its apprehension of Eternal Truth.  In this meeting of the human heart with all that it can apprehend of Reality, not adoration alone but unbounded contrition, not humble dependence alone but joy, peace and power, not rapture alone but mysterious darkness, must be woven into the fabric of love.  In this world the soul may sometimes wander as if in pastures, sometimes is poised breathless and intent.  Sometimes it is fed by beauty, sometimes by most difficult truth, and experiences the extremes of riches and destitution, darkness and light.  “It is not,” says Plotinus, “by crushing the Divine into a unity but by displaying its exuberance, as the Supreme Himself has displayed it, that we show knowledge of the might of God."[139]

Thus, by that instinctive and warmly devoted direction of its behaviour which is love, and that willed attention to and communion with the spiritual world which is prayer, all the powers of the self are united and turned towards the seeking and finding of the Eternal.  It is by complete obedience to this exacting love, doing difficult and unselfish things, giving up easy and comfortable things—­in fact by living, living hard on the highest levels—­that men more and more deeply feel, experience, and enter into their spiritual life.  This is a fact which must seem rather awkward to those who put forward pathological explanations of it.  And on the other hand it is only by constant contacts with and recourse to the energizing life of Spirit, that this hard vocation can be fulfilled.  Such a power of reference to Reality, of transcending the world of succession and its values, can be cultivated by us; and this education of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of the discipline of prayer.  True, it is only in times of recollection or of great emotion that this profound contact is fully present to consciousness.  Yet, once fully achieved and its obligations accepted by us, it continues as a grave melody within our busy outward acts:  and we must by right direction of our deepest instincts so find and feel the Eternal all the time, if indeed we are to actualize and incarnate it all the time.  From this truth of experience, religion has deduced the doctrine of grace, and the general conception of man as able to do nothing of himself.  This need hardly surprise us.  For equally on the physical plane man can do nothing of himself, if he be cut off from his physical sources of power:  from food to eat, and air to breathe.  Therefore the fact that his spiritual life too is dependent upon the life-giving atmosphere that penetrates him, and the heavenly food which he receives, makes no fracture in his experience.  Thus we are brought back by another path to the fundamental need for him, in some form, of the balanced active and contemplative life.