It is hardly worth while to insist that the need for such a redirection has never been more strongly felt than at the present day.  There is indeed no period in which history exhibits mankind as at once more active, more feverishly self-conscious, and more distracted, than is our own bewildered generation; nor any which stood in greater need of Blake’s exhortation:  “Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem."[39]

How many people do each of us know who work and will in quiet love, and thus participate in eternal life?

Consider the weight of each of these words.  The energy, the clear purpose, the deep calm, the warm charity they imply.  Willed work; not grudging toil.  Quiet love, not feverish emotionalism.  Each term is quite plain and human, and each has equal importance as an attribute of heavenly life.  How many politicians—­the people to whom we have confided the control of our national existence—­work and will in quiet love?  What about industry?  Do the masters, or the workers, work and will in quiet love? that is to say with diligence and faithful purpose, without selfish anxiety, without selfish demands and hostilities?  What about the hurried, ugly and devitalizing existence of our big towns?  Can we honestly say that young people reared in them are likely to acquire this temper of heaven?  Yet we have been given the secret, the law of spiritual life; and psychologists would agree that it represents too the most favourable of conditions for a full psychic life, the state in which we have access to all our sources of power.

But man will not achieve this state unless he dwells on the idea of it; and, dwelling on that idea, opening his mind to its suggestions, brings its modes of expression into harmony with his thought about the world of daily life.  Our spiritual life to-day, such as it is, tends above all to express itself in social activities.  Teacher after teacher comes forward to plume himself on the fact that Christianity is now taking a “social form”; that love of our neighbour is not so much the corollary as the equivalent of the love of God, and so forth.  Here I am sure that all can supply themselves with illustrative quotations.  Yet is there in this state of things nothing but food for congratulation?  Is such a view complete?  Is nothing left out?  Have we not lost the wonder and poetry of the forest in our diligent cultivation of the economically valuable trees; and shall we ever see life truly until we see it with the poet’s eyes?  There is so much meritorious working and willing; and so little time left for quiet love.  A spiritual fussiness—­often a material fussiness too—­seems to be taking the place of that inward resort to the fontal sources of our being which is the true religious act, our chance of contact with the Spirit.  This compensating beat of the fully lived human life, that whole side