Generally speaking, it is only in so far as we bring with us a plan of the universe that we can make anything of it; and only in so far as we bring with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire for Him, can we apprehend Him—­so true is it that we do, indeed, behold that which we are, find that which we seek, receive that for which we ask.  Feeling, thought, and tradition must all contribute to the full working out of religious experience.  The empty soul facing an unconditioned Reality may achieve freedom but assuredly achieves nothing else:  for though the self-giving of Spirit is abundant, we control our own powers of reception.  This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind with the noblest possible thoughts about God, refusing unworthy and narrow conceptions, and keeping alight the fire of His love.  We shall find that which we seek:  hence a richly stored religious consciousness, the lofty conceptions of the truth seeker, the vision of the artist, the boundless charity and joy in life of the lover of his kind, really contribute to the fulness of the spiritual life; both on its active and on its contemplative side.  As the self reaches the first degrees of the prayerful or recollected state, memory-elements, released from the competition of realistic experience, enter the foreconscious field.  Among these will be the stored remembrances of past meditations, reading, and experiences, all giving an affective tone conducive to new and deeper apprehensions.  The pure in heart see God, because they bring with them that radiant and undemanding purity:  because the storehouse of ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter, is free from conflicting desires and images, perfectly controlled by this feeling-tone.

It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports, from the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral purgation, as the beginning of all personal spiritual life.  Man does not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher levels of his psychic being.  His old attachments are hard; complexes of which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces which they enchain.  He must, then, examine without flinching his impulsive life, and know what is in his heart, before he is in a position to change it.  “The light which shows us our sins,” says George Fox, “is the light that heals us.”  All those repressed cravings, those quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the surface and, in the language of psychology, “abreacted”; in the language of religion, confessed.  The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of repressing it.  The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their elements brought up into consciousness and faced:  and only the self which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.  It is a process of spiritual hygiene.