 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 II PART B. HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT On lower levels, and through the inspiration of lesser teachers, history shows us the phenomena of primitive Christianity repeated again and again, both within and without the Christian circle of ideas. Every religion looks for, and most have possessed, some revealer of the Spirit, some prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the characteristic demonstrations of the human power of transcendence, a supernatural life which can be lived by us, have begun in one person who has become a creative center mediating new life to his fellow men, as were Buddha and Muhammad for the faiths which they founded. Such lives as those of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley, Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of this law. The parable of the leaven is in fact an exact description of the way in which the spiritual consciousness, the supernatural urge, is observed to spread in human society. It is characteristic of the regenerate type that he should as it were overflow his own boundaries and energize other souls for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours out inevitably from those who possess it to other men. We notice that the great mystics recognize again and again such a fertilizing and creative power as a mark of the soul's full vitality. It is not the personal rapture of the spiritual marriage, but rather the divine facendatee of one who is a parent of spiritual children which seems to them of human transcendence and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels in real union with God. In the fourth and last degree of love the soul brings forth its children, says Richard of St. Victor, 53. The last perfection to supervine upon a thing, says Aquinas, is its becoming the cause of other things. 54. In a word it is creative, and the spiritual life as we see it in history is thus creative, the cause of other things. History is full of examples of this law, that the man or woman of the spirit is fundamentally a life giver and all corporate achievement of the life of the spirit flows from some great apostle or initiator is the fruit of discipleship. Such corporate achievement is a form of group consciousness brought into being through the power and attraction of a fully harmonized life, infecting others with its own sharp sense of divine reality. Poets and artists thus infect in a measure all those who yield to their influence. The active mystic who is the poet of eternal life does it in a supreme degree. Such a relation of master and disciples is conspicuous in every true spiritual revival and is the link between the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration. We see it in the little flock that followed Christ, the little poor men who followed Francis, the friends of Fox, the army of General Booth. Not Christianity alone but Hindu and Muslim history testify to this necessity. But Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a guru who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere and must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience. The Sufi neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his shake as a corpse in the hands of the washer, and all the great saints of Islam have been the inspiring centers of more or less organized groups. Christianity teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through men. We most easily recognize spirit when it is perceived transfiguring human character and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic contagion, though the new light may flash as it seems directly into the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired. The spontaneous outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare, and even here careful analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment, tradition, teaching, literary, or oral have prepared the way for it. There is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human experience and education. Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of God are also the sons and daughters of the race, and are helped by those who go before them. And, as regards the generality, not isolated effort, but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher and every man and woman of the spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of influence, the unselfconscious trust of the disciple are the means by which the secret of full life has been handed on. One loving spirit in each the spiritual world was seen through a temperament and so mediated to the disciples who shared so far as they were able the master's special secret and attitude to life. Says St. Augustine sets another on fire and expressed in this phrase the law which governs the spiritual history of man. This law finds notable expression in the phenomena of the religious order, a type of association founded more or less perfection in every great religion which has not received the attention it deserves from students of psychology. If we study the lives of those who founded these orders, though such a foundation was not always intended by them, we notice one general characteristic. Each was an enthusiast abounding in zest and hope and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a source of spiritual infection for those who came under his influence. In each the spiritual world was seen through a temperament and so mediated to the disciples who shared so far as they were able the master's special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Benedict's sane and generous outlook is crystallized in the Benedictine rule. St. Francis's deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave Franciscan regeneration its particular character. The heroisms of the early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St. Ignatius. The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance from St. Teresa's mystical experience. The great orders in their purity were families, inheriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their patriarch who gave as a father to his children life-stamped with his own characteristics. Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of its founder the group appears to lose its spontaneous and enthusiastic character. Zest fails. Unless a fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles down again towards the general level of the herd. Thence it can only be roused by means of reforms or revivals, the arrival of new vigorous leaders in the formation of new enthusiastic groups, for the bulk of men as we know them cannot or will not make the costing effort needed for a first-hand participation in eternal life. They want a crowd-compeller to lift them above themselves. Thus the history of Christianity is the history of successive spiritual group formations and their struggle to survive from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed his little flock with the avowed aim of bringing in the kingdom of God, transmuting the mentality of the race and so giving it more abundant life. Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of their master, the influence and infection of his spirit and atmosphere as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life, and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain contact with the eternal world in prayer. The great speech of Sereneus to Cracy in John Engelsland described once for all the highest type of Christian spirituality, 55. But in practice this link and this influence are too subtle for the mass of men. They must constantly be re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls and by them be mediated to fresh groups formed within or without the institutional frame. Thus in the thirteenth century St. Francis and in the fourteenth friends of God created a true spiritual society within the church by restoring in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian idea and Christian life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Fox and Wesley possessed by the same essential vision broke away from the institution which was no longer supple enough to meet their needs and formed their fresh groups outside the old herd. When such creative personalities appear and such groups are founded by them the phenomena of the spiritual life re-appear in their full vigor and are disseminated. A new vitality, a fresh power of endurance, is seen in all who are drawn within the group and share its mind. This is what St. Paul seems to have meant when he reminded his converts that they had the mind of Christ. The primitive friars living under the influence of Francis did practice the perfect poverty which is also perfect joy. The assured calm and willing sufferings of the early Christians were reproduced in the early Quakers, secure in their possession of the inner light. We know very well the essential characters of this fresh mentality, the power, the enthusiasm, the radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hardship it confers. But we can no more produce it from these raw materials than the chemist's crucible can produce life. The whole experience of St. Francis is implied in the Beatitudes. The secret of Elizabeth Frye is a secret of St. John. The doctrine of general Booth is fully stated by St. Paul. But it was not by referring inquiries to the pages of the New Testament that the first brought men fettered by things to experience the freedom of poverty. The second faced entamed three hundred Newgate criminals who seemed at her first visit like wild beasts, or the third created armies of the redeemed from the dregs of the London slums. They did these things by direct personal contagion, and they will be done among us again when the triumphant power of eternal spirit is again exhibited, not in ideas, but in human character. I think, then, that history justifies us in regarding the full living of the spiritual life as implying at least these three characters. First, single mindedness to mean only God. Second, the full integration of the contemplative and active sides of existence lifted up, harmonized, and completely consecrated to those interests which the self recognizes as divine. Third, the power of reproducing this life, incorporating it in a group. Before we go on, we will look at one concrete example which illustrates all these points. This example is that of St. Benedict and the order which he founded, for in the rounded completeness of his life and system we see what should be the normal life of the spirit and its result. Benedict was born in times not unlike our own when wars had shaken civilization, the arts of peace were unsettled, religion was at a low ebb. As a young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from the vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the hills, and lived in a cave for three years alone with his thoughts of God. It would be easy to regard him as an eccentric boy, but he was adjusting himself to the real center of his life. Gradually others who longed for a more real existence joined him, and he divided them into groups of twelve and settled them in small houses, giving them a timetable by which to live, which should make possible a full and balanced existence of body, mind, and soul. Thanks to those years of retreat and preparation he knew what he wanted and what he ought to do, and they ushered in a long life of intense mental and spiritual activity. His houses were schools which taught the service of God and the perfecting of the soul as the aims of life. His rule, in which genial human tolerance, gentle courtesy, and a profound understanding of men are not less marked than lofty spirituality, is the classic statement of all that the Christian spiritual life implies and should be. 56. What then is the character of the life which St. Benedict proposed as a remedy for the human failure and disharmony that he saw around him? It was framed, of course, for a celibate community, but it has many permanent features which are unaffected by this limitation. It offers balanced opportunities of development to the body, the mind, and the spirit, laying equal emphasis on hard work, study, and prayer. It aims at a robust completeness, not at the production of professional ascetics. Indeed, its rule says little about physical austerities, insists on sufficient food and rest, and countenance is no extremes. According to Abbott Butler, St. Benedict's day was divided into three and a half hours for public worship, four and a half for reading and meditation, six and a half for manual work, eight and a half for sleep, and one hour for meals, so that in spite of the time devoted to spiritual and mental interests, the primitive Benedictine did a good day's work and had a good night's rest at the end of it. The work might be anything that wanted doing so long as the hours of prayer were not infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, handicrafts, and art have all been done perfectly by St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in quiet love. This is what one of the greatest constructive minds of Christendom regarded as a reasonable way of life, a frame within which the loftiest human faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieved that harmony with God, which is its goal. Moreover, this life was to be social. It was in the beginning just the busy, useful life of an Italian farm, lived in groups, in monastic families, under the rule and inspiration not of a master, but of an Abbott, a father who really was the spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility, obedience, self-denial, and gentle suppleness of character which are the authentic fruits of the spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has something still to say to us, some reproof to administer to our hurried and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those marks of the regenerate life of the spirit which history has shown to us as normal, namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action and contemplation, the creative power, and above all the principle of social solidarity and discipleship. We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the process by which the individual normally develops this life of the spirit, the serial changes it demands, for plainly, to know this is of practical importance to us. The full inwardness of these changes will be considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life. Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and small personalities, under the various labels which have been given to it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence with a temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This life we must believe in some form and degree to be possible for all, but we study it best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its fullest records survive. The first moment of this process seems to be that man falls out of love with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it. Disatisfaction and disillusion possess him, the negative marks of his nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict disguised by the meaningless life of Roman society, in St. Francis abandoning his gay and successful social existence, in Richard Brawl turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life, in the restless misery of St. Catherine of Genoa, in Fox desperately seeking something that could speak to his condition, and also in two outstanding examples from modern India, those of the Maharishi Devanjranath Tagore and the Sadhu Sundar Singh. This dissatisfaction sometimes associated with the negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with the positive longing for holiness and peace, is the mental preparation of conversion, which though not a constant, is at least a characteristic feature of the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history. We might indeed expect some crucial change of attitude, some inner crisis to mark the beginning of a new life which is to aim only at God. Here too we find one motive of that movement of world abandonment which so commonly follows conversion, especially in heroic souls. Thus St. Paul hides himself in Arabia. St. Benedict retires for three years to the cave at Subaiko. St. Ignatius to Manresa. Gerard Groot, the brilliant and wealthy young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of the common life, began his new life by self-seclusion in a Carthusian cell. St. Catherine of Siena at first lived solitary in her own room. St. Francis, with dramatic completeness, abandoned his whole past, even the clothing that was part of it. Ya Capona de Todi, the prosperous lawyer converted to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to express his utter separation from the world. Others it is true have chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the cell of self-knowledge the solitude they required, but some decisive break was imperative for all. History assures us that there is no easy sliding into the life of the spirit. A secondary cause of such world refusal is the first awakening of the contemplative powers, the intuition of eternity, hitherto dormant and felt as this stage to be in its overwhelming reality and appeal in conflict with the unreal world and unsublimated act of life. This is the controlling idea of the hermit and recluse. It is well seen in St. Teresa, whom her biographers describe as torn for years between the interests of human intercourse and the imperative inner voice urging her to solitary self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that in the beginning of the life of the spirit, as history shows it to us, if disillusion marks the first moment, some measure of asceticism of world refusal and painful self-schooling is likely to mark the second moment. What we are watching is the complete reconstruction of personality, a personality that has generally grown into the wrong shape. This is likely to be a hard and painful business, and indeed history assures us that it is, and further that the spiritual life is never achieved by taking the line of least resistance and basking in the divine light. With world refusal, then, is the intimately connected stern moral conflict often lasting for years and having as its object the conquest of self-hood in all its insidious forms. Take one step out of yourself, say the Sufis, and you will arrive at God. This one step is the most difficult act of life, yet urged by love, man has taken it again and again. This phrase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual biography that I need not insist upon it. In the field of this body says Kabir, a great war goes forward against passion, anger, pride, and greed. It is in the kingdom of truth, contentment, and purity that this battle is raging, and the sword that rings forth most loudly is the sword of his name, fifty-eight. Man, says Obama, must here be at war with himself if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen. Fighting must be the watchword, not with tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit, and not to give over. Fifty-nine. The need of such a conflict shown to us in history is explained on human levels by psychology. On spiritual levels it is made plain to all whose hearts are touched by the love of God. By this way all must pass who achieve the life of the Spirit subduing to its purposes their wayward wills and sublimating in its power their conflicting animal impulses. This long effort brings, as its reward, a unification of character, an inflow of power. From it we see the mature man or woman of the Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this conflict lasted for four years, after which the thought of sin ceased to rule her consciousness. Sixty. St. Teresa's intermittent struggles are said to have continued for thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply religious, did not attain the interstability he calls assurance till he was thirty-five years old. Blake was for twenty years in mental conflict, shut off from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do great personalities come to their full stature and subdue their vigorous impulses to the one ruling idea. The ending of this conflict, the self's unification and establishment in the new life, commonly means a return more or less complete to that world from which the convert had retreated, making up of the fully energized and fully consecrated human existence which must express itself in work no less than in prayer, an exhibition too of the capacity for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the first return of the Buddhist saint is from the absolute world to the world of phenomenon to save all sentient beings. Sixty-one. Thus St. Benedict's and St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a disappointed and world weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as a busy and devoted hospital matron, an inspired teacher of a group of disciples. St. Teresa's long interior struggles precede her vigorous career as founder and reformer, her creation of spiritual families, new centers of contemplative life. The vast activities of Fox and Wesley were the fruits first of inner conflict, then of assurance, the experience of God and of the self's relation to him. And on the highest levels of the spiritual life as history shows them to us this experience and realization, experience of profound harmony with eternity and its interests, next of a personal relation of love, last of an indwelling creative power, a givenness, an energizing grace, reaches that completeness to which has been given the name of union with God. The great man or woman of the spirit who achieves this perfect development is, it is true, a special product, a genius, comparable with great creative personalities and other walks of life. But he neither invalidates the smaller talent nor the more general tendency in which his supreme gift takes its rise. Where he appears that tendency is vigorously stimulated. Like other artists he founds a school. The spiritual life flames up and spreads to those within his circle of influence. Through him ordinary men whose aptitude for God might have remained latent obtain a fresh start, an impetus to growth. There is a sense in which he might say with the Johanine Christ, he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me. For yielding to his magnetism men really yield to the drawing of the spirit itself. And when they do this their lives are found to reproduce, though with less intensity, the life history of their leader. Therefore the main characters of that life history, that steady undivided process of sublimation, are normal human characters. We too may heal the discourse of our moral nature, learn to judge existence in the universal life, bring into consciousness our latent transcendental sense, and keep ourselves so spiritually supple that alike in times of stress and hours of prayer and silence we are aware of the mysterious and energizing contact of God. Psychology suggests to us that the great spiritual personalities revealed in history are but supreme instances of a searching self-adjustment and of a way of life always accessible to love and courage which all men may, in some sense, undertake. Footnotes. 42. Everard, some gospel treasures opened, page 555. 43. Canor Dolcor Canor, Role, the Fire of Love, book 1. 44. Role, the Mending of Life. 45. Benedetto Croci, Theory and History of Historiography, translated by Douglas Ainsley, page 25. 46. Dunn-Sermons, page 236. 47. BH Streeter in The Spirit, page 349. 48. Autobiography of Maharishi Devanjranath Tagore. 49. R. A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism. 50. Baron von Hugo in The Hibert Journal, July 1921. 51. Roycebrook, The Sparkling Stone. 52. Roycebrook, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, book 2. 53. R. of St. Victor, D'Quattore, Greta Bous, Violante, Territatus. 54. Summa Contra Gentiles, book 3. 55. J. E. Shorthouse, John Engelsland. 56. C. F. Delotte, The Rule of St. Benedict and C. Butler, Benedictine Monachism. 57. R. A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism. 58. 100 Poems of Kabir, page 44. 59. Rurma, Six Theosophic Points, page 111. 60. C. F. von Hugo, The Mystical Element of Religion, volume 1, part 2. 61. MacGovran, an introduction to Mahayana Buddhism, page 175. End of chapter 2, part B. The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, by Everland Underhill. Chapter 3, part A. Psychology and the Life of the Spirit, 1. The Analysis of Mind. Having interrogated history in our attempt to discover the essential character of the Life of the Spirit wherever it is found, we are now to see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature, and of the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out, would be a life work. Moreover, it is an inquiry in which we are not yet in the position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming available for it, but many of the principles involved are even yet obscure. Therefore, any conclusions at which we may arrive can only be tentative, and the theories and schematic representations that we shall be obliged to use must be regarded as mere working diagrams, almost certainly of a temporary character, but useful to us, because they do give us an interpretation of inner experience with which we can deal. I need not emphasize the extent in which modern developments of psychology are affecting our conceptions of the spiritual life, and our reading of many religious phenomena on which our ancestors looked with awe. When we have eliminated the more heady exaggerations of the psychoanalysts, and the two violent simplifications of the behaviorists, it remains true that many problems have lately been elucidated in an unexpected and some in a helpful sense. We are learning in particular to see in true proportion those abnormal states of trance and ecstasy which were once regarded as the essentials, but are now regarded as the byproducts of the mystical life. But a good deal that at first sight seems startling and even disturbing to the religious mind turns out on investigation to be no more than the relabeling of old facts, which behind their new tickets remain unchanged. Perhaps no generation has ever been so much at the mercy of such labels as our own. Thus, many people who are inclined to jibe at the doctrine of original sin welcome it with open arms when it is reintroduced as the uprush of primitive instinct. Opportunity of confession to a psychoanalyst is eagerly sought and gladly paid for by trouble spirits who would never resort for the same purpose to a priest. The formulae of autosuggestion are freely used by those who repudiate vocal prayer and acts of faith with scorn. If, then, I use for the purpose of exposition some of those new labels which are affected by the newest schools, I do so without any suggestion that they represent the only valid way of dealing with the psychic life of man. Indeed, I regard these labels as little more than exceedingly clever guesses at truth. But since they are now generally current and often suggestive, it is well that we should try to find a place for the spiritual experience within the system which they represent, thus carrying through the principle on which we are working, that of interpreting the abiding facts of the spiritual life so far as we can in the language of the present day. First, then, I propose to consider the analysis of mind and of what it has to tell us about the nature of sin, of salvation, of conversion, what light it casts on the process of purgation or of self-purification which is demanded by all religions of the spirit, what are the respective parts played by reason and instinct in the process of regeneration, and the importance for religious experience of the phenomena of apperception. We need not, at this point, consider again all that we mean by the life of the spirit. We have already considered it as it appears in history. It's inexhaustible variety, its power, nobility, and grace. We need only to remind ourselves that what we have got to find room for in our psychological scheme is literally a changed and enhanced life. A life which immersed in the stream of history is yet poised on the eternal world. This life involves a complete redirection of our desires and impulses, a transfiguration of character, and often too, a sense of subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of impersonal strength so overwhelming as to give many of its activities an inspirational or automatic character. We found that this life was marked by a rhythmic alternation between receptivity and activity, more complete and purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should condition, the healthy life of sense. This redirection and transfiguration, this removal to a higher term of our mental rhythm, are of course psychic phenomena, using this word in a broad sense, without prejudice to the discrimination of any one aspect of it as spiritual. All that we mean at the moment is that the change which brings in the spiritual life is a change in the mind and heart of man, working in the stuff of our common human nature, and involving all that the modern psychologist means by the word psyche. We begin therefore with the nature of this psyche as this modern, growing, changing psychology conceives it, for this is the raw material of regenerate man. If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche, by which of course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William James, was anticipated by Plotinus when he said in the Fourth Aeneid that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the body, and of the higher for the purposes of the spirit, and yet constitutes a unity, an unbroken series of ascending values and powers of response from the levels of merely physical and merely unconscious life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness. 62. We first discover psychic energy as undifferentiated, directive power, controlling response and adaption to environment, and as it develops ever increasing the complexity of its impulses and habits, yet never abandoning anything of its past. Instinct represents the corresponding of this life force with mere nature, its effort as it were to keep its footing and accomplish its destiny in the world of time. Spirit represents the same life acting on highest levels with most vivid purpose, seeking and achieving correspondence with the eternal world and realities of the loftiest order yet discovered to be accessible to us. We are compelled to use words of this kind, and the proceeding is harmless enough so long as we remember that they are abstractions, and that we have no real reason to suppose breaks in the life process which extends from the infant's first craving for food and shelter to the saint's craving for the knowledge of God. This urgent craving life is the dominant characteristic of the psyche. Thought is but the last come and least developed of its powers, one among its various responses to environment and ways of laying hold on experience. This conception of the multiplicity in unity of the psyche, conscious and unconscious, is probably one of the most important results of recent psychological advance. It means that we cannot any longer in the good old way rule off bits or aspects of it and call them intellect, soul, spirit, conscience, and so forth, or on the other hand refer to our lower nature as if it were something separate from ourselves. I am spirit when I pray if I pray rightly. I am my lower nature when my thoughts and deeds are swayed by my primitive impulses and physical longings declared or disguised. I am most wholly myself when that impulsive nature and that craving spirit are welded into one, subject to the same emotional stimulus directed to one goal. When theologians and psychologists, ignoring this unity of the self, set up arbitrary divisions, and both classes are very fond of doing so, they are merely making diagrams for their own convenience. We ourselves shall probably be compelled to do this, and the proceeding is harmless enough, so long as we recollect that these diagrams are at best symbolic pictures of fact. Specifically, is it necessary to keep our heads and refuse to be led away by the constant modern talk of the primitive, unconscious, foreconscious, instinctive, and other minds which are so prominent in modern psychological literature, or by the spatial suggestions of such terms as threshold complex channel of discharge, remembering always the central unity and non-material nature of that many-faced psychic life which is described under these various formulae. If we accept the central unity with all its implications, it follows we cannot take our superior and conscious faculties, set them apart, and call them ourselves, refusing responsibility for the more animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with such distressing ease and frequencies from the deeps by attributing these to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that the sophisticated surface mind which alone we usually recognize is the smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least important part of the real self, that whole man of impulse, thought, and desire which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate for God. That whole man is an animal spirit, a living, growing, plastic unit, moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us and carrying with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices, impulses, and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to us the extent in which the jungle and the stone age are still active in our games, our politics, and our creeds, how many of our motives are still those of primitive man, and how many of our social institutions offer him discreet opportunity of self-expression. Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely restating the fundamental Christian paradox that man is truly one, a living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the divine life, and yet that there seemed to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic natures, that duality which St. Paul calls the old atom and the new atom, the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the earthward tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life of redirected desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise. True religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of the facts, that which one calls original sin, the other calls the instinct of mind, but the situation each puts before us is the same. I find a law, says St. Paul, that when I would do good evil is present with me, for I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind. With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin, without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said in my hearing, if St. Paul had come to me I feel I could have helped him. I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to this and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction, demonstrating that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the impulsive and the rational life. The many conflicts which sap his energy arise from the persistence within us of the archaic and primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one of us, though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety, and reproduction, the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive, with its outlook of wonder, self-interest, and fear, developed under conditions of ignorance, peril, and perpetual struggle for life, the history of primitive man covers millions of years, the history of civilized man a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not surprising that the primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still the infantile foundation of our mental life. Finally, there is the rational life, so far as the rational is yet achieved by us, correcting, conflicting with, and seeking to refine and control the vigor of primitive impulse. But if it is to give an account of all the facts, psychology must also point out and find place for the last comer in the evolutionary series, the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and pointing not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human growth. But it cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as something separate from and wholly unconditioned by our racial past. We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which St. Paul calls growing up into the stature of Christ. Here psychology is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to recognize not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us. In the spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the religious consciousness, its half understood impulses to God, we perceive the floating up into the conscious field of this deep germinal life. And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward the upgrowth of this spiritual life we must take into account those earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition and explain so many of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that the psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven, and that every one of us still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many of the characters of those stages of development through which the race has passed, characters which inevitably give their color to our religious no less than to our social life. I desire, says a compass, to enjoy thee inwardly, but I cannot take thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and unmortified passions depress me. I will in my mind to be above all things, but in spite of myself I am constrained to be beneath. So I, an happy man, fight with myself, and am made grievous to myself, while the spirits seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath. Oh, what I suffer within while I think on heavenly things in my mind! The company of fleshly things cometh against me when I pray. 63. Oh, master, says the scholar in Burma's great dialogue, the creatures that live in me so withhold me that I cannot wholly yield and give myself up as I willingly would. 64. No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation than have these old specialists in this spiritual life. The bearing of all this on the study of organized religion is, of course, of great importance, and will be discussed in a subsequent section. All that I wish to point out now is that the beliefs and the explanations of action, put forward by our rationalizing surface consciousness, are often mere veils which drape the crudeness of our real desires and reactions to life, and that before life can be reintegrated about its highest centers these real beliefs and motives must be tracked down, and their humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and the tiger, in fact, are not dead in any one of us. In polite persons they are caged, which is a very different thing, and a careful introspection will teach us to recognize their snarls and chatterings, their urgent requests for more mutton chops or bananas, under the many disguises which they assume. Disguises which are not infrequently borrowed from ethics or from religion. Thus a primitive desire for revenge often masquerades as justice, and an unedifying interest in personal safety, can be discerned in at least some interpretations of atonement and some aspirations towards immortality. 65. I now go on to a second point. It will already be clear that the modern conception of the many-leveled psyche gives us a fresh standpoint from which to consider the nature of sin. It suggests to us that the essence of much sin is conservatism or adivism, that it is rooted in the tendency of the instinctive life to go on and change circumstances, acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct, the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess, and perpetually forces us to use on new and higher levels that machinery of habit formation, that power of implanting tendencies in the plastic psyche to which man owes his earthly dominance. When our unstable psychic life relaxes tension and sinks to lower levels than this, and it is always tending so to do, we are relapsing to antique methods of response suitable to an environment which is no longer there. Few people go through life without knowing what it is to feel a sudden, even murderous impulse to destroy the obstacle in their path, or sees at all costs that which they desire. Our ancestors called these uprushes the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the Christian soul, and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our spiritual strength. It is true that every man has within him such a tempting spirit, that its characters can better be studied in the zoological gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell. External reason, says Burma, supposes that hell is far from us, but it is near us. Every one carries it in himself. Many of our vices, in fact, are simply savage qualities, and some are even savage virtues, in their old age. Thus in an organized society the acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive dependent on his own powers, survive as the sins of envy and covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar, the greed and egotism of the profiteer, and, on the highest levels, the great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual could hardly survive. When, therefore, qualities which were once useful on their own level are outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life-spiritualization, then whatever they may be, they belong to the body of death, not to the body of life, and are sin. Call sin a lump, none other thing than thyself," says the cloud of unknowing. 67. Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth, which Julian of Norge declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul. Sometimes, too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The violent tempered man becomes once more a primitive when he yields to wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature, the old Adam, in fact, leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength. He obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief, and so too with the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena. 68. Saint Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up. 69. 69. Games and sport of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a certain amount of this unused ferocity, and indeed the chief function of games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory. On the extent in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved, failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this fact, for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea would in London provoke the immediate attention of the police. 69. Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fallback to past levels of conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which we look at the idea of salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation, on the conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued if he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it then from which he must be saved? I think that the answer must be from conflict, the conflict between the pull back of his racial origin and the pull forward of his spiritual destiny, the antagonism between the buried titan and the emerging soul, each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts and resistances, that the trite verse about fighting and fears within and without does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason needs some reinforcement, some helping power if they are to conquer and control his archaic, impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from the wrongful and adivistic claims of primitive impulse in its many strange forms, is a prime business of religion, sometimes achieved in the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower process of education. The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of the Puritan, and the extreme aesthetic, where all animal impulses regarded as sin and repressed, a proceeding which involves the risk of grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by Jacoboma when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man to harness his fiery energies to the service of the light. That is to say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction, harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration. This is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The voice which St. MacTillard heard saying, come and be reconciled, expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity. This need for the conversion or remaking of the instinctive life rather than the achievement of mere beliefs has always been appreciated by real spiritual teachers, who are usually some generations in advance of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the root of evil, the heart of the old man, and best promise of the new. Here is the raw material both of vice and of virtue, namely a mass of desires and cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural and self-regarding. In will imagination and desire, says William Law, consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature. 70. The divine voice which said to Jacopona de Todi, set love in order, thou that lovest me, declared one law of mental growth. 71. To use for a moment the language of mystical theology, conversion or repentance, the first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the direction of these cravings and desires. Purgation or purification, in which the work begun in conversion is made complete in their steadfast setting in order or reeducation, and that refinement and fixation of the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard, conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true self-conquest that the spiritual life in man draws as earnestness, reality and worth. 72. Oh, academicus, says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would endorse, forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a plain man, and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that there and there only can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth of life, and is the free, natural work and fruit of that which lives within us. For till goodness thus comes from a life within us, we have in truth none at all, for reason with all its doctrine, discipline and rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed and amended, as a wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again, as occasion shall offer. 72. Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild beast to work, and use its mighty energies, for thus only shall we find the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction, to the lust to save his fellow man. This transformation or sublimation is not the work of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been directed to a fresh channel of use. We may now look a little more closely at the character and potentialities of our instinctive life, for this life is plainly of the highest importance to us, since it will either energize or thwart all the efforts of the rational self. Current psychology, even more plainly than religion, encourages us to recognize in this powerful instinctive nature the real source of our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic personal demands, those impulses to action, which condition the full and successful life of the natural man. Instincts in the animal and the natural man are the methods by which the life force takes care of its own interests, ensures its own full development, its unimpeded forward drive. Insofar as we form part of the animal kingdom, our own safety, property, food, dominant, and the reproduction of our own type are inevitably the first objects of our instinctive care. Civilized life has disguised some of these crude demands and the behavior which is inspired by them, but their essential character remains unchanged. Love and hate, fear and wonder, self-assertion and self-abasement, the gregarious, the acquisitive, the constructive tendencies are all expressions of instinctive feeling and can be traced back to our simplest animal needs. But instincts are not fixed tendencies, they are adaptable. This can be seen clearly in the case of animals whose environment is artificially changed. In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of the pack has become loyalty to his master's household. In man, too, there has already been obvious modification and sublimation of many instincts. The hunting impulse begins in the jungle and may end in the philosopher's exploration of the infinite. It is the combative instinct which drives the reformer headlong against the evils of the world as it once drove two cavemen at each other's throats. Love, which begins in the emergence of two cells, ends in the saint's supreme discovery. Thou art the love wherewith the heart loves thee. 73. The much advertised herd instinct may weld us into a mob at the mercy of our own reasoning passions, but it can also make us living members of the communion of saints. The appeal of the prophet and the revivalist, the psalmist's taste and sea, the Baptist's change your hearts, are all invitations to an alteration in the direction of desire which would turn our instinctive energies in a new direction and begin the domestication of the human soul for God. End of Chapter 3, Part A. Footnotes. 62, Aeneid 4. 63, De'Emit, Christi, Book 3. 64, Burma, The Way to Christ, Part 4. 65, Unamuno has not hesitated to base the whole of religion on the instinct of self-preservation, but this I must think be regarded as an exaggerated view. See the tragic sense of life in men and peoples. 66, Burma, Six Theosophic Points, page 98. 67, The Cloud of Unknowing. 68, E. Gardner, St. Catherine of Siena, page 20. 69, The Life of St. Teresa, by herself. 70, Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law, page 59. 71, Jacopona de Tote, Lauda, 90. 72, Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law, page 123. 73, Jacopona de Tote, Lauda, 81. End of Chapter 3, Part A. 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 3, Part B. Psychology and the Life of the Spirit. 1. The Analysis of Mind. This, then, is the real business of conversion and of the character building that succeeds it, the harnessing of instinct to idea and its direction into new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting the turmoil of man's merely egotistic ambitions, anxieties and emotional desires into fresh forms of creative energy and transferring their interests from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven deadly sins of Christian ethics—pride, anger, envy, avarice, sloth, gluttony, and lust—represent not so much deliberate wrongfulness as the outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self-regarding instincts, unbridled self-assertion, ruthless acquisitiveness, and undisciplined indulgence of sins. The traditional evangelical virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which sum up the demands of the spiritual life, exactly oppose them. Over, against the self-assertion of the proud and angry, is set the idea of humble obedience, with its wise suppleness and abnegation of self-will. Over, against the acquisitiveness of the covetous and envious, is set the ideal of inward poverty, with its liberation from the narrow self-interest of I, me, and mine. Over, against the sensual indulgence of the greedy, lustful, and lazy, is set the idea of chastity, which finds all creatures pure to enjoy, since it sees them in God and God and all creatures. Yet all this rightly understood is no mere policy of repression. It is rather a rational policy of release, freeing for higher activities instinctive force to often throw away. It is giving the wild beast his work to do, training him. Since the instincts represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to achieve self-protection and self-realization, it is plain that the true regeneration of the psyche, its redirection from lower to higher levels, can never be accomplished without their help. We only rise to the top of our powers when the whole man acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or an instinctive need. Further, a complete and ungraduated response to stimulus, an all or none reaction, is characteristic of the instinctive life and of the instinctive life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give themselves wholly to it, and so display a power far beyond that of the critical and the controlled. Thus fear or rage will often confer abnormal strength and agility. A really dominant instinct is a veritable source of psychophysical energy unifying and maintaining in vigor all the activities directed to its fulfillment. 74. A young man in love is stimulated not only to emotional ardor, but also to hard work in the interests of the future home. The explorer develops amazing powers of endurance. The inventor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital forces and may carry on for long periods without sleep or food. If we apply this law to the great examples of the spiritual life, we see in the vigor and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests a mark of instinctive action, and in the power, the indifference to hardship which these selves develop, the result of unification of an all or none response to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It helps us to understand the cheerful austerities of the true ascetic, the superhuman achievement of St. Paul, little hindered by the thorn in the flesh, the career of St. Joan of Arc, the way in which St. Teresa or St. Ignatius, tormented by ill health, yet brought their great conceptions to birth, the powers of resistance displayed by George Fox and other Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slesser living and working barefoot and bareheaded under the tropical sun, disdaining the use of mosquito nets, eating native food, and taking with impunity the daily risks fatal to the average European. 75. It shows us, too, why the great heroes of the spiritual life so seldom think out their positions or husband their powers. They act because they are impelled, often in defiance of all prudent considerations, yet commonly with an amazing success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by the impulses and urgings of an undying ambition to save souls. What was this impulse and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced will determine its value for life, but its character is much the same in the convert at a revival, in the postulence-vivid sense of vocation and the consequent break with the world, in the disinterested man of science consecrated to search for truth, and in the apostle self-giving to the service of God with the answering gift of new strength and fruitfulness. Its secret, and indeed the secret of all transcendence, is implied in the direction of the Old English mystic. Mean God all, all God, so that nought may work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God. 76. The over-belief, the religious formula in which this instinctive passion is expressed, is comparatively unimportant. The revivalist, wholly possessed by concrete and anthropomorphic ideas of God which are impossible to a man of different and, as we suppose, superior education, can yet because of the burning reality with which he lives towards the God so strangely conceived, infect those with whom he comes in contact with the spiritual life. We are now in a position to say that the first necessity of the life of the Spirit is the sublimation of the instinctive life involving the transfer of our interest and energy to new objectives, the giving of our old vigor to new longings and new loves. It appears that the invitation of religion to a change of heart rather than a change of belief is founded on silent psychological laws. I need not dwell on the way in which divine love, as the saints have understood it, answers to the complete sublimation of our strongest natural passion, or the extent in which the highest experiences of the religious life satisfy man's instinctive craving for self-realization within a greater reality, how he feels himself to be fed with a mysterious food quickened by a fresh dour of life, assured of his own safety within a friendly universe, given a new objective for his energy. It is notorious that one of the most striking things about a truly spiritual man is that he has achieved a certain stability which others lack. In him the central craving of the psyche for more life and more love has reached its borne instead of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire which may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it. He loves the thing which he ought to love, wants to do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all aspects of his personality satisfied in one objective. Everyone has really a forced option between the costly effort to achieve this sublimation of impulse, this unification of the self on spiritual levels, and the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation to the animal instincts and unordered cravings of our many level to being. We cannot stand still, and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in mind of all the back-retending possibilities collectively to be thought of as sin, and explains to us why sloth, lack of spiritual energy, is held by religion to be one of the capital forms of human wrongness. I go on to another point which I regard as of special importance. It must not be supposed that the life of the spirit begins with the sublimation of the instinctive and emotional life, this is indeed for it a central necessity. Nor must we take it for granted that the apparent redirection of impulse to spiritual objects is always and inevitably in advance. All who are, or may be concerned with the spiritual training, help and counseling of others ought to clearly recognize that there are elements in religious experience which represent not a true sublimation, but either disguised primitive cravings and ideas or uprushes from lower instinctive levels. For these experiences have their special dangers. As we shall see when we come to their more detailed study, devotional practices tend to produce that state which psychologists call mobility of the threshold of consciousness, and may easily permit the emergence of natural inclinations and desires, of which the self does not recognize the real character. As a matter of fact a good deal of religious emotion is of this kind. Instances are the childish longing for mere protection, for a sort of super-sensual petting, the excessive desire for shelter and rest, voiced in too many popular hymns, the subtle form of self-assertion which can be detected in some claims to intercourse with God, e.g. the celebrated conversation of Angela of Foligno with the Holy Ghost. 77. The thinly veiled human feelings which find expression in the personal raptures of a certain type of pious literature, and in what has been well described as the divine duet type of devotion. Many, though not all of the super-normal phenomena of mysticism, are open to the same suspicion, and the Church's constant insistence on the need of submitting these to some critical test before accepting them at face value, is based on a most wholesome skepticism. Though a sense of meek dependence on infolding love and power is the very heart of religion, and no intense spiritual life is possible unless it contain a strong emotional element, it is of first importance to be sure that its effective side represents a true sublimation of human feelings and desires, and not merely an oblique indulgence of lower cravings. Again, we have to remember that the instinctive self, powerful though it be, does not represent the sum total of human possibility. The maximum of man's strength is not reached until all the self's powers, the instinctive and also the rational, are united and set on one objective, for then only is he safe from the insidious inner conflict between natural craving and conscious purpose which saps his energies, and is welded into a complete and harmonious instrument of life. The source of power, says Dr. Hadfield in The Spirit, lies not in instinctive emotion alone, but in instinctive emotion expressed in a way with which the whole man can, for the time being at least, identify himself. Ultimately this is impossible without the achievement of a harmony of all the instincts and the approval of reason. 78. Thus we see that any unresolved conflict or divorce between the religious instinct and the intellect will mar the full power of the spiritual life, and that an essential part of the self's readjustment to reality must consist in the uniting of these partners as intellect and intuition are united in creative art. The noblest music, most satisfying poetry, are neither the casual results of uncriticized inspiration nor the deliberate fabrications of the brain, but are born of the perfect fusion of feeling and of thought. For the greatest and most fruitful minds are those which are rich and active on both levels, which are perpetually raising blind impulse to the level of conscious purpose, uniting energy with skill, and thus obtaining the fiery energies of the instinctive life for the highest uses. So too the spiritual life is only seen in its full worth and splendor when the whole man is subdued to it, and one object satisfies the utmost desires of heart and mind. The spiritual impulse must not be allowed to become the center of a group of specialized feelings, a devotional complex in opposition to, or at least alienated from, the intellectual and economic life. It must on the contrary brim over, invading every department of the self. When the mind's loftiest and most ideal thought, its conscious vivid aspiration, has been united with the more robust qualities of the natural man, then and only then we have the material for the making of a possible saint. We must also remember that important as our primitive and instinctive life may be, and we should neither despise nor neglect it. Its religious impulses taken alone no more represent the full range of man's spiritual possibilities than the life of the hunting tribe, or the African crawl represent his false social possibilities. We may and should acknowledge and learn from our psychic origins. We must never be content to rest in them. Though in many respects mental as well as physical we are animals still, yet we are animals with a possible future in the making, both corporate and individual, which we cannot yet define. All other levels of life assure us that the impulsive nature is peculiarly susceptible to education. Not only can the whole group of instincts which help self-fulfillment be directed to higher levels, united and subdued to a dominant emotional interest, but merely instinctive actions can, by repetition and control, be raised to the level of habit and be given improved precision and complexity. This, of course, is a primary function of devotional exercises, training the first blind instinct for God to the complex responses to the life of prayer. Instinct is, at best, a rough and ready tool of life, practices required if it is to produce its best results. Observe, for instance, the poor efforts of the young bird to escape capture, and compare this with the finished performance of the parent, seventy-nine. Therefore, in estimating man's capacity for spiritual response, we must reckon not only his innate instinct for God, but also his capacity for developing this instinct on the level of habit, educating and using its latent powers to the best advantage. Especially on the contemplative side of life, education does great things for us, or would do, if we gave it the chance. Here, then, the rational mind and conscious will must play their part in that great business of human transcendence, which is man's function within the universal plan. It is true that the deep-seated human tendency to God may best be understood as the highest form of that outgoing instinctive craving of the psyche for more life and love, which on whatever level it be experienced is always one. But some external stimulus seems to be needed if this deep tendency is to be brought up into consciousness, and some education if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus and this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition, that is to say, by religious belief and practice. Or they may come from the countless minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied, the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity. And as a rule, this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. There is, however, nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself. It has its parallel and other drastic re-adjustments to other levels of life, and is merely a method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability. Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the Divine, but its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very little. Thus we see that the author of The Cloud of Unknowing spoke as a true psychologist when he said that a secret blind love pressing towards God held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do. For he may well be loved but not thought. By love he may be gotten and holding, but by thought never eighty. Nevertheless, if that consistency of deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by us, every man's conception of the God whom he serves ought to be the very best of which he is capable. Because ideas which re-recognize as partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and seeking a reality which fulfills to the utmost our craving for truth and beauty, as well as our instinct for good. It is easy, natural, and always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a little bit below its highest possible, on one hand to wallow in easy loves, rest in traditional formulae, or enjoy a moving type of devotion which makes no intellectual demand, on the other, to accept without criticism the skeptical attitude of our neighbors, and keep safely in the furrow of intelligent agnosticism. Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre levels, reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and satisfying its devotional inclinations by any long salter unmindfully mumbled in the teeth. Eighty-one. And a certain type of intelligent people have an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the traditional notions of the past. Insofar as all this represents a slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin. At any rate, it lacks the true character of spiritual life. Such life involves growth, sublimation, the constant and difficult redirection of energy, from lower to higher levels, a real effort to purge motive, see things more truly, face and resolve the conflict between the deep instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do not do with them their very best that they possibly can, and the penalty of this sin must be a narrowing of vision and arrest. The laws of apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to our sensual impressions. What we bring with us will condition what we obtain. We behold that which we are, Royce Brooks said long ago. Eighty-two. The mind's content and its ruling feeling-tone, say psychology, all its memories and desires mingle with all incoming impressions, color them and condition those which our consciousness selects. This intervention of memory and emotion in our perceptions is entirely involuntary, and explains why the devotee of any specific creed always finds in the pure immediacy of religious experience the special marks of his own belief. In most acts of perception, and probably too in the intuitional awareness of religious experience, that which the mind brings is bulkier, if less important than that which it receives, and only the closest analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this machinery of apperception, humbling, though its realization must be to the eager idealist, does not merely confuse the issue for us, or compel us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological puzzles, whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual experiences we should otherwise miss, because it gives to us a means of interpreting them. Pure immediacy as such is almost ungraspable by us. As man, not as pure spirit, the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies, that is to say, he took to the encounter of the infinite, the finite machinery of sense. This limitation is ignored by us at our peril. The great mystics who have sought to strip off all image and reach as they say the bare, pure truth have merely become inarticulate in their effort to tell us what it was that they knew. A light I cannot measure, goodness without form, exclaims Jacopon de Todi, 83. The light of the world, the good shepherd, says St. John, bringing a richly furnished poetic consciousness to the vision of God, and at once gives us something on which to lay hold. Generally speaking, it is only insofar as we bring with us a plan of the universe that we can make anything of it, and only insofar as we bring with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire for him, can we approach him. So true is it that we do indeed behold that which we are, find that which we seek, receive that for which we ask. Feeling, thought, and tradition must all contribute to the full working out of religious experience. The empty soul facing an unconditioned reality may achieve freedom, but assuredly achieves nothing else. For though the self-giving spirit is abundant, we control our own powers of reception. This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind with the noblest possible thoughts about God, refusing unworthy and narrow conceptions, and keeping alight the fire of his love. We shall find that which we seek. Hence a richly stored religious consciousness, the lofty conceptions of the truth-seeker, the vision of the artist. The boundless charity and joy in life of the lover of his kind really contribute to the fullness of the spiritual life, both on its active and on its contemplative side. As the self reaches the first degrees of the prayerful or recollected state, memory elements, released from the competition of realistic experience enter the foreconscious field. Among these will be the stored remembrances of past meditations, reading, and experiences, all giving an effective tone conducive to new and deeper apprehensions. The pure in heart see God because they bring with them that radiant and undemanding purity, because the storehouse of ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter, is free from conflicting desires and images perfectly controlled by this feeling tone. It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports from the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral purgation as the beginning of all personal spiritual life. Man does not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher levels of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard, complexes of which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces which they enchain. He must then examine without flinching his impulsive life and know what is in his heart before he is in a position to change it. The light which shows us our sins, says George Fox, is the light that heals us. All those repressed cravings, those quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust into hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the surface and, in the language of psychology, abreacted, language of religion, confessed. The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of repressing it. The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love and their elements brought up into consciousness and faced, and only the self which has endured this can hope to be established in the free spirit. It is a process of spiritual hygiene. Psychoanalysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge. But the emotional color of this process, when it is undertaken in the full conviction of the power and holiness of that life force which we have not used as well as we might and with the humble and loving consciousness of our deficiency, our falling short, will be totally different from the feeling state of those who conceive themselves to be searching for the merely animal sources of their mental and spiritual life. Meekness in itself, says the cloud of unknowing, is not else but a true knowing and feeling of man's self as he is. For surely whoso might verily see and feel himself as he is, should verily be meek. Therefore swink and sweat all that thou canst and mayest, for to get thee a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou art, and then I trial that soon after that thou shalt have a true knowing and feeling of God as he is. 84 The essence then of repentance and purification of character consists first in the identification, and next in the sublimation of our instinctive powers and tendencies, their detachment from egoistic desires and dedication to new purposes. We should not starve or repress the abounding life within us, but relieving it of its concentration on the here and now, give its attention and its passion a wider circle of interest over which to range, a greater love to which it can consecrate its growing powers. We do not yet know what the limit of such sublimation may be, but we do know that it is the true path of life's advancement, that already we owe to it our purest loves, our loveliest visions, and our noblest deeds. When such feeling, such vision, and such act are united and transfigured in God and find in contact with his living spirit the veritable sources of their power, then man will have resolved his inner conflict, developed his true potentialities, and live a harmonious, because a spiritual, life. We end, therefore, upon this conception of the psyche as the living force within us, a storehouse of ancient memories and animal tendencies, yet plastic, adaptable, ever pressing on and ever craving for more life and more love. Only the life of reality, the life rooted in communion with God, will ever satisfy that hungry spirit, or provide an adequate objective for its persistent, onward push. Sweet Art Thou unto me, I love thee better than any other who is in the Valley of Spoleto. The Divine Consolations of Blessed Angela of Folignio. Page 160. 78. The Spirit, edited by B. H. Streeter. Page 93. 79. CF. B. Russell. The Analysis of Mind. 80. Opset. Chapter 6. 81. Cloud of Unknowing. 82. Ricebrook. The Sparkling Stone. 83. Lauda. 91. 84. Opset. End of Chapter 3.