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 Sūfi's Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian piety which are familiar to all of us—this devotion too passes beyond its immediate goal and the relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized. It is characteristic of the primitive mind that it finds a difficulty about universals, and is most at home with particulars. The success of Christianity as a world-religion largely abides in the way in which it meets this need. It is notorious that the person of Jesus, rather than the Absolute God, is the object of average Protestant devotion. So too the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach God through and in his special saint, or even a special local form of the Madonna. This is the inevitable corollary of the psychic level at which he lives; and to speak contemptuously of his "superstition" is wholly beside the point. Other great faiths have been compelled by experience to meet need of a particular object on which the primitive religious consciousness can fasten itself: conspicuous examples being the development within Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and within pore Brahminism of Krishna worship. Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that the life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently from our simplest human impulses and needs. Yet, since the Universal, the Idea, is manifested in each such particular, we need not refuse to allow that the mass of men do thus enjoy—in a way that their psychic level makes natural to them—their own measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of God; and already live according to their measure a spiritual life.

These objects of religious cultus, then, and the whole symbolic faith-world which is built up of them, with its angels and demons, its sharply defined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications which embody certain attributes of God for us, the purity and gentleness of the Mother, the simplicity and infinite possibility of the Child, the divine self-giving of the Cross;—more, the Lamb, the Blood and the Fire of the revivalists, the oil and water, bread and wine, of a finished Sacramentalism—all these may be regarded as the vestures placed by man, at one stage or another of his progress, on the freely-given but ineffable spiritual fact. Like other clothes, they have now become closely identified with that which wears them. And we strip them off at our own peril: for this proceeding, grateful as it may be to our intellects, may leave us face to face with a mystery which we dare not look at, and cannot grasp.

So, cultus has done a mighty thing for humanity, in evolving and conserving the system of symbols through which the Infinite and Eternal can be in some measure expressed. The history of these symbols goes back, as we now know, to the infancy of the race, and forward to the last productions of the religious imagination; all of which bear the image of our past They are like coins, varying in beauty, and often of slight intrinsic value; but of enormous importance for our spiritual currency, because accepted as the representatives of a real wealth. In its symbols, the cultus preserves all the past levels of religious response achieved by the race; weaving them into the fabric of religion, and carrying them forward into the present. All the instinctive movements of the primitive mind; its fear of the invisible, its self-subjection, its trust in ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices, its tendency to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy off the unknown, to set up magicians and mediators, are represented in it. Its function is racial more than individual. It is the art-work of the folk-soul in the religious sphere. Here man's inveterate creative faculty seizes on the raw material given him by religious-intuition, and constructs from it significant shapes. We misunderstand, then, the whole character of religious symbolism if we either demand rationality from it, or try to adapt its imagery to the lucid and probably mistaken conclusions of the sophisticated, modern mind.

We are learning to recognize these primitive and racial elements in popular religion, and to endure their presence with tolerance; because they are necessary, and match a level of mental life which is still active in the race. This more primitive life emerges to dominate all crowds—where the collective mental level is inevitably lower than that of the best individuals immersed in it—and still conditions many of our beliefs and deeds. There is the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine powers; which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, insists on regarding as somehow hostile to us and wanting to be bought off. There is the whole idea and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more than the big apples and vegetable marrows of the harvest festival be involved in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical efficacy which some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites, shrines, liturgic formulae and religious objects; others, to the texts of their scriptures.[128] These things, and others like them, are not only significant survivals from the past. They also represent the religious side of something that continues active in us at present. Since, then, it should clearly be the object of all spiritual endeavor to win the whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in language that they understand, we should not too hurriedly despise or denounce these things. Far better that our primitive emotions, with their vast store of potential energy, should be won for spiritual interests on the only terms which they can grasp, than that they should be left to spend themselves on lower objects.

If therefore the spiritual or the regenerate life is not likely to prosper without some incorporation in institutions, some definite link with the past, it seems also likely to need for its full working-out and propaganda the symbols and liturgy of a cultus. Here again, the right path will be that of fulfilment, not of destruction; a deeper investigation of the full meaning of cultus, the values it conserves and the needs it must meet, a clearer and humbler understanding of our human limitations. We must also clearly realize as makers of the future, that as the Church has its special dangers of conservatism, cosiness, intolerance, a checking of initiative, the domestic tendency to enclose itself and shirk reality; so the cultus has also its special dangers, of which the chief are perhaps formalism, magic, and spiritual sloth. Receiving and conserving as it does all the successive deposits of racial experience, it is the very home of magic: of the archaic tendency to attribute words and deeds, special power to a priestly caste, and to make of itself the essential mediator between Creative Spirit and the soul. Further, using perpetually as it does and must symbols of the most archaic sort, directly appealing to the latent primitive in each of us, it offers us a perpetual temptation to fall back into something below our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting owner to the revivalists' penitent-bench.

But on the other hand, Creative Spirit is not merely conservative. The Lord and Giver of Life presses forward, and perpetually brings novelty to birth; and in so far as we are dedicated to Him, we must not make an unconditional surrender to psychic indolence, or to the pull-back of the religious past. We may not, as Christians, accept easy emotions in the place of heroic and difficult actualizations: make external religion an excuse for dodging reality, immerse ourselves in an exquisite dream, or tolerate any real conflict between old cultus and actual living faith. A most delicate discrimination is therefore demanded from us; the striking of a balance between the rightful conservatism of the cultus and the rightful independence of the soul. Yet, this is not to justify even in the most advanced a wholesale iconoclasm. Time after time, experience has proved that the attempt to approach God "without means," though it may seem to describe the rare and sacred moments of the personal life of the Spirit, is beyond the power of the mass of men; and even those who do achieve it are, as it were, most often supported from behind by religious history and the religious culture of their day. I do not think it can be doubted that the right use of cultus does-increase religious sensitiveness. Therefore here the difficult task of the future must be to preserve and carry forward its essential elements, all the symbolic significance, all the incorporated emotion, which make it one of man's greatest works of art; whilst eliminating those features which are, in the bad sense, conventional and no longer answer to experience or communicate life.

Were we truly reasonable human beings, we should perhaps provide openly and as a matter of course within the Christian frame widely different types of ceremonial religion, suited to different levels of mind and different developments of the religious consciousness. To some extent this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism, revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. But these varying types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in the relative though none in the absolute sense. Did we more openly acknowledge the character of that life, the historic Churches would no longer invite the sophisticated to play down to their own primitive fantasies; to sing meaningless hymns and recite vindictive psalms, or lull themselves by the recitation of litany or rosary which, admirable as the instruments of suggestion, are inadequate expressions of the awakened spiritual life. On the one hand, they would not require the simple to express their corporate religious feeling in Elizabethan English or Patristic Latin; on the other, expect the educated to accept at face-value symbols of which the unreal character is patent to them. Nor would they represent these activities as possessing absolute value in themselves.

To join in simplicity and without criticism in the common worship, humbly receiving its good influences, is one thing. This is like the drill of the loyal soldier; welding him to his neighbours, giving him the corporate spirit and forming in him the habits he needs. But to stop short at that drill, and tell the individual that drill is the essence of his life and all his duty, is another thing altogether. It confuses means and end; destroys the balance between liberty and law. If the religious institution is to do its real work in furthering the life of the Spirit, it must introduce a more rich variety into its methods; and thus educate souls of every type not only to be members of the group but also to grow up to the full richness of the personal life. It must offer them—as indeed Catholicism does to some extent already—both easy emotion and difficult mystery; both dramatic ceremony and ceremonial silence. It must also give to them all its hoarded knowledge of the inner life of prayer and contemplation, of the remaking of the moral nature on supernatural levels: all the gold that there is in the deposit of faith. And it must not be afraid to impart that knowledge in modern terms which all can understand. All this it can and will do if its members sufficiently desire it: which means, if those who care intensely for the life of the Spirit accept their corporate responsibilities. In the last resort, criticism of the Church, of Christian institutionalism, is really criticism of ourselves. Were we more spiritually alive, our spiritual homes would be the real nesting places of new life. That which the Church is to us is the result of all that we bring to, and ask from, history: the impact of our present and its past.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 119: William James: "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 31.]

[Footnote 120: On this point compare Von Huegel: "Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion," pp. 230 et seq.]

[Footnote 121: W. McDougall: "The Group Mind," Cap. 3.]

[Footnote 122: Von Huegel "Eternal Life," p. 377.]

[Footnote 123: Cf. Trotter: "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War."]

[Footnote 124: Dom Cuthbert Butler in the "Hibbert Journal," 1906, p. 502.]

[Footnote 125: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Cap. VII.]

[Footnote 126: Cf. R. Semon: "Die Mneme."]

[Footnote 127: Bertrand Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," p. 78.]

[Footnote 128: A quaint example of this occurred in a recent revival, where the exclamation "We believe in the Word of God from cover to cover, Alleluia!" received the fervent reply, "And the covers too!"]



CHAPTER VI

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL

In the last three chapters we have been concerned, almost exclusively, with those facts of psychic life and growth, those instruments and mechanizations, which bear upon or condition our spiritual life. But these wanderings in the soul's workshops, and these analyses of the forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life. I wish now to come out of the workshop, and try to see this spiritual life as the individual man may and should achieve it, from another angle of approach.

What are we to regard as the heart of spirituality? When we have eliminated the accidental characters with which varying traditions have endowed it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its possessor from the best, most moral citizen or devoted altruist? Why do the Christian saint, Indian rishi, Buddhist arhat, Moslem Sūfi, all seem to us at bottom men of one race, living under different sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact? This life, which they show in its various perfections, includes it is true the ethical life, but cannot be equated with it. Wherein do its differentia consist? We are dealing with the most subtle of realities and have only the help of crude words, developed for other purposes than this. But surely we come near to the truth, as history and experience show it to us, when we say again that the spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life that means God in all His richness, immanent and transcendent: the whole response to the Eternal and Abiding of which any one man is capable, expressed in and through his this-world life. It requires then an objective vision or certitude, something to aim at; and also a total integration of the self, its dedication to that aim. Both terms, vision and response, are essential to it.

This definition may seem at first sight rather dull. It suggests little of that poignant and unearthly beauty, that heroism, that immense attraction, which really belong to the spiritual life. Here indeed we are dealing with poetry in action: and we need not words but music to describe it as it really is. Yet all the forms, all the various beauties and achievements of this life of the Spirit, can be resumed as the reactions of different temperaments to the one abiding and inexhaustibly satisfying Object of their love. It is the answer made by the whole supple, plastic self, rational and instinctive, active and contemplative, to any or all of those objective experiences of religion which we considered in the first chapter; whether of an encompassing and transcendent Reality, of a Divine Companionship or of Immanent Spirit. Such a response we must believe to be itself divinely actuated. Fully made, it is found on the one hand to call forth the most heroic, most beautiful, most tender qualities in human nature; all that we call holiness, the transfiguration of mere ethics by a supernatural loveliness, breathing another air, satisfying another standard, than those of the temporal world. And on the other hand, this response of the self is repaid by a new sensitiveness and receptivity, a new influx of power. To use theological language, will is answered by grace: and as the will's dedication rises towards completeness the more fully does new life flow in. Therefore it is plain that the smallest and humblest beginning of such a life in ourselves—and this inquiry is useless unless it be made to speak to our own condition—will entail not merely an addition to life, but for us too a change in our whole scale of values, a self-dedication. For that which we are here shown as a possible human achievement is not a life of comfortable piety, or the enjoyment of the delicious sensations of the armchair mystic. We are offered, it is true, a new dower of life; access to the full possibilities of human nature. But only upon terms, and these terms include new obligations in respect of that life; compelling us, as it appears, to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual refusal to sink back into the next-best, to slide along a gentle incline. The spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe distance from the Fire of Love. It demands, indeed, very often things so hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman: immensely generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means a complete conquest of life's perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance of hardship and pain. And if we ask how this can be, what it is that makes possible such enhancement of human will and of human courage, the only answer seems to be that of the Johannine Christ: that it does consist in a more abundant life.

In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and for the new ideals. There was something of the penitent, something of the contemplative, and something of the apostle in every man or woman who thus grew to their full stature and realized all their latent possibilities. But above all there was a fortitude, an all-round power of tackling existence, which comes from complete indifference to personal suffering or personal success. And further, psychology showed us, that those workings and readjustments which we saw preparing this life of the Spirit, were in line with those which prepare us for fullness of life on other levels: that is to say the harnessing of the impulsive nature to the purposes chosen by consciousness, the resolving of conflicts, the unification of the whole personality about one's dominant interest. These readjustments were helped by the deliberate acceptance of the useful suggestions of religion, the education of the foreconscious, the formation of habits of charity and prayer.

The greatest and most real of living writers on this subject, Baron von Huegel, has given us another definition of the personal spiritual life which may fruitfully be compared with this. It must and shall, he says, exhibit rightful contact with and renunciation of the Particular and Fleeting; and with this ever seeks and finds the Eternal—deepening and incarnating within its own experience this "transcendent Otherness."[129] Nothing which we are likely to achieve can go beyond this profound saying. We see how many rich elements are contained in it: effort and growth, a temper both social and ascetic, a demand for and a receiving of power. True, to some extent it restates the position at which we arrived in the first chapter: but we now wish to examine more thoroughly into that position and discover its practical applications. Let us then begin by unpacking it, and examining its chief characters one by one.

If we do this, we find that it demands of us:—(1) Rightful contact with the Particular and Fleeting. That is, a willing acceptance of all this-world tasks, obligations, relations, and joys; in fact, the Active Life of Becoming in its completeness.

(2) But also, a certain renunciation of that Particular and Fleeting. A refusal to get everything out of it that we can for ourselves, to be possessive, or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a sense of detachment or asceticism; of further destiny and obligation for the soul than complete earthly happiness or here-and-now success.

(3) And with this ever—not merely in hours of devotion—to seek and find the Eternal; penetrating our wholesome this-world action through and through with the very spirit of contemplation.

(4) Thus deepening and incarnating—bringing in, giving body to, and in some sense exhibiting by means of our own growing and changing experience—that transcendent Otherness, the fact of the Life of the Spirit in the here-and-now.

The full life of the Spirit, then, is once more declared to be active, contemplative, ascetic and apostolic; though nowadays we express these abiding human dispositions in other and less formidable terms. If we translate them as work, prayer, self-discipline and social service they do not look quite so bad. But even so, what a tremendous programme to put before the ordinary human creature, and how difficult it looks when thus arranged! That balance to be discovered and held between due contact with this present living world of time, and due renunciation of it. That continual penetration of the time-world with the spirit of Eternity.

But now, in accordance with the ruling idea which has occupied us in this book, let us arrange these four demands in different order. Let us put number three first: "ever seeking and finding the Eternal." Conceive, at least, that we do this really, and in a practical way. Then we discover that, placed as we certainly are in a world of succession, most of the seeking and finding has got to be done there; that the times of pure abstraction in which we touch the non-successive and supersensual must be few. Hence it follows that the first and second demands are at once fully met; for, if we are indeed faithfully seeking and finding the Eternal whilst living—as all sane men and women must do—in closest contact with the Particular and Fleeting, our acceptances and our renunciations will be governed by this higher term of experience. And further, the transcendent Otherness, perpetually envisaged by us as alone giving the world of sense its beauty, reality and value, will be incarnated and expressed by us in this sense-life, and thus ever more completely tasted and known. It will be drawn by us, as best we can, and often at the cost of bitter struggle, into the limitations of humanity; entincturing our attitude and our actions. And in the degree in which we thus appropriate it, it will be given out by us again to other men.

All this, of course, says again that which men have been constantly told by those who sought to redeem them from their confusions, and show them the way to fullness of life. "Seek first the Kingdom of God," said Jesus, "and all the rest shall be added to you." "Love," said St. Augustine, "and do what you like"; "Let nothing," says Thomas a Kempis, "be great or high or acceptable to thee but purely God";[130] and Kabir, "Open your eyes of love, and see Him who pervades this world! consider it well, and know that this is your own country."[131] "Our whole teaching," says Boehme, "is nothing else than how man should kindle in himself God's light-world."[132] I do not say that such a presentation of it makes the personal spiritual life any easier: nothing does that. But it does make its central implicit rather clearer, shows us at once its difficulty and its simplicity; since it depends on the consistent subordination of every impulse and every action to one regnant aim and interest—in other words, the unification of the whole self round one centre, the highest conceivable by man. Each of man's behaviour-cycles is always directed towards some end, of which he may or may not be vividly conscious. But in that perfect unification of the self which is characteristic of the life of Spirit, all his behaviour is brought into one stream of purpose, and directed towards one transcendent end. And this simplification alone means for him a release from conflicting wishes, and so a tremendous increase of power.

If then we admit this formula, "ever seeking and finding the Eternal"—which is of course another rendering of Ruysbroeck's "aiming at God"—as the prime character of a spiritual life, the secret of human transcendence; what are the agents by which it is done?

Here, men and women of all times and all religions, who have achieved this fullness of life, agree in their answer: and by this answer we are at once taken away from dry philosophic conceptions and introduced into the very heart of human experience. It is done, they say, on man's part by Love and Prayer: and these, properly understood in their inexhaustible richness, joy, pain, dedication and noble simplicity, cover the whole field of the spiritual life. Without them, that life is impossible; with them, if the self be true to their implications, some measure of it cannot be escaped. I said, Love and Prayer properly understood: not as two movements of emotional piety, but as fundamental human dispositions, as the typical attitude and action which control man's growth into greater reality. Since then they are of such primary importance to us, it will be worth while at this stage to look into them a little more closely.

First, Love: that over-worked and ill-used word, often confused on the one hand with passion and on the other with amiability. If we ask the most fashionable sort of psychologist what love is, he says that it is the impulse urging us towards that end which is the fulfilment of any series of deeds or "behaviour-cycle"; the psychic thread, on which all the apparently separate actions making up that cycle are strung and united. In this sense love need not be fully conscious, reach the level of feeling; but it must be an imperative, inward urge. And if we ask those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul towards its Source;[133] which impels every living thing to pursue the most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God. Love is for them much more than its emotional manifestations. It is "the ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things"—no less. This definition, which I take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas Aquinas,[134] would be agreeable to the most modern psychologist; he might give the hidden steersman of the psyche in its perpetual movement towards novelty a less beautiful and significant name. "This indwelling Love," says Plotinus, "is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular soul, strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Love, the guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its being."[135]

Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at whatever level it be experienced, the psychic craving, the urgent spirit within us pressing out to life, is always one; and that the sublimation of this vital craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regeneration? There, in our instinctive nature—which, as we know, makes us the kind of animal we are—abides that power of loving which is, really, the power of living; the cause of our actions, the controlling factor in our perceptions, the force pressing us into any given type of experience, turning aside for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater vigour. Each level of the universe makes solicitations to this power: the worlds of sense, of thought, of beauty, and of action. According to the degree of our development, the trend of the conscious will, is our response; and according to that response will be our life. "The world to which a man turns himself," says Boehme, "and in which he produces fruit, the same is lord in him, and this world becomes manifest in him."[136]

From all this it becomes clear what the love of God is; and what St. Augustine meant when he said that all virtue—and virtue after all means power not goodness—lay in the right ordering of love, the conscious orientation of desire. Christians, on the authority of their Master, declare that such love of God requires all that they have, not only of feeling, but also of intellect and of power; since He is to be loved with heart and mind and strength. Thought and action on highest levels are involved in it, for it means, not religious emotionalism, but the unflickering orientation of the whole self towards Him, ever seeking and finding the Eternal; the linking up of all behaviour on that string, so that the apparently hard and always heroic choices which are demanded, are made at last because they are inevitable. It is true that this dominant interest will give to our lives a special emotional colour and a special kind of happiness; but in this, as in the best, deepest, richest human love, such feeling-tone and such happiness—though in some natures of great beauty and intensity—are only to be looked upon as secondary characters, and never to be aimed at.

When St. Teresa said that the real object of the spiritual marriage was "the incessant production of work, work,"[137] I have no doubt that many of her nuns were disconcerted; especially the type of ease-loving conservatives whom she and her intimates were accustomed to refer to as the pussy-cats. But in this direct application to religious experience of St. Thomas' doctrine of love, she set up an ideal of the spiritual life which is as valid at the present day in the entanglements of our social order, as it was in the enclosed convents of sixteenth-century Spain. Love, we said, is the cause of action. It urges and directs our behaviour, conscious and involuntary, towards an end. The mother is irresistibly impelled to act towards her child's welfare, the ambitious man towards success, the artist towards expression of his vision. All these are examples of behaviour, love-driven towards ends. And religious experience discloses to us a greater more inclusive end, and this vital power of love as capable of being used on the highest levels, regenerated, directed to eternal interests; subordinating behaviour, inspiring suffering, unifying the whole self and its activities, mobilizing them for this transcendental achievement. This generous love, to go back to the quotation from Baron von Huegel which opened our inquiry, will indeed cause the behaviour it controls to exhibit both rightful contact with and renunciation of the particular and fleeting; because in and through this series of linked deeds it is uniting with itself all human activities, and in and through them is seeking and finding its eternal end. So, in that rightful bringing-in of novelty which is the business of the fully living soul, the most powerful agent is love, understood as the controlling factor of behaviour, the sublimation and union of will and desire. "Let love," says Boehme, "be the life of thy nature. It killeth thee not, but quickeneth thee according to its life, and then thou livest, yet not to thy own will but to its will: for thy will becometh its will, and then thou art dead to thyself but alive to God."[138] There is the true, solid and for us most fruitful doctrine of divine union, unconnected with any rapture, trance, ecstasy or abnormal state of mind: a union organic, conscious, and dynamic with the Creative Spirit of Life.

If we now go on to ask how, specially, we shall achieve this union in such degree as is possible to each one of us; the answer must be, that it will be done by Prayer. If the seeking of the Eternal is actuated by love, the finding of it is achieved through prayer. Prayer, in fact—understood as a life or state, not an act or an asking—is the beginning, middle and end of all that we are now considering. As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world. And such humble yet ardent contact with the spiritual world—opening up to its suggestions our impulses, our reveries, our feelings, our most secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts-is the essence of prayer, understood in its widest sense. No more than surrender or love can prayer be reduced to "one act." Those who seek to sublimate it into "pure" contemplation are as limited at one end of the scale, as those who reduce it to articulate petition are at the other. It contains in itself a rich variety of human reactions and experiences. It opens the door upon an unwalled world, in which the self truly lives and therefore makes widely various responses to its infinitely varying stimuli. Into that world the self takes, or should take, its special needs, aptitudes and longings, and matches them against its apprehension of Eternal Truth. In this meeting of the human heart with all that it can apprehend of Reality, not adoration alone but unbounded contrition, not humble dependence alone but joy, peace and power, not rapture alone but mysterious darkness, must be woven into the fabric of love. In this world the soul may sometimes wander as if in pastures, sometimes is poised breathless and intent. Sometimes it is fed by beauty, sometimes by most difficult truth, and experiences the extremes of riches and destitution, darkness and light. "It is not," says Plotinus, "by crushing the Divine into a unity but by displaying its exuberance, as the Supreme Himself has displayed it, that we show knowledge of the might of God."[139]

Thus, by that instinctive and warmly devoted direction of its behaviour which is love, and that willed attention to and communion with the spiritual world which is prayer, all the powers of the self are united and turned towards the seeking and finding of the Eternal. It is by complete obedience to this exacting love, doing difficult and unselfish things, giving up easy and comfortable things—in fact by living, living hard on the highest levels—that men more and more deeply feel, experience, and enter into their spiritual life. This is a fact which must seem rather awkward to those who put forward pathological explanations of it. And on the other hand it is only by constant contacts with and recourse to the energizing life of Spirit, that this hard vocation can be fulfilled. Such a power of reference to Reality, of transcending the world of succession and its values, can be cultivated by us; and this education of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of the discipline of prayer. True, it is only in times of recollection or of great emotion that this profound contact is fully present to consciousness. Yet, once fully achieved and its obligations accepted by us, it continues as a grave melody within our busy outward acts: and we must by right direction of our deepest instincts so find and feel the Eternal all the time, if indeed we are to actualize and incarnate it all the time. From this truth of experience, religion has deduced the doctrine of grace, and the general conception of man as able to do nothing of himself. This need hardly surprise us. For equally on the physical plane man can do nothing of himself, if he be cut off from his physical sources of power: from food to eat, and air to breathe. Therefore the fact that his spiritual life too is dependent upon the life-giving atmosphere that penetrates him, and the heavenly food which he receives, makes no fracture in his experience. Thus we are brought back by another path to the fundamental need for him, in some form, of the balanced active and contemplative life.

In spite of this, many people seem to take it for granted that if a man believes in and desires to live a spiritual life, he can live it in utter independence of spiritual food. He believes in God, loves his neighbour, wants to do good, and just goes ahead. The result of this is that the life of the God-fearing citizen or the Social Christian, as now conceived and practised, is generally the starved life. It leaves no time for the silence, the withdrawal, the quiet attention to the spiritual, which is essential if it is to develop all its powers. Yet the literature of the Spirit is full of warnings on this subject. Taste and see that the Lord is sweet. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. These are practical statements; addressed, not to specialists but to ordinary men and women, with a normal psycho-physical make-up. They are literally true now, or can be if we choose. They do not involve any peculiar training, or unnatural effort. A sliding scale goes from the simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to that complete self-loss and complete self-finding, which is called the transforming union of the saint; and somewhere in this series, every human soul can find a place.

If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to receive what St. Augustine called the food of the full-grown, to find and feel the Eternal, we must give time and place to it in our lives. I emphasize this, because its realization seems to me to be a desperate modern need; a need exhibited supremely in our languid and ineffectual spirituality, but also felt in the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of the artist, the reformer and the teacher. St. John of the Cross says in one of his letters: "What is wanting is not writing or talking—there is more than enough of that—but, silence and action. For silence joined to action produces recollection, and gives the spirit a marvellous strength." Such recollection, such a gathering up of our interior forces and retreat of consciousness to its "ground," is the preparation of all great endeavour, whatever its apparent object may be. Until we realize that it is better, more useful, more productive of strength, to spend, let us say, the odd ten minutes in the morning in feeling and finding the Eternal than in flicking the newspaper—that this will send us off to the day's work properly orientated, gathered together, recollected, and really endowed with new power of dealing with circumstance—we have not begun to live the life of the Spirit, or grasped the practical connection between such a daily discipline and the power of doing our best work, whatever it may be.

I will illustrate this from a living example: that of the Sadhu Sundar Singh. No one, I suppose, who came into personal contact with the Sadhu, doubted that they were in the presence of a person who was living, in the full sense, the spiritual life. Even those who could not accept the symbols in which he described his experience and asked others to share it, acknowledged that there had been worked in him a great transformation; that the sense of the abiding and eternal went with him everywhere, and flowed out from him, to calm and to correct our feverish lives. He fully satisfies in his own person the demands of Baron von Huegel's definition: both contact with and renunciation of the Particular and Fleeting, seeking and finding of the Eternal, incarnating within his own experience that transcendent Otherness. Now the Sadhu has discovered for himself and practises as the condition of his extraordinary activity, power and endurance, just that balance of life which St. Benedict's rule ordained. He is a wandering missionary, constantly undertaking great journeys, enduring hardship and danger, and practising the absolute poverty of St. Francis. He is perfectly healthy, strong, extraordinarily attractive, full of power. But this power he is careful to nourish. His irreducible minimum is two hours spent in meditation and wordless communication with God at the beginning of each day. He prefers three or four hours when work permits; and a long period of prayer and meditation always precedes his public address. If forced to curtail or hurry these hours of prayer, he feels restless and unhappy, and his efficiency is reduced. "Prayer," he says, "is as important as breathing; and we never say we have no time to breathe."[140]

All this has been explained away by critics of the muscular Christian sort, who say that the Sadhu's Christianity is of a typically Eastern kind. But this is simply not true. It were much better to acknowledge that we, more and more, are tending to develop a typically Western kind of Christianity, marked by the Western emphasis on doing and Western contempt for being; and that if we go sufficiently far on this path we shall find ourselves cut off from our source. The Sadhu's Christianity is fully Christian; that is to say, it is whole and complete. The power in which he does his works is that in which St. Paul carried through his heroic missionary career, St. Benedict formed a spiritual family that transformed European culture, Wesley made the world his parish, Elizabeth Fry faced the Newgate criminals. It is idle to talk of the revival of a personal spiritual life among ourselves, or of a spiritual regeneration of society—for this can only come through the individual remaking of each of its members—unless we are willing, at the sacrifice of some personal convenience, to make a place and time for these acts of recollection; this willing and loving—and even more fruitful, the more willing and loving—communion with, response to Reality, to God. It is true that a fully lived spiritual life involves far more than this. But this is the only condition on which it will exist at all.

Love then, which is a willed tendency to God; prayer, which is willed communion with and experience of Him; are the two prime essentials in the personal life of the Spirit. They represent, of course, only our side of it and our obligation. This love is the outflowing response to another inflowing love, and this prayer the appropriation of a transcendental energy and grace. As the "German Theology" reminds us, "I cannot do the work without God, and God may not or will not without me."[141] And by these acts alone, faithfully carried through, all their costly demands fulfilled, all their gifts and applications accepted without resistance and applied to each aspect of life, human nature can grow up to its full stature, and obtain access to all its sources of power.

Yet this personal inward life of love and prayer shall not be too solitary. As it needs links with cultus and so with the lives of its fellows, it also needs links with history and so with the living past. These links are chiefly made by the individual through his reading; and such reading—such access to humanity's hoarded culture and experience—has always been declared alike by Christian and non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper helps of the spiritual life. Though Hoeffding perhaps exaggerates when he reminds us that mediaeval art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in their books, and suggests that such brooding study directly induces contemplative states,[142] yet it is true that the soul gains greatly from such communion with, and meek learning from, its cultural background. Ever more and more as it advances, it will discover within that background the records of those very experiences which it must now so poignantly relive; and which seem to it, as his own experience seems to every lover, unique. There it can find, without any betrayal of its secret, the wholesome assurance of its own normality; standards of comparison; companionship, alike in its hours of penitence, of light, and of deprivation. Yet such fruitful communion with the past is not the privilege of an aristocratic culture. It is seen in its perfection in many simple Christians who have found in the Bible all the spiritual food they need. The great literature of the Spirit tells its secrets to those alone who thus meet it on its own ground. Not only the works of Thomas a Kempis, of Ruysbroeck, or of St. Teresa, but also the Biblical writers—and especially, perhaps, the Psalms and the Gospels—are read wholly anew by us at each stage of our advance. Comparative study of Hindu and Moslem writers proves that this is equally true of the great literatures of other faiths.[143] Beginners may find in all these infinite stimulus, interest, and beauty. But to the mature soul they become road-books, of which experience proves the astonishing exactitude; giving it descriptions which it can recognize and directions that it needs, and constituting a steady check upon individualism.

Now let us look at the emergence of this life which we have been considering, and at the typical path which it will or may follow, in an ordinary man or woman of our own day. Not a saint or genius, reaching heroic levels; but a member of that solid wholesome spiritual population which ought to fill the streets of the City of God. We noticed when we were studying its appearance in history, that often this life begins in a sort of restlessness, a feeling that there is something more in existence, some absolute meaning, some more searching obligation, that we have not reached. This dissatisfaction, this uncertainty and hunger, may show itself in many different forms. It may speak first to the intellect, to the moral nature, to the social conscience, even to the artistic faculty; or, directly, to the heart. Anyhow, its abiding quality is a sense of contraction, of limitation; a feeling of something more that we could stretch out to, and achieve, and be. Its impulsion is always in one direction; to a finding of some wider and more enduring reality, some objective for the self's life and love. It is a seeking of the Eternal, in some form. I allow that thanks to the fog in which we live muffled, such a first seeking, and above all such a finding of the Eternal is not for us a very easy thing. The sense of quest, of disillusion, of something lacking, is more common among modern men than its resolution in discovery. Nevertheless the quest does mean that there is a solution: and that those who are persevering must find it in the end. The world into which our desire is truly turned, is somehow revealed to us. The revelation, always partial and relative, is of course conditioned by our capacity, the character of our longing and the experiences of our past. In spiritual matters we behold that which we are: here following, on higher levels, the laws which govern aesthetic apprehension.

So, dissatisfied with its world-view and realizing that it is incomplete, the self seeks at first hand, though not always with clear consciousness of its nature, the Reality which is the object of religion. When it finds this Reality, the discovery, however partial, is for it the overwhelming revelation of an objective Fact; and it is swept by a love and awe which it did not know itself to possess. And now it sees; dimly, yet in a sufficiently disconcerting way, the Pattern in the Mount; the rich complex of existence as it were transmuted, full of charity and beauty, governed by another series of adjustments. Life looks different to it. As Fox said, "Creation gives out another smell than before."[144] There is only one thing more disconcerting than this, and that is seeing the pattern actualized in a fellow human being: living face to face with human sanctity, in its great simplicity and supernatural love, joy, peace. For, when we glimpse Eternal Beauty in the universe, we can say with the hero of "Callista," "It is beyond me!" But, when we see it transfiguring human character, we know that it is not beyond the power of the race. It is here, to be had. Its existence as a form of life creates a standard, and lays an obligation on us all.

Suppose then that the self, urged by this new pressure, accepts the obligation and measures itself by the standard. It then becomes apparent that this Fact which it sought for and has seen is not merely added to its old universe, as in mediaeval pictures Paradise with its circles over-arches the earth. This Reality is all-penetrating and has transfigured each aspect of the self's old world. It now has a new and most exacting scale of values, which demand from it a new series of adjustments; ask it—and with authority—to change its life.

What next? The next thing, probably, is that the self finds itself in rather a tight place. It is wedged into a physical order that makes innumerable calls on it, and innumerable suggestions to it: which has for years monopolized its field of consciousness and set up habits of response to its claims. It has to make some kind of a break with this order, or at least with its many attachments thereto; and stretch to the wider span demanded by the new and larger world. And further, it is in possession of a complex psychic life, containing many insubordinate elements, many awkward bequests from a primitive past. That psychic life has just received the powerful and direct suggestion of the Spirit; and for the moment, it is subdued to that suggestion. But soon it begins to experience the inevitable conflict between old habits, and new demands—between a life lived in the particular and in the universal spirit—and only through complete resolution of that conflict will it develop its full power. So the self quickly realizes that the theologian's war between Nature and Grace is a picturesque way of stating a real situation; and further that the demand of all religions for a change of heart—that is, of the deep instinctive nature—is the first condition of a spiritual life. And hence, that its hands are fairly full. It is true that an immense joy and hope come with it to this business of tackling imperfection, of adjusting itself to the newly found centre of life. It knows that it is committed to the forward movement of a Power, which may be slow but which nothing can gainsay. Nevertheless the first thing that power demands from it is courage; and the next an unremitting vigorous effort. It will never again be able to sink back cosily into its racial past. Consciousness of disharmony and incompleteness now brings the obligation to mend the disharmony and achieve a fresh synthesis.

This is felt with a special sharpness in the moral life, where the irreconcilable demands of natural self-interest and of Spirit assume their most intractable shape. Old habits and paths of discharge which have almost become automatic must now, it seems, be abandoned. New paths, in spite of resistances, must be made. Thus it is that temptation, hard conflict, and bewildering perplexities usher in the life of the Spirit. These are largely the results of our biological past continuing into our fluctuating half-made present; and they point towards a psychic stability, an inner unity we have not yet attained.

This realization of ourselves as we truly are—emerging with difficulty from our animal origin, tinctured through and through with the self-regarding tendencies and habits it has imprinted on us—this realization or self-knowledge, is Humility; the only soil in which the spiritual life can germinate. And modern man with his great horizons, his ever clearer vision of his own close kinship with life's origin, his small place in the time-stream, in the universe, in God's hand, the relative character of his best knowledge and achievement, is surely everywhere being persuaded to this royal virtue. Recognition of this his true creaturely status, with its obligations—the only process of pain and struggle needed if the demands of generous love are ever to be fulfilled in him and his many-levelled nature is to be purified and harmonized and develop all its powers—this is Repentance. He shows not only his sincerity, but his manliness and courage by his acceptance of all that such repentance entails on him; for the healthy soul, like the healthy body, welcomes some trial and roughness and is well able to bear the pains of education. Psychologists regard such an education, harmonizing the rational or ideal with the instinctive life—the change of heart which leaves the whole self working together without inner conflict towards one objective—as the very condition of a full and healthy life. But it can only be achieved in its perfection by the complete surrender of heart and mind to a third term, transcending alike the impulsive and the rational. The life of the Spirit in its supreme authority, and its identification with the highest interests of the race, does this: harnessing man's fiery energies to the service of the Light.

Therefore, in the rich, new life on which the self enters, one strand must be that of repentance, catharsis, self-conquest; a complete contrition which is the earnest of complete generosity, uncalculated response. And, dealing as we are now with average human nature, we can safely say that the need for such ever-renewed self-scrutiny and self-purgation will never in this life be left behind. For sin is a fact, though a fact which we do not understand; and now it appears and must evermore remain an offence against love, hostile to this intense new attraction, and marring the self's willed tendency towards it.

The next strand we may perhaps call that of Recollection: for the recognizing and the cure of imperfection depends on the compensating search for the Perfect and its enthronement as the supreme object of our thought and love. The self, then, soon begins to feel a strong impulsion to some type of inward withdrawal and concentration, some kind of prayer; though it may not use this name or recognize the character of its mood. As it yields to this strange new drawing, such recollection grows easier. It finds that there is a veritable inner world, not merely of phantasy, but of profound heart-searching experience; where the soul is in touch with another order of realities and knows itself to be an inheritor of Eternal Life. Here unique things happen. A power is at work, and new apprehensions are born. And now for the first time the self discovers itself to be striking a balance between this inner and the outer life, and in its own small way—but still, most fruitfully—enriching action with the fruits of contemplation. If it will give to the learning of this new art—to the disciplining and refining of this affective thought—even a fraction of the diligence which it gives to the learning of a new game, it will find itself repaid by a progressive purity of vision, a progressive sense of assurance, an ever-increasing delicacy of moral discrimination and demand. Psychologists, as we have seen, divide men into introverts and extroverts; but as a matter of fact we must regard both these extreme types as defective. A whole man should be supple in his reactions both to the inner and to the outer world.

The third strand in the life of the Spirit, for this normal self which we are considering; must be the disposition of complete Surrender. More and more advancing in this inner life, it will feel the imperative attraction of Reality, of God; and it must respond to this attraction with all the courage and generosity of which it is capable. I am trying to use the simplest and the most general language, and to avoid emotional imagery: though it is here, in telling of this perpetually renewed act of self-giving and dedication, that spiritual writers most often have recourse to the language of the heart. It is indeed in a spirit of intensest and humble adoration that generous souls yield themselves to the drawing of that mysterious Beauty and unchanging Love, with all that it entails. But the form which the impulse to surrender takes will vary with the psychic make-up of the individual. To some it will come as a sense of vocation, a making-over of the will to the purposes of the Kingdom; a type of consecration which may not be overtly religious, but may be concerned with the self-forgetting quest of social excellence, of beauty, or of truth. By some it will be felt as an illumination of the mind, which now discerns once for all true values, and accepting these, must uphold and strive for them in the teeth of all opportunism. By some—and these are the most blessed—as a breaking and re-making of the heart. Whatever the form it takes, the extent in which the self experiences the peace, joy and power of living at the level of Spirit will depend on the completeness and singlemindedness of this, its supreme act of self-simplification. Any reserves, anything in its make-up which sets up resistances—and this means generally any form of egotism—will mar the harmony of the process. And on the other hand, such a real simplification of the self's life as is here demanded—uniting on one object, the intellect, will and feeling too often split among contradictory attractions—is itself productive of inner harmony and increased power: productive too of that noble endurance which counts no pain too much in the service of Reality.

Here then we come to the fact, valid for every level of spiritual life, which lies behind all the declarations concerning surrender, self-loss, dying to live, dedication, made by writers on this theme. All involve a relaxing of tension, letting ourselves go without reluctance in the direction in which we are most profoundly drawn; a cessation of our struggles with the tide, our kicks against the pricks that spur us on. The inward aim of the self is towards unification with a larger life; a mergence with Reality which it may describe under various contradictory symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but which it feels to be the fulfilment of existence. It has learnt—though this knowledge may not have passed beyond the stage of feeling—that the universe is one simple texture, in which all things have their explanation and their place. Combing out the confusions which enmesh it, losing its sham and separate life and finding its true life there, it will know what to love and how to act. The goal of this process, which has been called entrance into the freedom of the Will of God, is the state described by the writer of the "German Theology" when he said "I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man."[145] For such a declaration not only means a willed and skilful working for God, a practical siding with Perfection, becoming its living tool, but also close union with, and sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual order: a feeding on and using of its power, its very life blood; complete docility to its inward direction, abolition of separate desire. The surrender is therefore made not in order that we may become limp pietists, but in order that we may receive more energy and do better work: by a humble self-subjection more perfectly helping forward the thrust of the Spirit and the primal human business of incarnating the Eternal here and now. Its justification is in the arduous but untiring, various but harmonious, activities that flow from it: the enhancement of life which it entails. It gives us access to our real sources of power; that we may take from them and, spending generously, be energized anew.

So the cord on which those events which make up the personal life of the Spirit are to be strung is completed, and we see that it consists of four strands. Two are dispositions of the self; Penitence and Surrender. Two are activities; inward Recollection and outward Work. All four make stern demands on its fortitude and goodwill. And each gives strength to the rest: for they are not to be regarded as separate and successive states, a discrete series through which we must pass one by one, leaving penitence behind us when we reach surrendered love; but as the variable yet enduring and inseparable aspects of one rich life, phases in one complete and vital effort to respond more and more closely to Reality.

Nothing, perhaps, is less monotonous than the personal life of the Spirit. In its humility and joyous love, its adoration and its industry, it may find self-expression in any one of the countless activities of the world of time. It is both romantic and austere, both adventurous and holy. Full of fluctuation and unearthly colour, it yet has its dark patches as well as its light. Since perfect proof of the supersensual is beyond the span of human consciousness, the element of risk can never be eliminated: we are obliged in the end to trust the universe and live by faith. Therefore the awakened soul must often suffer perplexity, share to the utmost the stress and anguish of the physical order; and, chained as it is to a consciousness accustomed to respond to that order, must still be content with flashes of understanding and willing to bear long periods of destitution when the light is veiled.

The further it advances the more bitter will these periods of destitution seem to it. It is not from the real men and women of the Spirit that we hear soft things about the comfort of faith. For the true life of faith gives everything worth having and takes everything worth offering: with unrelenting blows it welds the self into the stuff of the universe, subduing it to the universal purpose, doing away with the flame of separation. Though joy and inward peace even in desolation are dominant marks of those who have grown up into it, still it offers to none a succession of supersensual delights. The life of the Spirit involves the sublimation of that pleasure-pain rhythm which is characteristic of normal consciousness, and if for it pleasure becomes joy, pain becomes the Cross. Toil, abnegation, sacrifice, are therefore of its essence; but these are not felt as a heavy burden, because they are the expression of love. It entails a willed tension and choice, a noble power of refusal, which are not entirely covered by being "in tune with the Infinite." As our life comes to maturity we discover to our confusion that human ears can pick up from the Infinite many incompatible tunes, but cannot hear the whole symphony. And the melody confided to our care, the one which we alone perhaps can contribute and which taxes our powers to the full, has in it not only the notes of triumph but the notes of pain. The distinctive mark therefore is not happiness but vocation: work demanded and power given, but given only on condition that we spend it and ourselves on others without stint. These propositions, of course, are easily illustrated from history: but we can also illustrate them in our own persons if we choose.

Should we choose this, and should life of the Spirit be achieved by us—and it will only be done through daily discipline and attention to the Spiritual, a sacrifice of comfort to its interests, following up the intuition which sets us on the path—what benefits may we as ordinary men expect it to bring to us and to the community that we serve? It will certainly bring into life new zest and new meaning; a widening of the horizon and consciousness of security; a fresh sense of joys to be had and of work to be done. The real spiritual consciousness is positive and constructive in type: it does not look back on the past sins and mistakes of the individual or of the community, but in its other-world faith and this-world charity is inspired by a forward-moving spirit of hope. Seeking alone the honour of Eternal Beauty, and because of its invulnerable sense of security, it is adventurous. The spiritual man and woman can afford to take desperate chances, and live dangerously in the interests of their ideals; being delivered from the many unreal fears and anxieties which commonly torment us, and knowing the unimportance of possessions and of so-called success. The joy which waits on disinterested love and the confidence which follows surrender, cannot fail them. Moreover, the inward harmony and assurance, the consciousness of access to that Spirit who is in a literal sense "health's eternal spring" means a healing of nervous miseries, and invigoration of the usually ill-treated mind and body, and so an all-round increase in happiness and power.

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." This, said St. Paul, who knew by experience the worlds of grace and of nature, is what a complete man ought to be like. Compare this picture of an equable and fully harmonized personality with that of a characteristic neurasthenic, a bored sensualist, or an embittered worker, concentrated on the struggle for a material advantage: and consider that the central difference between these types of human success and human failure abides in the presence or absence of a spiritual conception of life. We do not yet know the limits of the upgrowth into power and happiness which complete and practical surrender to this conception can work in us; or what its general triumph might do for the transformation of the world. And it may even be that beyond the joy and renewal which come from self-conquest and unification, a level of spiritual life most certainly open to all who will really work for it; and beyond that deeper insight, more widespreading love, and perfection of adjustment to the here-and-now which we recognize and reverence as the privilege of the pure in heart—beyond all these, it may be that life still reserves for man another secret and another level of consciousness; a closer identification with Reality, such as eye hath not seen, or ear heard.

And note, that this spiritual life which we have here considered is not an aristocratic life. It is a life of which the fundamentals are given by the simplest kinds of traditional piety, and have been exhibited over and over again by the simplest souls. An unconditional self-surrender to the Divine Will, under whatever symbols it may be thought of; for we know that the very crudest of symbols is often strong enough to make a bridge between the heart and the Eternal, and so be a vehicle of the Spirit of Life. A little silence and leisure. A great deal of faithfulness, kindness, and courage. All this is within the reach of anyone who cares enough for it to pay the price.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 129: This doctrine is fully worked out in the last two sections of "Eternal Life."]

[Footnote 130: De Imit. Christi, Bk. II, Cap. 6.]

[Footnote 131: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75.]

[Footnote 132: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 78.]

[Footnote 133: Cl. Ruysbroeck: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. VIII]

[Footnote 134: "In Librum B. Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus commentaria."]

[Footnote 135: Ennead III. 5, 4.]

[Footnote 136: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75.]

[Footnote 137: "The Interior Castle"; Seventh Habitation, Cap. IV.]

[Footnote 138: Boehme; "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]

[Footnote 139: Ennead II. 9. 9.]

[Footnote 140: "Streeter and Appasamy: The Sadhu," pp. 98, 100 et seq., 213.]

[Footnote 141: "Theologia Germanica," Cap. III.]

[Footnote 142: Hoeffding, "The Philosophy of Religion," III, B.]

[Footnote 143: There are, for instance, several striking instances in the Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore.]

[Footnote 144: "Fox's Journal," Vol. I, Cap. 2.]

[Footnote 145: "Theologia Germanica," Cap. 10.]



CHAPTER VII

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION

In the past six chapters we have been considering in the main our own position, and how, here in the present, we as adults may actualize and help on the spiritual life in ourselves. But our best hope of giving Spirit its rightful, full expression within the time-world lies in the future. It is towards that, that those who really care must work. Anything which we can do towards persuading into better shape our own deformed characters, compelling our recalcitrant energy into fresh channels, is little in comparison with what might be achieved in the plastic growing psychic life of children did we appreciate our full opportunity and the importance of using it. This is why I propose now to consider one or two points in the relation of education to the spiritual life.

Since it is always well, in a discussion of this kind, to be quite clear about the content of the words with which we deal, I will say at once, that by Education I mean that deliberate adjustment of the whole environment of a growing creature, which surrounds it with the most favourable influences and educes all its powers; giving it the most helpful conditions for its full growth and development. Education should be the complete preparation of the young thing for fullness of life; involving the evolution and the balanced training of all its faculties, bodily, mental and spiritual. It should train and refine senses, instincts, intellect, will and feeling; giving a world-view based on real facts and real values and encouraging active correspondence therewith. Thus the educationist, if he be convinced, as I think most of us must be, that all isn't quite right with the world of mankind, has the priceless opportunity of beginning the remaking of humanity from the right end. In the child he has a little, supple thing, which can be made into a vital, spiritual thing; and nothing again will count so much for it as what happens in these its earliest years. To start life straight is the secret of inward happiness: and to a great extent, the secret of health and power.

That conception of man upon which we have been working, and which regards his psychic life on all its levels as the manifold expressions of one single energy or urge in the depths of his being, a life-force seeking fulfilment, has obvious and important applications in the educational sphere. It indicates that the fundamental business of education is to deal with this urgent and untempered craving, discipline it, and direct it towards interests of permanent value: helping it to establish useful habits, removing obstacles in its path, blocking the side channels down which it might run. Especially is it the task of such education, gradually to disclose to the growing psyche those spiritual correspondences for which the religious man and the idealist must hold that man's spirit was made. Such an education as this has little in common with the mere crude imparting of facts. It represents rather the careful and loving induction of the growing human creature into the rich world of experience; the help we give it in the great business of adjusting itself to reality. It operates by means of the moulding influences of environment, the creation of habit. Suggestion, not statement, is its most potent instrument; and such suggestion begins for good or ill at the very dawn of consciousness. Therefore the child whose infancy is not surrounded by persons of true outlook is handicapped from the start; and the training in this respect of the parents of the future is one of the greatest services we can render to the race.

We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile impressions: how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop underground, and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poisoning the body and the mind of the adult. But here good is at least as potent as ill. What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil; a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for good. Moreover, we can bury good seed in the unconscious minds of children and reasonably look forward to the fruit. Babyish prayers, simple hymns, trace whilst the mind is ductile the paths in which feelings shall afterwards tend to flow; and it is only in maturity that we realize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps afterwards abandoned beliefs and deeds. So the veritable education of the Spirit begins at once, in the cradle, and its chief means will be the surroundings within which that childish spirit first develops its little awareness of the universe; the appeals which are made to its instincts, the stimulations of its life of sense. The first factor of this education is the family: the second the society within which that family is formed.

Though we no longer suppose it to possess innate ideas, the baby has most surely innate powers, inclinations and curiosities, and is reaching out in every direction towards life. It is brimming with will power, ready to push hard into experience. The environment in which it is placed and the responses which the outer world makes to it—and these surroundings and responses in the long run are largely of our choosing and making—represent either the helping or thwarting of its tendencies, and the sum total of the directions in which its powers can be exercised and its demands satisfied: the possibilities, in fact, which life puts before it. We, as individuals and as a community, control and form part of this environment. Under the first head, we play by influence or demeanour a certain part in the education of every child whom we meet. Under the second head, by acquiescence in the social order, we accept responsibility for the state of life in which it is born. The child's first intimations of the spiritual must and can only come to it through the incarnation of Spirit in its home and the world that it knows. What, then, are we doing about this? It means that the influences which shape the men and women of the future will be as wholesome and as spiritual as we ourselves are: no more, no less. Tone, atmosphere are the things which really matter; and these are provided by the group-mind, and reflect its spiritual state.

The child's whole educational opportunity is contained in two factors; the personality it brings and the environment it gets. Generations of educationists have disputed their relative importance: but neither party can deny that the most fortunate nature, given wrongful or insufficient nurture, will hardly emerge unharmed. Even great inborn powers atrophy if left unused, and exceptional ability in any direction may easily remain undeveloped if the environment be sufficiently unfavourable: a result too often achieved in the domain of the spiritual life. We must have opportunity and encouragement to try our powers and inclinations, be helped to understand their nature and the way to use them, unless we are to begin again, each one of us, in the Stone Age of the soul. So too, even small powers may be developed to an astonishing degree by suitable surroundings and wise education—witness the results obtained by the expert training of defective children—and all this is as applicable to the spiritual as to the mental and bodily life. That life is quick to respond to the demands made on it: to take every opportunity of expression that comes its way. If you make the right appeal to any human faculty, that faculty will respond, and begin to grow. Thus it is that the slow quiet pressure of tradition, first in the home and then in the school, shapes the child during his most malleable years. We, therefore, are surely bound to watch and criticize the environment, the tradition, the customs we are instrumental in providing for the infant future: to ask ourselves whether we are sure the tradition is right, the conventions we hand on useful, the ideal we hold up complete. The child, whatever his powers, cannot react to something which is not there; he can't digest food that is not given to him, use faculties for which no objective is provided. Hence the great responsibility of our generation, as to providing a complete, balanced environment now, a fully-rounded opportunity of response to life physical, mental and spiritual, for the generation preparing to succeed us. Such education as this has been called a preparation for citizenship. But this conception is too narrow, unless the citizenship be that of the City of God; and the adjustments involved be those of the spirit, as well as of the body and the mind.

Herbert Spencer, whom one would hardly accuse of being a spiritual philosopher, was accustomed to group the essentials of a right education under four heads:[146]

First, he said, we must teach self-preservation in all senses: how to keep the body and the mind healthy and efficient, how to be self-supporting, how to protect oneself against external dangers and encroachments.

Next, we must train the growing creature in its duties towards the life of the future: parenthood and its responsibilities, understood in the widest sense.

Thirdly; we must prepare it to take its place in the present as a member of the social order into which it is born.

Last: we must hand on to it all those refinements of life which the past has given to us—the hoarded culture of the race.

Only if we do these four things thoroughly can we dare to call ourselves educators in the full sense of the word.

Now, turning to the spiritual interests of the child:—and unless we are crass materialists we must believe these interests to exist, and to be paramount—what are we doing to further them in these four fundamental directions? First, does the average good education train our young people in spiritual self-preservation? Does it send them out equipped with the means of living a full and efficient spiritual life? Does it furnish them with a health-giving type of religion; that is, a solid hold on eternal realities, a view of the universe capable of withstanding hostile criticism, of supporting them in times of difficulty and of stress? Secondly, does it give them a spiritual outlook in respect of their racial duties, fit them in due time to be parents of other souls? Does it train them to regard humanity, and their own place in the human life-stream, from this point of view? This point is of special importance, in view of the fact that racial and biological knowledge on lower levels is now so generally in the possession of boys and girls; and is bound to produce a distorted conception of life, unless the spirit be studied by them with at least the same respectful attention that is given to the flesh. Thirdly, what does our education do towards preparing them to solve the problems of social and economic life in a spiritual sense—our only reasonable chance of extracting the next generation from the social muddle in which we are plunged to-day? Last, to what extent do we try to introduce our pupils into a full enjoyment of their spiritual inheritance, the culture and tradition of the past?

I do not deny that there are educators—chiefly perhaps educators of girls—who can give favourable answers to all these questions. But they are exceptional, the proportion of the child population whom they influence is small, and frequently their proceedings are looked upon—not without some justice—as eccentric. If then in all these departments our standard type of education stops short of the spiritual level, are not we self-convicted as at best theoretical believers in the worth and destiny of the human soul?

Consider the facts. Outside the walls of definitely religious institutions—where methods are not always adjusted to the common stuff and needs of contemporary human life—it does not seem to occur to many educationists to give the education of the child's soul the same expert delicate attention so lavishly bestowed on the body and the intellect. By expert delicate attention I do not mean persistent religious instruction; but a skilled and loving care for the growing spirit, inspired by deep conviction and helped by all the psychological knowledge we possess. If we look at the efforts of organized religion we are bound to admit that in thousands of rural parishes, and in many towns too, it is still possible to grow from infancy to old age as a member of church or chapel without once receiving any first-hand teaching on the powers and needs of the soul or the technique of prayer; or obtaining any more help in the great religious difficulties of adolescence than a general invitation to believe, and trust God. Morality—that is to say correctness of response to our neighbour and our temporal surroundings—is often well taught. Spirituality—correctness of response to God and our eternal surroundings—is most often ignored. A peculiar British bashfulness seems to stand in the way of it. It is felt that we show better taste in leaving the essentials of the soul's development to chance, even that such development is not wholly desirable or manly: that the atrophy of one aspect of "man's made-trinity" is best. I have heard one eminent ecclesiastic maintain that regular and punctual attendance at morning service in a mood of non-comprehending loyalty was the best sort of spiritual experience for the average Englishman. Is not that a statement which should make the Christian teachers who are responsible for the average Englishman, feel a little bit uncomfortable about the type which they have produced? I do not suggest that education should encourage a feverish religiosity; but that it ought to produce balanced men and women, whose faculties are fully alert and responsive to all levels of life. As it is, we train Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in the principles of honour and chivalry. Our Bible-classes minister to the hungry spirit much information about the journeys of St. Paul (with maps). But the pupils are seldom invited or assisted to taste, and see that the Lord is sweet.