CHAPTER I

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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."]