More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the searching question of the disciple in Boehme’s Dialogue on the Supersensual Life:  “Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature into the supersensual ground, without destroying nature?"[3] And such a coming through into the ground, such a finding and feeling of Eternal Life, is I take it the central business of religion.  For religion is committed to achieving a synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting, of nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to a greater reality, because a greater participation in eternity.  Such a participation in eternity, manifested in the time-world, is the very essence of the spiritual life:  but, set as we are in mutability, our apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative.  Absolutes are known only to absolute mind; our measurements, however careful and intricate, can never tally with the measurements of God.  As Einstein conceives of space curved round the sun we, borrowing his symbolism for a moment, may perhaps think of the world of Spirit as curved round the human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, and therefore presenting to us innumerable angles of approach.  This means that God can and must be sought only within and through our human experience.  “Where,” says Jacob Boehme, “will you seek for God?  Seek Him in your soul, which has proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living fountain of forces wherein the Divine working stands."[4]

But, on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for agnosticism.  For this our human experience in its humbling imperfection, however we interpret it, is as real within its own system of reference as anything else.  It is our inevitably limited way of laying hold on the stuff of existence:  and not less real for that than the monkeys’ way on one hand, or the angels’ way on the other.  Only we must be sure that we do it as thoroughly and completely as we can; disdaining the indolence which so easily relapses to the lower level and the smaller world.

And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all times and places, and at all levels of life.  It is an experience which is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or rationalization we may choose to make of it:  and no one, as a matter of fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some form of the experience.  We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience, whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most readily understand and respond to it.