Christ, it is true, gives nobody any encouragement for supposing that a merely self-cultivating sort of spirituality, keeping the home fires burning and so on, is anybody’s main job.  The main job confided to His friends is the preaching of the Gospel.  That is, spreading Reality, teaching it, inserting it into existence; by prayers, words, acts, and also if need be by manual work, and always under the conditions and symbolisms of our contemporary world.  But since we can only give others that which we already possess, this presupposes that we have got something of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves.  The soul’s two activities of reception and donation must be held in balance, or impotence and unreality will result.  It is only out of the heart of his own experience that man really helps his neighbour:  and thus there is an ultimate social value in the most secret responses of the soul to grace.  No one, for instance, can help others to repentance who has not known it at first-hand.  Therefore we have to keep the home fires burning, because they are the fires which raise the steam that does the work:  and we do this mostly by the fuel with which we feed them, though partly too by giving free access to currents of fresh air from the outer world.

We cannot read St. Paul’s letters with sympathy and escape the conviction that in the midst of his great missionary efforts he was profoundly concerned too with the problems of his own inner life.  The little bits of self-revelation that break into the epistles and, threaded together, show us the curve of his growth, also show us how much, lay behind them, how intense, and how exacting was the inward travail that accompanied his outward deeds.  Here he is representative of the true apostolic type.  It is because St. Augustine is the man of the “Confessions” that he is also the creator of “The City of God.”  The regenerative work of St. Francis was accompanied by an unremitting life of penitence and recollection.  Fox and Wesley, abounding in labours, yet never relaxed the tension of their soul’s effort to correspond with a transcendent Reality.  These and many other examples warn us that only by such a sustained and double movement can the man of the Spirit actualize all his possibilities and do his real work.  He must, says Ruysbroeck, “both ascend and descend with love."[149] On any other basis he misses the richness of that fully integrated human existence “swinging between the unseen and the seen” in which the social and individual, incorporated and solitary responses to the demands of Spirit are fully carried through.  Instead, he exhibits restriction and lack balance.  This in the end must react as unfavourably on the social as on the personal side of life:  since the place and influence of the spiritual life in the social order will depend entirely on its place in the individual consciousness of which that social order will be built, the extent in which loyalty to the one Spirit governs their reactions to common daily experience.