Here then we come to the fact, valid for every level of spiritual life, which lies behind all the declarations concerning surrender, self-loss, dying to live, dedication, made by writers on this theme.  All involve a relaxing of tension, letting ourselves go without reluctance in the direction in which we are most profoundly drawn; a cessation of our struggles with the tide, our kicks against the pricks that spur us on.  The inward aim of the self is towards unification with a larger life; a mergence with Reality which it may describe under various contradictory symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but which it feels to be the fulfilment of existence.  It has learnt—­though this knowledge may not have passed beyond the stage of feeling—­that the universe is one simple texture, in which all things have their explanation and their place.  Combing out the confusions which enmesh it, losing its sham and separate life and finding its true life there, it will know what to love and how to act.  The goal of this process, which has been called entrance into the freedom of the Will of God, is the state described by the writer of the “German Theology” when he said “I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man."[145] For such a declaration not only means a willed and skilful working for God, a practical siding with Perfection, becoming its living tool, but also close union with, and sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual order:  a feeding on and using of its power, its very life blood; complete docility to its inward direction, abolition of separate desire.  The surrender is therefore made not in order that we may become limp pietists, but in order that we may receive more energy and do better work:  by a humble self-subjection more perfectly helping forward the thrust of the Spirit and the primal human business of incarnating the Eternal here and now.  Its justification is in the arduous but untiring, various but harmonious, activities that flow from it:  the enhancement of life which it entails.  It gives us access to our real sources of power; that we may take from them and, spending generously, be energized anew.

So the cord on which those events which make up the personal life of the Spirit are to be strung is completed, and we see that it consists of four strands.  Two are dispositions of the self; Penitence and Surrender.  Two are activities; inward Recollection and outward Work.  All four make stern demands on its fortitude and goodwill.  And each gives strength to the rest:  for they are not to be regarded as separate and successive states, a discrete series through which we must pass one by one, leaving penitence behind us when we reach surrendered love; but as the variable yet enduring and inseparable aspects of one rich life, phases in one complete and vital effort to respond more and more closely to Reality.