her child’s welfare, the ambitious man towards success, the artist towards expression of his vision.  All these are examples of behaviour, love-driven towards ends.  And religious experience discloses to us a greater more inclusive end, and this vital power of love as capable of being used on the highest levels, regenerated, directed to eternal interests; subordinating behaviour, inspiring suffering, unifying the whole self and its activities, mobilizing them for this transcendental achievement.  This generous love, to go back to the quotation from Baron von Huegel which opened our inquiry, will indeed cause the behaviour it controls to exhibit both rightful contact with and renunciation of the particular and fleeting; because in and through this series of linked deeds it is uniting with itself all human activities, and in and through them is seeking and finding its eternal end.  So, in that rightful bringing-in of novelty which is the business of the fully living soul, the most powerful agent is love, understood as the controlling factor of behaviour, the sublimation and union of will and desire.  “Let love,” says Boehme, “be the life of thy nature.  It killeth thee not, but quickeneth thee according to its life, and then thou livest, yet not to thy own will but to its will:  for thy will becometh its will, and then thou art dead to thyself but alive to God."[138] There is the true, solid and for us most fruitful doctrine of divine union, unconnected with any rapture, trance, ecstasy or abnormal state of mind:  a union organic, conscious, and dynamic with the Creative Spirit of Life.

If we now go on to ask how, specially, we shall achieve this union in such degree as is possible to each one of us; the answer must be, that it will be done by Prayer.  If the seeking of the Eternal is actuated by love, the finding of it is achieved through prayer.  Prayer, in fact—­understood as a life or state, not an act or an asking—­is the beginning, middle and end of all that we are now considering.  As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world.  And such humble yet ardent contact with the spiritual world—­opening up to its suggestions our impulses, our reveries, our feelings, our most secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts-is the essence of prayer, understood in its widest sense.  No more than surrender or love can prayer be reduced to “one act.”  Those who seek to sublimate it into “pure” contemplation are as limited at one end of the scale, as those who reduce it to articulate petition are at the other.  It contains in itself a rich variety of human reactions and experiences.  It opens the door upon an unwalled world, in which the self truly lives and therefore makes widely various responses to its infinitely varying stimuli.  Into that world the self takes, or should take, its special needs, aptitudes and longings, and matches them against