In such a restatement, such a reference back to actual man, here at the present day as we have him—­such a demand for a spiritual interpretation of the universe, which will allow us to fit in all his many-levelled experiences—­I believe we have the way of approach to which religion to-day must look as its best hope.  Thus only can we conquer that museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which—­agreeable as it may be to the historic or aesthetic sense—­makes it so unreal to our workers, no less than to our students.  Such a method, too, will mean the tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is already a marked character of contemporary thought.

And note that, working on this basis, we need not in order to find room for the facts commit ourselves to the harsh dualism, the opposition between nature and spirit, which is characteristic of some earlier forms of Christian thought.  In this dualism, too, we find simply an effort to describe felt experience.  It is an expression of the fact, so strongly and deeply felt by the richest natures, that there is an utter difference in kind between the natural life of use and wont, as most of us live it, and the life that is dominated by the spiritual consciousness.  The change is indeed so great, the transfiguration so complete, that they seize on the strongest language in which to state it.  And in the good old human way, referring their own feelings to the universe, they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds of matter and of spirit, of nature and of grace.  But those who have most deeply reflected, have perceived that the change effected is not a change of worlds.  It is rather such a change of temper and attitude as will disclose within our one world, here and now, the one Spirit in the diversity of His gifts; the one Love, in homeliest incidents as well as noblest vision, laying its obligations on the soul; and so the true nature and full possibilities of this our present life.

Although it is true that we must register our profound sense of the transcendental character of this spirit-life, its otherness from mere nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language of convulsion.  The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it.  And whatever its special, language and personal colour be—­for all our news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual men, and arrives tinctured by their feelings and beliefs—­in the end it does this by disclosing us to ourselves as spirits growing up, though unevenly and hampered by our past, through the physical order into completeness of response to a universe that is itself a spiritual fact.  “Heaven,” said Jacob Boehme, “is nothing else but a manifestation of the Eternal One, wherein all worketh and willeth in quiet love."[38] Such a manifestation of Spirit must clearly be made through humanity, at least so far as our own order is concerned:  by our redirection and full use of that spirit of life which energizes us, and which, emerging from the more primitive levels of organic creation, is ours to carry on and up—­either to new self-satisfactions, or to new consecrations.