Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.  Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a prevenient and an answering love.  For it is always in a personal and emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response.  It is significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience.  Thus we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing—­

“I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me....  Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should be renouncing all the others—­for there is no turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign and loving.  And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the Lord."[9]

Compare with this Upton the Unitarian:  “If,” he says, “this Absolute Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our life’s experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it associations too human and too limited adequately to express this profound God-consciousness."[10]

Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.  We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their philosophy:  for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so to speak its own guarantees.  Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an “intellectual fountain,” hears the Divine Voice crying: 

    “I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
    Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me."[11]

Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say: 

    “O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!"[12]

Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father and ever-present Companion of the soul,[13] and Kabir, for whom God is the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim: 

“From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and thee:  and how shall such love be extinguished?"[14]