“Without Thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest;
    Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon. 
    Tho’ every hair on my body becomes a tongue
    A thousandth part of the thanks due to Thee I cannot tell."[26]

There is the sudden note of rapture which startles us in the Neoplatonists, as when Plotinus speaks of “the name of love for what is there to know—­the passion of the lover testing on the ’bosom of his love."[27] Surely we may accept all these, as the instinctive responses of a diversity of spirits to the one eternal Spirit of life and love:  and recognize that without such personal response, such a discovery of imperishable love, a fully lived spiritual life is no more possible than is a fully lived physical life from which love has been left out.

When we descend from experience to interpretation, the paradoxical character of such a personal sense of intimacy is eased for us, if we remember that the religious man’s awareness of the indwelling Spirit, or of a Divine companionship—­whatever name he gives it—­is just his limited realization, achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of a universal and not a particular truth.  To this realization he brings all his human—­more, his sub-human—­feelings and experiences:  not only those which are vaguely called his spiritual intuitions, but the full weight of his impulsive and emotional life.  His experience and its interpretation are, then, inevitably conditioned by this apperceiving mass.  And here I think the intellect should show mercy, and not probe without remorse into those tender places where the heart and the spirit are at one.  Let us then be content to note, that when we consult the works of those who have best and most fully interpreted their religion in a universal sense, we find how careful they are to provide a category for this experience of a personally known and loved indwelling Divinity—­man’s Father, Lover, Saviour, ever-present Companion—­which shall avoid its identification with the mere spirit of Nature, whilst safeguarding its immanence no less than its transcendent quality.  Thus, Julian of Norwich heard in her meditations the voice of God saying to her, “See!  I am in all things!  See!  I lift never mine hand from off my works, nor ever shall!"[28] Is it possible to state more plainly the indivisible identity of the Spirit of Life?  “See!  I am in all things!” In the terrific energies of the stellar universe, and the smallest song of the birds.  In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive.  This sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual experience, wherever found.  It chimes well with the definition of Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly spiritual man, though he may not be any better morally than his non-religious neighbour, “has a confidence in the universe and an inner joy which the other does not know—­is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men."[29]