 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today by Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism, The Essentials of Mysticism, etc. New York, E. P. Dutton and Company, 681 Fifth Avenue, copyright 1922 by E. P. Dutton and 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 electorship 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 rewritten, in order to make it more 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. The 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 the most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to themselves the plain words of Thomas A. Kempis. Thou art a man and not God, thou art flesh, and no angel. Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity, but the normal life of the Spirit, as it may be, and is lived in the here and now, I have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in the ordinary terms of present-day thought, and with little or no use of the technical language of mysticism. For the same reason, no attention has been given to those abnormal experiences in states of consciousness which, too often regarded as especially 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 worldview 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. That of Chapter 4 has already appeared in the Fortnightly Review under the title Suggestion and Religious Experience. Chapter 8 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 Hugley, 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 honour of being the first woman lecturer in religion to appear in the university list. E. U. Epiphany 1922 Contents Preface Chapter 1 The Characters of Spiritual Life Chapter 2 History and the Life of the Spirit Chapter 3 Psychology and the Life of the Spirit 1. The Analysis of Mind Chapter 4 Psychology and the Life of the Spirit 2. Contemplation and Suggestion Chapter 5 Institutional Religion and the Life of the Spirit Chapter 6 The Life of the Spirit in the Individual Chapter 7 The Life of the Spirit in Education Chapter 8 The Life of the Spirit and the Social Order End of forward. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today by Evelyn Underhill Chapter 1 Part A The Characters of Spiritual Life This book has been called The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today in order to emphasise 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 insofar 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 insofar as we realise 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's 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 too. 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 fulfillment of it. More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the searching question of the disciple in Boma's dialogue on the super sensual life. Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature into the super sensual ground, without destroying nature? Three. 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 Obama, will you seek for God? Seek him in your soul, which has proceeded out of the eternal nature, the living fountain of forces wherein divine working stands. For—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 monkey's way, on one hand, or the angel's way on the other. 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 affecting 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. Five. Assures us in these words that he too has known that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious experience insofar 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. Bosenke as oneness with the supreme good in every facet of the heart and will. Six. And since without derogation of its transcendent character, its vigor, 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 seek something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way in which education may best prepare its fulfillment, 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. Education 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 the cosmos of which, despite all contrary appearance, peace is the very heart and which is not inimicable 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 center 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 a 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 has 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 gaze on the light that never changes, above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence. 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 today 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, or 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. 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 Roycebrook, 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 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. Best we have on one hand the Catholic minded, 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 crossroads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing 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 this with 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, let exclaim, from the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and thee, 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. 15. On the immense question of what it is that long 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 color 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 vigor 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 mighty increase of 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 holy, 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 world have received the power of power. 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, an 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 Lucy Christine says 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 Devanjranath Thakur, 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 holes. 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 Royce Brook 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 ever must 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 insofar 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 eminent love, a paradox which only some form of incarnational philosophy can solve. It is said of Abud Said, the Great Sufi, 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 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 never was heard quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute-glass to turn—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-Benedictan phase of Christian monasticism, there has been an unbalanced cultivation of the contemplative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imperfectly vitalized asocial 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 overdriven and the underfed. But no one can be said to live in its fullness 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 Royce Brooks 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 twofold ideal in Christ and 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 fullness of his stature, this is the ideal that is implied. In the intermediate term of the religious experience, that felt communion with that person which is the clue of the devotional life, we get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence and of eminence, 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 the Bhakti Marga. In Islam there is the impassioned longing of the Sufis for the beloved, who is the rose of all reason and all truth. Without the O beloved I cannot rest. Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon. Though every hair on my body becomes a tongue a thousand part of the thanks due to the I cannot tell. 26. There is the sudden note of rapture which startles us in the Neo-Platonists, as when Plotinus speaks of the name of love for what is there to know, the passion of a lover resting 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 subhuman, 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 appresieving 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, while safeguarding its eminence 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 mind 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 spacetime 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 neighbor, 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. End of Chapter 1, Part A. 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 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 psychic life, thought, will and feeling must have its part and from each must be evoked a response. Only insofar 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 instinct of life that this reality 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 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 insofar 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 other fantasies 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. Hofting goes so far as to say that any real religion implies and must give us a world view. Thirty. 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 to 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 today 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 the 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 centers 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 disheveled state from the explorations of history and psychology. Even contrasted with our everyday, 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 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 hilltop view. Lifting us up to higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. Hence, the wider 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 towards 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 earnest 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 experiences, 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. Thirty-one. Though St. Thomas Aquinas may not have covered all the facts when he called man a contemplative animal, thirty-two, he came nearer the mark than more modern anthropologists. Man has an ineradicable impulse to transcendence, though sometimes, as we may admit it, 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 surrounding 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. Thirty-three. 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 telelogical 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 and 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 in 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 and attracting a magnetic desire. Thirty-four. 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 real 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. Thirty-five. This is a truth which should make us humble in our efforts to understand the difficult and 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. Anne von Hugel has finally 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 the pious indolence and 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, today, and forever. 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 standpoint and with this object of examining what we have, of sorting out, if we can, the permanent from the transitory, of noticing lax 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 at all his many leveled experiences. I believe we have the way of approach to which religion today must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety, which, agreeable as it may be to the historic or aesthetic sense, makes it so unreal to our workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology, which is already a marked character of contemporary thought. And note that, working on this basis, we need not in order to find room for the facts commit ourselves to the harsh dualism, the opposition between nature and spirit, which is characteristic of some earlier forms of Christian thought. In this dualism, too, we find simply an effort to describe felt experience. It is an expression of the fact, so strongly and deeply felt by the richest natures, that there is an utter difference in kind between the natural life of use and want, 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 affected 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 are present life. Although it is true that we must register our profound sense of the transcendental character of the 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 purdurable basis of life and foster our growth into communion with it. And whatever its special language and personal color 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 in itself a spiritual fact. Heaven, said Jacob Boeme, 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 worthwhile 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. 40. 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 the young people reared in them are likely to acquire this temper of heaven? Yet we have been given this secret, the law of spiritual life, and psychologists would agree that it represents, too, the most favorable 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 today, 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 neighbor 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 deff the ears of our bodies than the clamorings of desires in the soul deff its ears. So you see a man must go into the silence, or else he cannot hear God speak. Forty. And until we remodel our current conception of the Christian life and such a sense as to give that silence and as revelation their full value, I do not think that we can hope to exhibit the triumphant power of the spirit and 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 itself 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. Forty-one. And what is worship but a reach out of the finite spirit towards infinite life? Here thought must mend the breach with 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 around 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 in 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 his 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 and kind from the rhythm of life and death. And in there 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 Plotina 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 1. Von Hugo. Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion. Page 60. 2. Aeneid 1. 6. 7. 3. Jacca Burma. The Way to Christ. Part 4. 4. Opsit loksit. 5. 100 Poems of Kabir. Page 31. 6. What Religion is? Page 32. 7. Augustine. Confession 7. 27. 8. My vision becoming more purified entered deeper and deeper into the ray of that supernal light which in itself is true. 9. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples. Page 194. Number 10. T. Upton. The Basis of Religious Belief. Page 363. Number 11. Blake. Jerusalem. 12. Nicholson. The Devani Shamsi Tabriz. Page 141. 13. Aeneid 5. 14. Kabir. Opsit. Page 41. 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 straightly, for in thee the heart so joyful dwells that he who feels it not can never say how sweet it is to taste thy savor. Yacapon de Todi. Lauda 101. Number 16. Isaiah 11 29 31. 17. Augustine Confession 10 28. Number 18. Autobiography of the Maharishi Devanjranath Tagore. Number 19. Le Journel Spirituel de Lucy Christine. Number 20. Autobiography of Maharishi Devanjranath Tagore. 21. Roycebrook. The Book of the Twelve Begins. Number 22. Overton. The Life of Wesley. Number 23. R.A. Nicholson. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. Number 24. Dunn Sermons. Edited by L. Pearsall Smith. Page 236. Number 25. Roycebrook. The Sparkling Stone. Number 26. Beshear E. Yasin. Nicholson Opset Lokesit. Number 27. Aneid 694. Number 28. Revelations of Divine Love. Number 29. Pratt, The Religious Consciousness. 30. Hofding. Philosophy of Religion. Part 2, A. 31. Opset, Book 4. Number 32. Summa Contra Gentiles. 53. Number 33. Augustine Confession in 7. 10. Number 34. The Liberal and Mystical Ridings of William Law. Page 154. Number 35. C. F. Haldane. The Rain of Relativity. Number 36. Fond Hugo. Eternal Life. Page 385. Number 37. Aneid 146. Number 38. Verma, The Way to Christ. Part 4. Number 39. Blake, Jerusalem to the Christians. Number 40. Some Gospel Treasures Opened. Page 600. Number 41. William Penn. No Cross, No Crown. End of Chapter 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today. By Evelyn Underhill. Number 2. History and the Life of the Spirit. Read by Mary Reagan. We have already agreed that if we wish to grasp the real character of spiritual life, we must avoid the temptation to look at it as merely a historical subject. If it is what it claims to be, it is a form of eternal life, as constant as accessible to us here and now as in any so-called age of faith, therefore of actual and present importance, or else nothing at all. This is why I think that the approach to it through philosophy and psychology is so much to be preferred to the approach through pure history. Yet there is a sense in which we must not neglect such history, for here, if we try to enter by sympathy into the past, we can see the life of the Spirit emerging and being lived in all degrees of perfection and under many different forms. Here, through and behind the immense diversity of temperaments which it has transfigured, we can best realize its uniform and enduring character and therefore our own possibility of attaining to it and the way that we must tread so to do. History does not exhort us or explain to us but exhibits living specimens to us, and these specimens witness again and again to the fact that a compelling power does exist in the world, little understood even by those who are inspired by it, which presses men to transcend their material limitations and mental conflicts and live a new creative life of harmony, freedom, and joy. Directly human character emerges as one of man's prime interests. This possibility emerges too and is never lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian, Muslim, and Christian all declare, with more or less completeness, a way of life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment, and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women who have followed this way and found its promise to be true. It is indeed of supreme importance to us that these men and women did truly and actually thus grow, suffer, and attain, did so feel the pressure of a more intense life and the demand of a more authentic love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to them, belong at the bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not of fantasy, and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it could only have for us the interest of a noble dream, an interest actually less than that of great poetry, for this at least has been given to us by man's hard, passionate work of expressing in concrete image, and ever the more concrete the greater his art, the result of his transcendental contacts with beauty, power, or love. Thus as the tracking out of a concrete life, a man from Nazareth to Calvary made Christianity a veritable human revelation of God, and not a gnostic answer to the riddle of the soul. So the real and solid men and women of the spirit, eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the circumstances of their own time, are the earnest of our own latent destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to grow taller in Christ. Forty-two. These powers, that ability, are factually present in the race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow. In order then that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection, and keep tight hold on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who have followed on highest levels a normal course, the upstanding types, varying much in temperament, but little in aim and achievement of that form of life which is remade and controlled by the spirit and tinctured with eternal life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educated for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it as a mere chronicle of past events, and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens exhibited against a flat tapestry background, more or less picturesque but always thought of in opposition to the concrete thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epics now closed, of ages of faith utterly separated from us, of saints as some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden atmosphere and less vividly human in various than ourselves. Such conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense, and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the spirit, that is to say with the saints, they are particularly common and particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croci has observed, the very condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated must live and be present in the soul of the historian, must be emotionally realized by him now as concrete fact weighted with significance. It must be answer to a present, not to a past interest of the race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward truth. Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rohl, who has been called the father of English mysticism. It is easy enough for those who regard spiritual history as dead chronicle, and its subjects as something different from ourselves, to look upon Rohl's threefold experience of the soul's reaction to God, the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his austere self-giving life, forty-three, as the probable result of the reaction of a neurotic temperament to medieval traditions. But if, for instance, the Oxford undergraduate of today realizes Rohl not as a picturesque fourteenth century hermit, but as a fellow student, another Oxford undergraduate, separated from him only by an enterful of time, who gave up that university in the career it could offer him, under the compulsion of another wisdom and another love, then he re-enters the living past. If, standing beside him in that small hut in the Yorkshire walls, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the north of England, he hears Rohl saying, not more profitable, not merrier, than grace of contemplation, which lifted us from low things and presented us to God. What thing is a grace but beginning of joy? And what is perfection of joy but grace complete? Forty-four. If I say he so re-enters history that he can hear this as Rohl meant it, not as a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed, life's very secret, then his heart may be touched, and he may begin to understand. And then it may occur to him that this ardor and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard life which it supported, witness to another level of being, reprove his own languor and comfort, his contentment with merely physical mental life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition or of pathology. When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past, our time span is enlarged and history is born and becomes contemporary, thus both widening and deepening our vital experience. It then becomes not only a real mode of life to us, but more than this, a mode of social life. Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time stream to achieve by ourselves and in defiance of tradition a true integration of existence. Thus, to defy tradition is to refuse all the gifts that the past can make to us and cut ourselves off from the accumulative experiences of the race. The spirit as Crochi, 45, reminds us is history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all preceding history, since becoming is the essential reality, the creative formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed. It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical aspect of the life of spirit, re-entering the past by sympathetic imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which persist and have significance for it, getting, if we can, face to face with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it. This is not easy. In studying all such experience we have to remember that men and women of the spirit are members of two orders. They have attachments both to time and to eternity. Their characteristic experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth, the earth of their own day. Therefore two factors will inevitably appear in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free movements of creative life, and we, if we would understand, must discriminate between them. In this power of taking from the past and pushing on to the future the balance maintained between stability and novelty we find one of their abiding characteristics. When this balance is broken, when there is either to complete a submission to tradition and authority, or to violent a rejection of it, full greatness is not achieved. In complete lives the two things overlap, and so perfectly that no sharp distinction is made between the gifts of authority and a fresh experience. Traditional formulae, as we know, are often used because they are found to tally with life, to light up dark corners of our own spirits and give names to experiences which we want to define. Ceremonial deeds are used to actualize free contacts with reality, and we need not be surprised that they can do this, since tradition represents the crystallization and handling on under symbols of all the spiritual experiences of the race. Therefore the man or woman of the spirit will always accept and use some tradition, and unless he does so he is not of much use to his fellow men. He must not then be discredited on account of the symbolic system he adopts but must be allowed to tell his news in his own way. We must not refuse to find reality within the Hindu's account of his joyous, life-giving communion with Ram any more than we refuse to find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout Buddhist who faithfully follows the middle way, or deny that pagan sacramentalism was, to its initiates, a channel of grace. For all these are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of history, and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this fact with all that it involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see when we come to discuss the laws of suggestion and the function of belief, the weight of tradition presses the loyal and humble soul which accepts it to such an interpretation of its own spiritual intuitions as its church, its creed, its environment give to it. Thus St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, even Roycebrook, are able to describe their intuitive communion with God in strictly Catholic terms, and by so doing renew, enrich, and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the current formula, Fox, Wesley, or Blake, driven into opposition by the sterility of the contemporary church, were forced to find elsewhere some tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it in the Bible, Wesley and patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic and Christian connections. And all these regarded themselves far less as bringers-in of novelty than as restores of lost truth. So we must be prepared to discriminate the element of novelty from the element of stability, the reality of the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral situation from the traditional and often symbolic language in which it is given to us. The comparative method helps us towards this, and is thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of skepticism, but rightly used the revealer of the spirit of life in its variety of gifts. In this connection, we might remember that time, like space, is only of secondary importance to us. Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of years of our animal and subhuman existence, the life of the spirit as it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous rather than successive. We may borrow the imagery of Dunn's great discourse on eternity and say that those heroic livers of the spiritual life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique or medieval men were, but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, all in one morning in respect of this day forty-six. Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere differences of language and appearance, and grasp the warmly living and contemporary character of all historic truth. It preserves us too from the common error of discriminating between so-called ages of faith and our own. The more we study the past, the more clearly we recognize that there are no ages of faith. Such labels merely represent the arbitrary cuts which we make in the time stream, the arbitrary colors which we give to it. The spiritual man or woman is always fundamentally the same kind of man or woman, always reaching out with the same faith and love towards the heart of the same universe, though telling that faith and love in various tongues. He is far less the child of his time than the transformer of it. His This World Business is to bring in novelty, new reality, fresh life. Yet coming to fulfill not to destroy he uses for this purpose the traditions, creeds, even the institutions of his day. But when he has done with them they do not look the same as they did before. Christ himself has been well called a constructive revolutionary. 47. Yet each single element of his teaching can be found in Jewish tradition, and the noblest of his followers have the same character. Thus St. Francis of Assisi only sought consistently to apply the teaching of the New Testament, and St. Teresa, that of the Carmelite Rule. Every element of Wesleyanism is to be found in primitive Christianity, and Wesleyanism is itself the tradition from which the new vigor of the Salvation Army sprang. The great regenerators of history are always in fundamental opposition to the common life of their day, for they demand by their very existence a return to first principles, a revolution in the ways of thinking and of acting common among men, a heroic consistency and single-mindedness. But they can use for their own fresh constructions and contacts with eternal life the material of which this life offers to them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, or Wesley were not, therefore, the natural products of ages of faith. They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding apathy and decadence, an invasion of novelty, a sharp break with society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with the spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epic, and spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even eccentric at the time at which it appears. We are accustomed to think of the imitation of Christ as the classic expression of medieval spirituality. But when Thomas at Kempis wrote his book, it was the manifesto of that which was called the modern devotion, and represented a new attempt to live the life of the spirit in opposition to surrounding apathy. When we re-enter the past we find there is the persistent conflict between this novelty and this apathy, that is to say between man's instinct for transcendence in which we discern the pressure of the spirit and earnest of its future and his tendency to lag behind towards animal levels in which we see the influence of his racial past. So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by sin under the second head. And the most striking, though not the only, examples of the forward reach of life towards freedom, that is, of conquering grace, are those persons whom we call men and women of the spirit. In them it is incarnate, and through them as it were it spreads and gives the race a lift. For their transfiguration is never for themselves alone. They impart it to all who follow them. But the downward falling movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit and tends to drag back to the average level the group these have vivified when their influence is withdrawn. Hence the history of the spirit, and incidentally the history of all churches, exhibits to us a series of strong movements towards completed life inspired by vigorous and transcendent personalities thwarted by the common indolence and tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. We have no reason to suppose that this history is a closed book, or that the spiritual life struggling to emerge among ourselves will follow other laws. We desire then, if we can, to discover what it was that these transcendent personalities possessed. We may think, from the point at which we now stand, that they had some things which were false, or at least were misinterpreted by them. We cannot without insincerity make their view of the universe our own. But plainly they also possessed truths and values which most of us have not. They obtained from their religion whether we allow that it had as creed an absolute or symbolic value, a power of living, a courage and a clear vision, which we do not as a rule obtain. When we study the character and works of these men and women, observing their nobility, their sweetness, their power of endurance, their outflowing love, we must, unless we be utterly insensitive, perceive ourselves to be confronted by a quality of being which we do not possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet one of them in the flesh, though his conduct is commonly more normal than our own, we know then, with Plotinus, that the soul has another life. Yet many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies, acknowledge the same scale of values and the same moral law. But as something beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes more vividly alive, so for these there was and is in religion a new, intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels, a type of life and of greatness which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the race. Now, the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two groups. First, type. What are the characters which mark this life of the spirit? Secondly, process. What is the line of development by which the individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters? First, then, the spiritual type. What we see above all in these men and women so frequently repeated that we may regard it as classic is a perpetual, serious, heroic effort to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and real source of power is in a single-mindedness. They aim at God. The phrase is Royce Brooks, but it pervades the real literature of the spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that the householder must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions. Forty-eight. Thus the Sufi says he has but two laws, to look in one direction and to live in one way. Forty-nine. Christians call this, and with reason, the imitation of Christ, and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of our Lord's life was his abiding sense of direct connection with, and responsibility to, the Father, that his teaching and works of charity alike were inspired by this union, and that he declared it not as a unique fact, but as a possible human ideal. This is not a theological but a historical statement which applies, in its degree to every man and woman who has been a follower of Christ, for he was, as St. Paul has said, the eldest and a vast family of brothers. The same single-minded effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths, though these may lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love. And by a paradox repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant fruits in the temporal sphere, giving not only the strength to do difficult things, but that creative charity which wins and redeems the unlovely by the power of its love. Fifty. The man or woman of prayer, the community devoted to it, taps some deep source of power and use it in the most practical ways. Thus the only object of the Benedictine rule was the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the soul, and it became one of the chief instruments in the civilization of Europe, carrying forward not only religion but education, pure scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The object of St. Bernard's reform was the restoration of the life of prayer. His monks, going out into the waste places with no provision but their own faith, hope and charity, revived agriculture, established industry, literally compelled the wilderness to flower for God. The brothers of the common life joined together in order that living simply and by their own industry they might observe a rule of constant prayer, and they became in consequence a powerful educational influence. The object of Wesley and his first companions was by declaration the saving of their own souls and the living only to the glory of God, but they were impelled at once by this to practical deeds of mercy, and ultimately became the regenerators of religion in the English speaking world. It is well to emphasize this truth, for it conveys a lesson which we can learn from history at the present time with much profit to ourselves. It means that reconstruction of character and reorientation of attention must precede reconstruction of society, that the Sufi is right when he declares that the whole secret lies in looking in one direction and living in one way. Again and again it has been proved that those who aim at God do better work than those who start with the declared intention of benefiting their fellow men. We must be good before we can do good, be real before we can accomplish real things. No generalized benevolence, no social Christianity, however beautiful and devoted, can take the place of this centering of the spirit on eternal values, this humble, deliberate recourse to reality. To suppose that it can do so is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect for cause. This brings us to the second character, the rich completeness of the spiritual life, the way in which it fuses and transfigures the complementary human tendencies to contemplation and action, the non-successive and successive aspects of reality. The love of God, said Royce Brooke, is an in-drawing and outpouring tide, fifty-one, and history endorses this. In its greatest representatives the rhythm of adoration and work is seen in an accentuated form. These people seldom or never answer to the popular idea of idol contemplatives. They do not withdraw from the stream of natural life and effort but plunge into it more deeply, seek its heart. They have powers of expression and creation and use them to the full. St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius, organizing families which shall incarnate the gift of new life. Fox, Wesley and Booth, striving to save other men. Mary Slesser, driven by vocation from the Dundee mill to the African swamps, these are characteristic of them. We perceive that they are not specialists, as more earthly types of efficiency are apt to be. There's our rich natures, their touch on existence has often an artistic equality. St. Paul and his correspondents could break into poetry as the only way of telling the truth. St. Jerome lived to the full the lives of scholar and of ascetic. St. Francis, in his perpetual missionary activities, still found time for his music and songs. St. Hildegard and St. Catherine of Siena had their strong political interests. Jacopo and Dottori combined the careers of politician and poet. So too in practical matters. St. Catherine of Genoa was one of the first hospital administrators. St. Vincent de Paul a genius in the sphere of organized charity. Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform. Brother Lawrence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in the presence of God. Jacopo was a hardworking cobbler and afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition. The perpetual journeys and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller compass the career of St. Paul. He was also an exact scholar and a practical educationist. Mary Slesser showed the quality of a ruler as well as that of a winner of souls. In the intellectual region Richard of St. Victor was supreme in contemplation and also a psychologist far in advance of his time. We are apt to forget the mystical side of Aquinas who was poet and contemplative as well as a scholastic philosopher. And the third feature we notice about these men and women is that this new power by which they lived was, as Royce Brooke calls it, a spreading light. Fifty-two. It poured out of them invading and illuminating other men so that through them whole groups or societies were reborn, if only for a time, onto fresh levels of reality, goodness, and power. Their own intense personal experience was valid not only for themselves. They belonged to that class of natural leaders who are capable of infecting the herd with their own ideals, leading it to new feeding grounds, improving the common level. It is indeed the main social function of the man or woman of the spirit to be such a crowd-compeller in the highest sense and as the artist reveals new beauty to his fellow men to stimulate their neighbors in the latent human capacity for God. In every great surge forward to new life we can trace back the radiance to such a single point of light, the transfiguration of an individual soul. Thus Christ's communion with his father was the life-center, the point of contact with eternity, whence radiated the joy and power of the primitive Christian flock, the classic example of a corporate spiritual life. When the young man with great possessions asked Jesus, what shall I do to be saved? Jesus replied in effect, put aside all lesser interests, strip off unrealities, and come. Give yourself the chance of catching the infection of holiness for me. Whatever be our view of Christian dogma, whatever meaning we attach to the words redemption and atonement, we shall hardly deny that in the life and character of the historic Christ something new was thus evoked from and added to humanity. No one can read with attention the gospel and the story of the primitive church without being struck by the consciousness of renovation of enhancements experienced by all who received the Christian secret in its charismatic stage. This new factor is sometimes called rebirth, sometimes grace, sometimes the power of the spirit, sometimes being in Christ. We misread history if we regard it either as a mere gust of emotional fervor, or a theological idea, or discount the miracles of healing and other proofs of enhanced power by which it was expressed. Everything goes to prove that the more abundant life offered by the Joannine Christ to his followers was literally experienced by them and was the source of their joy, their enthusiasm, their mutual love, and power of endurance.