Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of analysis, can only say:  “The soul knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the dispenser of true life.”  Yet in saying this, does he not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of Soul?  And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying “More than all else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known that more abundant life.  These are the statements of the pure religious experience, in so far as “pure” experience is possible to us; which is only of course in a limited and relative sense.  The subjective element, all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and control it.  Nevertheless, they refer to man’s communion with an independent objective Reality.  This experience is more real and concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which theology seeks to explain it.  We may then take it, without prejudice to any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is one life; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the diversity of gifts and graces which men have been willing to call true, holy, beautiful and good.  For the moment at least we may accept the definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as “oneness with the Supreme Good in every facet of the heart and will."[6] And since without derogation of its transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and worth, it is in human experience rather than in speculation that we are bound to seek it, we shall look first at the forms taken by man’s intuition of Eternity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next at the actual appearance of this life in history.  Then at the psychological machinery by which we may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious institutions make to its realization; and last, turning our backs on these partial explorations of the living Whole, seek if we can to seize something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way in which education may best prepare its fulfilment, and the part it must play in the social group.

We begin therefore at the starting point of this life of Spirit:  in man’s vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and transcendent reality—­his instinct for God.  The characteristic forms taken by this instinct are simple and fairly well known.  Complication only comes in with the interpretation we put on them.

By three main ways we tend to realize our limited personal relations with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real; and these, appearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, might be illustrated from all places and all times.