well to remember, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of the poem, and the creative phantasy—­works up its transcendent intuitions in symbolic form.  For this purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of speech, sometimes that of image.  As our ordinary reveries constantly proceed by way of an interior conversation or narrative, so the content of spiritual contemplation is often expressed in dialogue, in which memory and belief are fused with the fruit of perception.  The “Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena,” the “Life of Suso,” and the “Imitation of Christ,” all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed illustrations of it might be found in every school and period of religious literature.

Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spontaneous forms of autistic thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their consciousness of direct communion with God.  I need not point out how easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their characteristic experience.  “Blessed is that soul,” says a Kempis, “that heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of consolation.  Blessed be those ears that receive of God’s whisper and take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate presence of Spirit.  Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude thrown open to these influences:  and the instinctive mind, as we have already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.

Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather than of dialogue:  and here again, memory and feeling will provide the material.  Here we stand at the sources of religious art:  which, when it is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of those experiences.  But many minds are, as it were, their own religious artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to their intuitive apprehensions.  So vivid may these structures sometimes be for them that—­to revert again to our original simile—­the self turns from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world.  When this happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout people who tend to visualization have probably known.  When the