of this terrific fact? To see whether our plans are so laid as to bring
out all the balanced possibilities of the coming man; all his latent
powers? We recognize the fact that body and mind must be trained whilst
still in a plastic state. We are awake to the results of allowing them
to atrophy. Where we find individuals with special powers in one of
these directions, we aim at their perfect development; at the production
of the athlete, scholar, man of action. But it cannot be said that we
are equally on the lookout for special qualities of spirit; that when
found, we train them with the same skill and care. Yet if we do not, can
we expect to get the very best out of the race? To explore all its
potentialities; some, perhaps, still unguessed? We know that the child’s
reactions to life will be determined by the mental furniture with which
he is equipped. His perceptions, his choice from among the welter of
possible impressions surrounding him, will depend on the character of
his “apperceiving mass.” Surely then it is our first duty so to equip
him that he shall be able to lay hold on those intimations of spirit
which are woven into the texture of our sensual universe; to lead him
into that mood of receptivity in which the beautiful and the
significant, the good and the true, stand out for him from the scene of
life and hold his interest. A meadow which to one boy is merely a
possible cricket field, to another is a place of romance and adventure,
full of friendly life.
The mischief is that whatever our theoretic beliefs, we do not in
practice really regard spirit as the chief element of our being; the
chief object of our educational care. Our notions about it are shadowy,
and have very little influence on our educational schemes. Were it
present to us as a vivid reality, we should surely provide our young
people with a reasoned philosophy of life in which it is given its
place: something which can provide honest answers to the questions of
the awakening intelligence, and withstand the hostile criticism which
wrecks so much adolescent faith. For ten parents who study the
Montessori system of sense training, how many think of consulting those
old specialists who taught how the powers of the spirit may be developed
and disciplined, and given their true place in human life? How many
educationalists realize that prayer, as taught to children, may and
should be an exercise which gently develops a whole side of human
consciousness that might otherwise be dormant; places it in
communication with a real and valid universe awaiting the apprehension
of man? How many give the subject the same close, skilled attention that
they give, say, to Latin grammar on one hand or physical culture on the
other? Those subjects, and many more, have emerged from vagueness into
clarity because attention, the cutting point of the human will, has been
concentrated upon them. Gradually in these departments an ordered world
has been made, and the child or young person put in correspondence with
that world. We cannot say that the same has been done for the world of
spirit. The majority of the “well-educated” probably pass through life
without any knowledge of the science of prayer, with at best the vaguest
notions of the hygiene of the soul. Often our religious teachers are
themselves no better instructed, and seem unable to offer the growing
and hungry spirit any food more heavenly than practical ethics and
dogmatic beliefs. Thus a complete world of experience is habitually
ignored by us, and one great power of the human trinity allowed to
atrophy.
We are just beginning as educators to pay ordered attention to that
fringe-world in which sense, intellect, and spirit all have a part: I
mean the world of æsthetic apprehension. It cannot be denied that the
result has been, for many of the young people now growing up, an immense
enlargement and enrichment of life. Look at one of the most striking
intellectual characteristics of the last few years: the rapid growth of
the taste and need for poetry, the amount of it that is written, the way
in which it seems to supply a necessary outlet for young Englishmen in
the present day. Look at the mass of verse which was composed, under
conditions of utmost horror, on the battlefields; poetry the most
pathetic in the world, in which we see the passionate effort of spirit
to find adjustment, its assertion of unconquerable power, even in the
teeth of this overwhelming manifestation of brute force. There is the
power of the future: the spirit of beauty and truth seeking for
utterance. There is that quickening spring, bubbling up afresh in every
generation; and ready, if we will help it to find expression, to
transfigure our human life.
There is a common idea that the spiritual life means something pious and
mawkish: not very desirable in girls, and most objectionable in boys. It
is strange that this notion, which both the Jewish and Christian
Scriptures so emphatically contradict, should ever have grown up amongst
us. The spirit, says St. Paul, is not a spirit of fearfulness; it is “a
spirit of Power and Love and Discipline”—qualities that make for vigour
and manliness of the best type. It is the very source of our energies,
both natural and supernatural. The mystics sometimes called it our
“life-giving life,” and modern psychologists are beginning to discover
that it is, in the most literal sense, our “health’s eternal spring.”
People say, “Come, Holy Spirit”; as if it were something foreign to us:
yet it comes perpetually in every baby born into the world, for each new
human life entering the temporal order implies a new influx or, least, a
new manifestation of spirit. But, when spirit is thus wedded to mind and
body to form human nature, it is submitted to the law governing human
nature: the law of freedom. It is ours, to develop or stunt as we
please. Its mighty powers are not pressed on an unwilling race, but
given us in germ to deal with as we will. Parents are responsible for
giving it every opportunity of development, the food, the light, the
nurture that all growing things require—in fact, for its education: a
great honour, and a great responsibility.
If we are asked wherein such education should consist, I think we must
reply that its demands are not satisfied by teaching the child any
series of religious doctrines divorced from practical experience. He is
full of energies demanding expression. Our object is so to train those
energies that they shall attain their full power and right balance; and
enable him to set up relations with the spiritual world in which he
truly lives. The first phase in this education will consist in a
definite moral training, which is like the tilling and preparation of
the earth in which the spiritual plant is to grow: and as regarding the
special objects of this training I will take the definition of a great
spiritual writer, a definition remarkable for its sanity and moderation:
“If we would discover and know that Kingdom of God which is hidden in
us, we must lead a life that is virtuous within, well ordered without,
and fulfilled with true charity.” What does that imply? It implies the
cultivation of self-control, order, and disinterestedness. Order is a
quality which all spiritual writers hold in great esteem; for they are
far from being the ecstatic, unbalanced, and mood-ridden creatures of
popular fancy. Now the untrained child has all the disorderly ways, the
uncontrolled and self-interested instincts of the primitive man. He is a
vigorous young animal, reacting promptly and completely to the stimulus
of fear or of greed. The history of human society, the gradual exchange
of license for law, self-interest for group-interest, spasmodic activity
for orderly diligence must be repeated in him if he is to take his place
in that human society. But if we would also prepare in him the way of
spirit, the aim of this training must be something higher than that
convenient social morality, that spirit of fair play, truth, justice,
mutual tolerance, which public school discipline seeks to develop. That
morality is relative and utilitarian. The morality in which alone the
life of the spirit can flourish is absolute and ideal. It is sought, not
because it makes life secure, or promotes the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, but for its own sake. Yet in spite of this, the social
order, in the form in which the child comes in contact with it, may be
made one of the best instruments for producing those characters demanded
by the spiritual life. For what, after all, is the exchanging of
self-interest for group-interests but the beginning of love? And what is
at the root of the spirit of give and take but humility? See how the
approaches to the spiritual kingdom are found in the midst of the common
life: what easy opportunity we have of initiating our children into
these central virtues of the soul. The spiritual writers tell us that
from love and humility all other virtues come; that on the moral side
nothing else is required of us. And we, if we train wisely, may lead the
young into them so gently and yet so deeply that their instinctive
attitude to existence will be that of humbleness and love; and they will
be spared the conflict and difficult reformation of those who wake to
spiritual realities in later life.
Now humbleness and love, as understood by spiritual persons, are not
passive virtues: they are energetic, and show themselves in mind, will,
and heart. In the mind, by a constant desirous tendency to, and seeking
after, that which is best; in the will by keenness, or, as the mystics
would say, by diligence and zeal; in the heart, by an easy suppleness of
relation with our fellow men—patience, good temper, sympathy,
generosity. Plainly the moral character which makes for spirituality is
a moral character which also makes for happiness. Suppose, then, that
our moral training has been directed towards this eager, supple state of
humbleness and love: what special results may we expect as the
personality develops? Spiritual writers tell us to expect certain
qualities, which are traditionally called the “seven gifts of the
spirit”; and if we study the special nature of these gifts, we see that
they are the names of linked characters or powers, which together work
an enhancement and clarification of the whole personality—a tuning-up of
human nature to fresh levels, a sublimation of its primitive instincts.
The first pair of qualities which are to mark our spiritual humanity are
called Godliness and Fear. By these are meant that solemn sense of
direct relationship with an eternal order, that gravity and awe, which
we ought to feel in the presence of the mysteries of the universe; the
fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. From these grow the
gifts called Knowledge, that is, the power of discerning true from false
values, of choosing a good path through the tangled world, and Strength,
the steady central control of the diverse forces of the self: perhaps
the gift most needed by our distracted generation. “Through the gift of
spiritual strength,” says Ruysbroeck, “a man transcends all creaturely
things and possesses himself, powerful and free.” This is surely a power
which we should desire for the children of the future, and get for them
if we can.
We see that the first four gifts of the spirit will govern the
adjustment of man to his earthly life: that they will immensely increase
the value of his personality in the social order, will clarify his mind
and judgment, confer nobility on his aims. The last three gifts—those
called Counsel, Understanding and Wisdom—will govern his intercourse
with the spiritual order. By Counsel, the spiritual writers mean that
inward voice which, as the soul matures, urges us to leave the
transitory and seek the eternal: and this not as an act of duty, but as
an act of love. When that voice is obeyed, the result is a new spiritual
Understanding; which, says Ruysbroeck again, may be “likened to the
sunshine, which fills the air with a simple brightness, and lights all
forms and shows the distinctions of all colours.” Even so does this
spiritual gift irradiate the whole world with a new splendour, and shows
us secrets that we never guessed before. Poets know flashes of it, and
from it their power proceeds; for it enables its possessor to behold
life truly, that is from the angle of God, not from the angle of man.
“Such an one,” says Ruysbroeck, “walks in heaven, and beholds and
apprehends the height, the length, the depth, and the breadth, the
wisdom and truth, the bounty and unspeakable generosity, which are in
God our Lover without number and without limit; for all this is Himself.
Then that enlightened man looks down, and beholds himself and all other
men and all creatures; and this gift, through the knowledge of truth
which is given us in its light, establishes in us a wide-stretching love
towards all in common.”
“A wide-stretching love towards all in common.” When we think of this as
the ruling character of our future citizens, and so the ruling character
of our future world, we begin to see that the education of the spirit
may represent a political no less than a transcendental ideal. It alone
can bring about that regeneration, working from the heart outwards, of
which the prophets of every country have dreamed.
It seems hard to conceive anything beyond this. But there is something.
To behold things as they are is not the end: beyond this is that Wisdom
which comes not with observation, but is the fruit of intimate communion
with Reality. Understanding is perception raised to its highest
expression: Wisdom is intuition raised to its highest expression, and
directed towards an absolute objective. It is, so far as we know here,
the crown and goal of human development; the perfect fruition of love.
We have considered very shortly the chief possibilities of the human
spirit, as they are described by those who have looked most deeply into
its secrets. These seers tell us further that this spirit has its
definite course to run, its definite consummation: that it emerges
within the physical order, grows, spreads, and at last enters into
perfect union or communion with the real and spiritual world. How much
attention do we pay to this statement, which, if true, is the
transcendent fact of human history, the key to the nature of man? How
much real influence does it have on our hopes and plans for our
children? The so-called phenomenon of conversion—the fact that so far
nearly all the highest and best examples of the spiritual life have been
twice-born types, that they have had to pass through a terrible crisis,
in which their natural lives were thrown into confusion in order that
their spiritual lives might emerge—all this is really a confession of
failure on the part of human nature: a proof that the plastic creature
has been allowed to harden in the wrong shape. If our growth were
rightly directed, the spirit would emerge and flower in all its strength
and loveliness, as the physical and mental powers of normal children
emerge and flower. What is wrong with education that it fails to achieve
this? Partly, I think, that the values at which it aims are too often
relative and self-interested; not absolute and disinterested. Its
intelligent gaze is fixed too steadily on earthly society, earthly
happiness. We encourage our young people to do the best things, but not
always from the best motives. We forget the essential link between work
and prayer: yet this alone lifts man from the position of a busy animal
to that of the friend and helper of God. We forget that our duties ought
to include the awakening of that clear consciousness of eternity which
should be normal in every human being, and without which it is
impossible for any man to grasp the true values and true proportion of
life.
From the very beginning, then, we ought to raise the eyes of the young
from the contemplation of the earth under their feet to that of the
heavens above their heads: to give them absolute values, not utilitarian
values, to aim at. There is nothing morbid or sickly in this: it is
rather those who do not possess the broader consciousness who are the
morbid, the sickly, and the maimed. The hope of the future is wide. We
must train our children to a wide stretch of faith, of aim, of
imagination, if they are to grasp it, and fully enter into the
inheritance that awaits them.
How, then, should we begin this most delicate of all tasks; this
education of the most sacred and subtle aspect of human nature? We must
be careful; for difficulties and dangers crowd the path, cranks lie in
wait at every corner. I have spoken of the moral preparation. That is
always safe and sure. But there are two other safe ways of approach; the
devotional and æsthetic. These two ways are not alternative, but
complementary. Art, says Hegel, belongs to the highest sphere of spirit,
and is to be placed in respect of its content on the same footing as
religion and philosophy; and many others—seers and philosophers—have
found in the revelation of beauty an authentic witness to God. But the
love and realization of beauty, without reverence and devotion, soon
degenerates into mere pleasure. So, too, devotion, unless informed with
the spirit of beauty, becomes thin, hard and sterile. But where these
two exist together, we find on one hand that the developed apprehension
which discovers deep messages in nature, in music, in all the noble
rhythms of art, makes the senses themselves into channels of Spirit: and
this is an apprehension which we can foster and control. And on the
other hand the devotional life, rightly understood as a vivid, joyful
thing—with that disciplining of the attention and will which is such an
important part of it—is the most direct way to an attainment of that
simple and natural consciousness of our intangible spiritual environment
which all ought to possess, and which the old mystics called by the
beautiful name of the “practice of the Presence of God.”
This linking up of the devotional life with the instinct for beauty and
wonder, will check its concentration on the more sentimental and
anthropomorphic aspects of religion; and so discourage that religious
emotionalism which wise educationalists rightly condemn. Hence these two
ways of approach, merged as they should be into one, can bring the self
into that simple kind of contemplation which is a normal birthright of
every soul, but of which our defective education deprives so many men
and women; who cannot in later life quicken those faculties which have
been left undeveloped in youth. As logic is a supreme exercise of the
mind, so contemplation is a supreme exercise of the spirit: it
represents the full activity of that intuitional faculty which is our
medium of contact with absolute truth. Before the inevitable smile
appears on the face of the reader, I say at once that I am not
suggesting that we should teach young children contemplation; though I
am sure that many brought up in a favouring atmosphere naturally
practise it long before they know the meaning of the word. But I do
suggest that we should bring them up in such a way that their developed
spirits might in the end acquire this art, without any more sense of
break with the normal than that which is felt by the developed mind when
it acquires the art of logic.
What is contemplation? It is attention to the things of the spirit:
surely no outlandish or alarming practice, foreign to the general drift
of human life. Were we true to our own beliefs, it should rather be our
central and supremely natural activity; the way in which we turn to the
spiritual world, and pick up the messages it sends to us. That world is
always sending us messages of liberation, of hope, and of peace. Are we
going to deprive our children of this unmeasured heritage, this
extension of life—perhaps the greatest of the rights of man—or leave
their enjoyment of it to some happy chance? We cannot read the wonderful
records of the spiritually awakened without a sense of the duty that is
laid on us, to develop if we can this spiritual consciousness in the
generation that is to be.
All great spiritual literature is full of invitations to a newness of
life, a great change of direction; which shall at last give our human
faculties a worthy objective and redeem our consciousness from its
present concentration upon unreal interests. It urges us perpetually, as
a practical counsel, as something which is within human power and has
already been achieved by the heroes of the race, to “put on the new
man”; to “bring to birth the Son of God in the soul.” But humanity as a
whole has never responded to that invitation, and therefore its greatest
possibilities are still latent. We, the guardians of the future, by
furnishing to each emerging consciousness committed to our care such an
apperceiving mass as shall enable it to discern the messages of reality,
may do something to bring those possibilities into manifestation.
THE PLACE OF WILL, INTELLECT AND FEELING IN PRAYER
The psychology of religious experience, as yet so little understood, has
few more important problems proposed to it than that which concerns the
true place and right use of will, intellect, and feeling in prayer. This
question, which to some may appear merely academic, really involves the
whole problem of the method and proportion in which the various powers
and activities of our being may best be used, when they turn from the
natural world of concrete things to attend to the so-called
“supernatural” world of Spirit—in fact, to God, Who is the source and
sum of the reality of that world. That problem must be of practical
interest to every Christian—more, to every one who believes in the
spiritual possibilities of man—for it concerns itself with all those
responses which are made by human personality to the impact of Infinite
Life. It deals, in Maeterlinck’s words, with “the harshest and most
uninhabitable headlands of the Divine ‘know thyself,’” and includes in
its span the whole region “where the psychology of man mingles with the
psychology of God.”
In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely just this: that
part of our active and conscious life which is deliberately orientated
towards, and exclusively responds to, spiritual reality. The Being of
God, Who is that spiritual reality, we believe to be immanent in all
things: “He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and
move, and have our being.” In fact, as Christians we must believe this.
Therefore in attending to those visible and concrete things, we are in a
way attending to that immanent God; and in this sense all honest work is
indeed, as the old proverb says, a sort of prayer. But when we speak of
prayer as a separate act or activity of the self, we mean more than
this. We mean, in fact, as a rule the other aspect of spiritual
experience and communion; in the language of theology, attention to
transcendent rather than to immanent Reality. Prayer, says Walter
Hilton, in terms of which the origin goes back to the Neoplatonists, “is
nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart
into God, by withdrawing it from all earthly thoughts”—an ascent, says
Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law
defines it as “the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the
riches of eternity.” It entails, then, a going up or out from our
ordinary circle of earthly interests; a cutting off, so far as we may,
of “the torrent of use and wont,” that we may attend to the changeless
Reality which that flux too often hides. Prayer stretches out the
tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life
which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of
things; but rather to that “Eternal truth, true Love, and loved
Eternity” wherein the world is felt to be enshrined; and in this act it
brings to full circle the activities of the human soul—that
“Swinging-wicket set between
The Unseen and the Seen.”