 35, 40
+
+
+  Fox, George, 8, 45, 59, 62, 67, 96, 109, 155, 215, 270, 273
+
+  Francis of Assisi, St., 47, 54, 59, 61, 63, 67, 270, 273
+
+  Friends of God, 63, 271
+
+  Fry, Elizabeth, 55, 63, 210
+
+
+  Gardner, Edmund, 87
+
+  God, Experience of, 7 seq., 74, 127, 214, 238, seq., 252, 275, 298
+    personality of, 9, seq., 17 seq.
+
+  Grace, 138, seq., 206, 211
+
+  Groot, Gerard, 68
+
+  Groups, 61, 271, 285, seq.
+
+  Guyon, Madame, 143
+
+
+  Habit, 85, 90, 102, 172
+
+  Hadfield, J.A., 100
+
+  Haldane, Viscount, 28
+
+  Hayward, F.H., 259
+
+  Hinduism, 18, 21, 45, 51, 155, 182
+
+  History and spiritual life, 38, seq., 212
+    in education, 256, seq.
+
+  Hoeffding, H., 24, 212
+
+  Huegel, Baron, F. von, 2, 29, 52, 70, 125, 209
+    on spiritual life, 195, seq.
+
+  Humility, 109, 217, 275, 282
+
+  Hymns, 148, 173, seq.
+
+
+  Ignatius, Loyola, St., 61, 68, 95
+
+  Instinct, 76, 78, seq., 90, seq., 102, 263
+    herd, 272
+    in children, 249
+
+  Intercession, 289
+
+  Introversion, 121
+
+  Isaiah, 12
+
+
+  Jacopone da Todi, 12, 55, 68, 90, 93, 107, 131
+
+  James, William, 157
+
+  Jerome, St., 154
+
+  Jesus Christ, 17, 40, 47, 51, 56, 59, 61, 156, 182, 198, 202, 268,
+  273, 279
+
+  Joan of Arc, St., 95
+
+  "John Inglesant", 61
+
+  John, St., 107, 244
+
+  John of the Cross, St., 128, 208
+
+  Julian of Norwich, 20, 87, 135, 144
+
+
+  Kabir, 5, 11, 70, 155, 198
+
+
+  Lawrence, Brother, 55
+
+  Law, William, 27, 90, 91
+
+  Liturgy, _see_ Cultus
+
+  Livingstone, W.P., 96
+
+  Love, 90, 97, 104, 211, 244, seq., 292, seq.
+    defined, 200, seq.
+
+  Lucie, Christine, 14
+
+
+  Mass, The, 177
+
+  McDougall, W., 163, 285
+
+  McGovern, W.M., 72
+
+  Mechthild of Magdeburg, St., 89, 129
+
+  Memory, 179, seq.
+
+  Methodists, 15, 53, 286
+
+  Mind, analysis of, 76, seq.
+    foreconscious, 117, seq.
+    instinctive, 89, seq., 137, seq.
+    primitive, 82, 99, 104, 181, seq.
+    rational, 100, seq.
+    unconscious, 114, seq., 141, seq., 230, 264
+
+  Motive, 84, 109
+
+  Mystical Experience, 99, 107, 113
+
+
+  Nanak, 155
+
+  Nicholson, Reynold, 11, 16, 18, 51, 70
+
+
+  Pascal, 137
+
+  Patmore, Coventry, 119
+
+  Paul, St., 13, 52, 55, 63, 68, 81, 83, 95, 136, 210, 244, 269
+
+  Penn, William, 36, 125, 137
+
+  Plotinus, 2, 5, 11, 18, 29, 37, 77, 201, 205
+
+  Pratt, J.B., 20, 149, 157
+
+  Prayer 52, 108, 113, 120, seq., 199, 204, seq., 211, 253, 265, seq.
+    Childrens', 229, 243
+    corporate, 169, 286
+    distractions in, 126, 149
+    education in, 102, 248
+    of quiet, 124, 141
+    Sadhu on, 209
+    short act, 144
+    and suggestion 138, seq.
+    vocal, 144
+    and work, 253
+
+  Psyche, The, 77, seq., 103, 116, 230
+
+  Purgation, 69, 76, 90, 108, seq., 218
+
+
+  Quakers, 63, 164, 174, 258
+
+
+  Ramakrishna, 149
+
+  Recollection, 123, seq., 139, 208, 219, seq.
+    corporate, 281
+
+  Regeneration, 15, 89, 94
+  corporate, 271, seq., 293, seq.
+
+  Religious ceremonies, 173, seq., 188
+    education, 179, seq.
+    institutions, 154, seq., 281
+    magic 185, seq.
+    orders, 60
+
+  Repentance, 108, seq., 218, 269
+    social, 275, seq.
+
+  Reverie, 117, 122, seq.
+
+  Richard of St. Victor, 55, 58
+
+  Rolle, Richard, 41, seq., 67
+
+  Rosary, 144
+
+  Russell, Bertrand, 102, 179
+
+  Ruysbroeck, 17, 17, 51, 54, seq., 106, 120, seq., 126, 142, 199, 212,
+  261, 270, 292
+
+
+  Sacrifice, 185
+
+  Sadhu, Sundar, Singh, 68, 130, 209
+
+  Saints, 41, 257
+
+  Salvation, 76, 89, seq.
+
+  Salvation Army, 48, 91, 260, 286
+
+  Semon, R., 179
+
+  Sin, 76, 81, 85, seq., 109, 149, 218
+    corporate, 276
+
+  Sins, Seven Deadly, 93
+
+  Slessor, Mary, 54, seq., 96
+
+  Social reform, 282, seq., 296
+    service, 267, seq.
+
+  Spencer, Herbert, 234
+
+  Spirit of Power, 13, 52, 62, 222, 290
+
+  Spiritual Life
+    in adolescence, 247, seq.
+    characters of, 22, seq., 32, 43, 54, 58, 64, 76, 96, seq.,
+    158, seq., 192, seq., 221, seq., 261, 269, 274, seq., 283, 292, 298
+    contagious, 56, seq., 72, 169, 261, 273, 285, seq., 295
+    corporate, 58, 153, seq., 168, 250, 254, 275, seq., 285, seq.
+    dangers of 99, seq., 263
+    development of, 67, seq., 108, 213, seq.
+    and education, 228, seq.
+    and history, 38, seq., 159, seq., 212
+    and institutions 158, seq.
+    personal, 191, seq., 250, seq., 256, 268, 274
+    and prayer, 204, seq.
+    and, psychology, 76, seq., 195, seq.
+    and reading, 211
+    social, aspect of, 266, seq.
+    and work, 222, 253, 256, 282
+
+  Spiritual Type, 51, 192, seq., 226
+
+  Stigmata, 134
+
+  Streeter, B.H., 47, 130
+
+  Sublimation, 91, 96, seq., 110, 201. 297
+
+  Sufis, 11, 16, 18, 51, 59, 70, 155, 258
+
+  Suggestion, 75, 103, 132, seq., 167
+  and faith, 137
+    laws of, 141, seq.
+    in worship, 148, 173, seq.
+
+  Surrender, 220, 299
+
+  Symbols, 127, seq., 173, seq., 180, seq.
+
+
+  Tagore, Maharerhi Devendranath, 13, 14, 51, 67, 213
+
+  Tansley, C., 272
+
+  Tauler, 257, 282
+
+  Teresa, St, 47, 54, 61, 69, 71, 88, 95, 123, 142, 150, 202, 212, 290
+
+  Theologia, Germanica, 211, 222
+
+  Therese de l'Enfant, Jesus, Venerable, 137, 148
+
+  Thomas a Kempis, 48, 83, 128, 139, 198, 212
+
+  Trinity, Doctrine of, 14
+
+  Trotter, W.F., 168
+
+
+  Unamuno, Don M. de, 10, 85
+
+  Unification, 98, seq., 110, 195, 198, 221, 227, 278
+
+  Union with God, 67, 72, 204, 291, 299
+
+  Upton, T., 10
+
+
+  Varendonck, J., 117
+
+  Vincent de Paul, St. 55
+
+  Virtues, Evangelical, 94
+
+  Visions, 129, seq.
+
+  Vocation, 220, 225, 294, 300
+
+
+  Wesley, John, 53, 55, 62, 71, 210, 270
+
+  Work, 222, 253, 282
+
+  Worship, 175, 255, 260
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
+To-day, by Evelyn Underhill
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