contemporary the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that “Seekers after God must realize Brahma in these three places.  They must see Him within, see Him without, and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind’s interpretation of these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by us.  It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them, an attempt to describe experience.  What is that supernal symphony of which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms part?  We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from knowledge of wholes.  But even those strains which we do hear, assure us how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power, of beauty which are contained in them.

And if the first type of experience, with the immense feeling of assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the “world that is unwalled,"[21] and from the mind’s utter surrender and abolition of resistances—­if all this seems to lead to a merely static or contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of experience, with its impulse towards action, its often strongly felt accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and dynamic interpretation of that life.  Indeed, if the first moment in the life of the Spirit be man’s apprehension of Eternal Life, the second moment—­without which the first has little worth for him—­consists of his response to that transcendent Reality.  Perception of it lays on him the obligation of living in its atmosphere, fulfilling its meaning, if he can:  and this will involve for him a measure of inward transformation, a difficult growth and change.  Thus the ideas of new birth and regeneration have always been, and I think must ever be, closely associated with man’s discovery of God:  and the soul’s true path seems to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral effort, and thence to charity.

Even so did the Oxford Methodists, who began by trying only to worship God and be good by adhering to a strict devotional rule, soon find themselves impelled to try to do good by active social work.[22] And at his highest development, and in so far as he has appropriated the full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and contemplation.  Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a fellow worker with Him:  between the soul’s profound sense of transcendent love, and its felt possession of and duty towards immanent love—­a paradox which only some form of incarnational philosophy