If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and symbols of poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love.  Such a divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic incarnation, though not limited by it:  and it is continued into history by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.  The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.

Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as a genuine and abiding human fact—­a form of life—­independent of the dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed.  I now wish to go on to a second point:  this—­that it follows that any complete description of human life as we know it, must find room for the spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it finds expression.  This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal series, as we might find room for any special human activity or aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but deep-set in the enduring stuff of man’s true life.  We must believe that the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot in fact be broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth with the universe as a whole.  But the extent in which we find and feel it is the measure of the fullness of spiritual life that we enjoy.  Organic union must be lifted to conscious realization:  and this to do, is the business of religion.  In this act of realization each aspect of the psychic life—­thought, will and feeling—­must have its part, and from each must be evoked a response.  Only in so far as such all-round realization and response are achieved by us do we live the spiritual life.  We do it perhaps in some degree, every time that we surrender to pure beauty or unselfish devotion; for then all but the most insensitive must be conscious of an unearthly touch, and hear the cadence of a heavenly melody.  In these partial experiences something, as it were, of the richness of Reality overflows and is experienced by us.  But it is in the wholeness of response characteristic of religion—­that uncalculated response to stimulus which is the mark of the instinctive life—­that this Realty of love and power is most truly found and felt by us.  In this generous and heart-searching surrender of religion, rightly made, the self achieves inner harmony, and finds a satisfying objective for all its cravings and energies.  It then finds its life, and the possibilities before it, to be far greater than it knew.