can solve.  It is said of Abu Said, the great S[=u]fi, at the full term of his development, that he “did all normal things while ever thinking of God."[23] Here, I believe, we find the norm of the spiritual life, in such a complete response both to the temporal and to the eternal revelations and demands of the Divine nature:  on the one hand, the highest and most costing calls made on us by that world of succession in which we find ourselves; on the other, an unmoved abiding in the bosom of eternity, “where was never heard quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to turne."[24]

There have been many schools and periods in which one half of this dual life of man has been unduly emphasized to the detriment of the other.  Often in the East—­and often too in the first, pre-Benedictine phase of Christian monasticism—­there has been an unbalanced cultivation of the contemplative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imperfectly vitalized a-social type of spirituality.  On the other hand, in our own day the tendency to action usually obliterates the contemplative side of experience altogether:  and the result is the feverishness, exhaustion and uncertainty of aim characteristic of the over-driven and the underfed.  But no one can be said to live in its fulness the life of the Spirit who does not observe a due balance between the two:  both receiving and giving, both apprehending and expressing, and thus achieving that state of which Ruysbroeck said “Then only is our life a whole, when work and contemplation dwell in us side by side, and we are perfectly in both of them at once."[25] All Christian writers on the life of the Spirit point to the perfect achievement of this two-fold ideal in Christ; the pattern of that completed humanity towards which the indwelling Spirit is pressing the race.  His deeds of power and mercy, His richly various responses to every level of human existence, His gift to others of new faith and life, were directly dependent on the nights spent on the mountain in prayer.  When St. Paul entreats us to grow up into the fulness of His stature, this is the ideal that is implied.

In the intermediate term of the religious experience, that felt communion with a Person which is the clou of the devotional life, we get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual growth.  It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the exaggerations to which it has led.  Both extremes are richly represented in the literature of mysticism.  But we should remember that Christianity is not alone in thus requiring place to be made for such a conception of God as shall give body to all the most precious and fruitful experiences of the heart, providing simple human sense and human feeling with something on which to lay hold.  In India, there is the existence, within and alongside the austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of the ardent personal Vaishnavite devotion to the heart’s Lord, known as Bhakti Marga.  In Islam, there is the impassioned longing of the S[=u]fis for the Beloved, who is “the Rose of all Reason and all Truth.”