In spite of this, many people seem to take it for granted that if a man believes in and desires to live a spiritual life, he can live it in utter independence of spiritual food.  He believes in God, loves his neighbour, wants to do good, and just goes ahead.  The result of this is that the life of the God-fearing citizen or the Social Christian, as now conceived and practised, is generally the starved life.  It leaves no time for the silence, the withdrawal, the quiet attention to the spiritual, which is essential if it is to develop all its powers.  Yet the literature of the Spirit is full of warnings on this subject. Taste and see that the Lord is sweet.  They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.  In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.  These are practical statements; addressed, not to specialists but to ordinary men and women, with a normal psycho-physical make-up.  They are literally true now, or can be if we choose.  They do not involve any peculiar training, or unnatural effort.  A sliding scale goes from the simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to that complete self-loss and complete self-finding, which is called the transforming union of the saint; and somewhere in this series, every human soul can find a place.

If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to receive what St. Augustine called the food of the full-grown, to find and feel the Eternal, we must give time and place to it in our lives.  I emphasize this, because its realization seems to me to be a desperate modern need; a need exhibited supremely in our languid and ineffectual spirituality, but also felt in the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of the artist, the reformer and the teacher.  St. John of the Cross says in one of his letters:  “What is wanting is not writing or talking—­there is more than enough of that—­but, silence and action.  For silence joined to action produces recollection, and gives the spirit a marvellous strength.”  Such recollection, such a gathering up of our interior forces and retreat of consciousness to its “ground,” is the preparation of all great endeavour, whatever its apparent object may be.  Until we realize that it is better, more useful, more productive of strength, to spend, let us say, the odd ten minutes in the morning in feeling and finding the Eternal than in flicking the newspaper—­that this will send us off to the day’s work properly orientated, gathered together, recollected, and really endowed with new power of dealing with circumstance—­we have not begun to live the life of the Spirit, or grasped the practical connection between such a daily discipline and the power of doing our best work, whatever it may be.