We need not claim that those men and women who have most fully realized, and so at first hand have described to us, this life of the Spirit, have neither discerned or communicated the ultimate truth of things; nor need we claim that the symbols they use have intrinsic value, beyond the poetic power of suggesting to us the quality and wonder of their transfigured lives.  Still less must we claim this discovery as the monopoly of any one system of religion.  But we can and ought to claim, that no system shall be held satisfactory which does not find a place for it:  and that only in so far as we at least apprehend and respond to the world’s spiritual aspect, do we approach the full stature of humanity.  Psychologists at present are much concerned to entreat us to “face reality,” discarding idealism along with the other phantasies that haunt the race.  Yet this facing of reality can hardly be complete if we do not face the facts of the spiritual life.  Certainly we shall find it most difficult to interpret these facts; they are confused, and more than one reading of them is possible.  But still we cannot leave them out and claim to have “faced reality.”

Hoeffding goes so far as to say that any real religion implies and must give us a world-view.[30] And I think it is true that any vividly lived spiritual life must, as soon as it passes beyond the level of mere feeling and involves reflection, involve too some more or less articulated conception of the spiritual universe, in harmony with which that life is to be lived.  This may be given to us by authority, in the form of creed:  but if we do not thus receive it, we are committed to the building of our own City of God.  And to-day, that world-view, that spiritual landscape, must harmonize—­if it is needed to help our living—­with the outlook, the cosmic map, of the ordinary man.  If it be adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless conflict with it.  The stretched-out, graded, striving world of biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy—­these great constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind, must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view which centres on the God known in religious experience.  They are true within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis wide enough to contain them.

It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an explanation.  They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to live.  But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the explorations of history and of psychology.  Even contrasted with our every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in a wilderness.  Whilst we are inside everything seems all right.