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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]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Garrett Alley, and the Online
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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








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