The continued force of any regenerative movement depends above all else on continued vivid contact with the Divine order, for the problems of the reformer are only really understood and seen in true proportion in its light.  Such contact is not always easy:  it is a form of work.  After a time the weary and discouraged will need the support of discipline if they are to do it.  Therefore definite role of silence and withdrawal—­perhaps an extension of that system of periodical retreats which is one of the most hopeful features of contemporary religious life—­is essential to any group-scheme for the general and social furtherance of the spiritual life.  It is not to be denied for a moment, that countless good men and women who love the world in the divine and not in the self-regarding sense, are busy all their lives long in forwarding the purposes of the Spirit:  which is acting through them, as truly as through the conscious prophets and regenerators of the race.  But, to return for a moment to psychological language, whilst the Divine impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is not doing all that it could for us nor we all that we could do for it; for we are not completely unified.  We can by appropriate education bring up that imperative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, and wittingly dedicate to its uses our heart, mind and will; and such realization in its most perfect form appears to be the psychological equivalent of the state which is described by spiritual writers, in their own special language, as “union with God.”

I have been at some pains to avoid the use of this special language of the mystics; but now perhaps we may remind ourselves that, by the declaration of all who have achieved it, the mature spiritual life is such a condition of completed harmony—­such a theopathetic state.  Therefore here to-day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble, no less that in the Indian forest or the mediaeval cloister, man’s really religious method and self-expression must be harmonious with a life-process of which this is the recognized if distant goal:  and in all the work of restatement, this abiding objective must be kept in view.  Such union, such full identification with the Divine purpose, must be a social as well as an individual expression of full life.  It cannot be satisfied by the mere picking out of crumbs of perfection from the welter, but must mean in the end that the real interests of society are indentical with the interests of Creative Spirit, in so far as these are felt and known by man; the interests, that is, of a love that is energy and an energy that is love.  Towards this identification, the willed tendency of each truly awakened individual must steadfastly be set; and also the corporate desire of each group, as expressed in its prayer and work.  For the whole secret of life lies in directed desire.