But if it is to give an account of all the facts psychology must also point out, and find place for, the last-comer in the evolutionary series:  the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and pointing, not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human growth.  But it cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as something separate from, and wholly unconditioned by, our racial past.  We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which St. Paul calls “growing up into the stature of Christ.”  Here psychology is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to recognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us.  In the spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the religious consciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of this deep germinal life.  And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward the upgrowth of this spiritual life, we must take into account those earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition and explain so many of our motives and our deeds.  It warns us that the psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven; and that every one of us still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many of the characters of those stages of development through which the race has passed—­characters which inevitably give their colour to our religious no less than to our social life.

“I desire,” says a Kempis, “to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take thee.  I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and unmortified passions depress me.  I will in my mind be above all things but in despite of myself I am constrained to be beneath, so I unhappy man fight with myself and am made grievous to myself while the spirit seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath.  O what I suffer within while I think on heavenly things in my mind; the company of fleshly things cometh against me when I pray."[63]

“Oh Master,” says the Scholar in Boehme’s great dialogue, “the creatures that live in me so withhold me, that I cannot wholly yield and give myself up as I willingly would."[64]

No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation than have these old specialists in the spiritual life.

The bearing of all this on the study of organized religion is of course of great importance; and will be discussed in a subsequent section.  All that I wish to point out now is that the beliefs, and the explanations of action, put forward by our rationalizing surface consciousness are often mere veils which drape the crudeness of our real desires and reactions to life; and that before life can be reintegrated about