Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at whatever level it be experienced, the psychic craving, the urgent spirit within us pressing out to life, is always one; and that the sublimation of this vital craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regeneration?  There, in our instinctive nature—­which, as we know, makes us the kind of animal we are—­abides that power of loving which is, really, the power of living; the cause of our actions, the controlling factor in our perceptions, the force pressing us into any given type of experience, turning aside for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater vigour.  Each level of the universe makes solicitations to this power:  the worlds of sense, of thought, of beauty, and of action.  According to the degree of our development, the trend of the conscious will, is our response; and according to that response will be our life.  “The world to which a man turns himself,” says Boehme, “and in which he produces fruit, the same is lord in him, and this world becomes manifest in him."[136]

From all this it becomes clear what the love of God is; and what St. Augustine meant when he said that all virtue—­and virtue after all means power not goodness—­lay in the right ordering of love, the conscious orientation of desire.  Christians, on the authority of their Master, declare that such love of God requires all that they have, not only of feeling, but also of intellect and of power; since He is to be loved with heart and mind and strength.  Thought and action on highest levels are involved in it, for it means, not religious emotionalism, but the unflickering orientation of the whole self towards Him, ever seeking and finding the Eternal; the linking up of all behaviour on that string, so that the apparently hard and always heroic choices which are demanded, are made at last because they are inevitable.  It is true that this dominant interest will give to our lives a special emotional colour and a special kind of happiness; but in this, as in the best, deepest, richest human love, such feeling-tone and such happiness—­though in some natures of great beauty and intensity—­are only to be looked upon as secondary characters, and never to be aimed at.

When St. Teresa said that the real object of the spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work, work,"[137] I have no doubt that many of her nuns were disconcerted; especially the type of ease-loving conservatives whom she and her intimates were accustomed to refer to as the pussy-cats.  But in this direct application to religious experience of St. Thomas’ doctrine of love, she set up an ideal of the spiritual life which is as valid at the present day in the entanglements of our social order, as it was in the enclosed convents of sixteenth-century Spain.  Love, we said, is the cause of action.  It urges and directs our behaviour, conscious and involuntary, towards an end.  The mother is irresistibly impelled to act towards