In the last three chapters we have been concerned, almost exclusively, with those facts of psychic life and growth, those instruments and mechanizations, which bear upon or condition our spiritual life.  But these wanderings in the soul’s workshops, and these analyses of the forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life.  I wish now to come out of the workshop, and try to see this spiritual life as the individual man may and should achieve it, from another angle of approach.

What are we to regard as the heart of spirituality?  When we have eliminated the accidental characters with which varying traditions have endowed it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its possessor from the best, most moral citizen or devoted altruist?  Why do the Christian saint, Indian rishi, Buddhist arhat, Moslem S[=u]fi, all seem to us at bottom men of one race, living under different sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact?  This life, which they show in its various perfections, includes it is true the ethical life, but cannot be equated with it.  Wherein do its differentia consist?  We are dealing with the most subtle of realities and have only the help of crude words, developed for other purposes than this.  But surely we come near to the truth, as history and experience show it to us, when we say again that the spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life that means God in all His richness, immanent and transcendent:  the whole response to the Eternal and Abiding of which any one man is capable, expressed in and through his this-world life.  It requires then an objective vision or certitude, something to aim at; and also a total integration of the self, its dedication to that aim.  Both terms, vision and response, are essential to it.

This definition may seem at first sight rather dull.  It suggests little of that poignant and unearthly beauty, that heroism, that immense attraction, which really belong to the spiritual life.  Here indeed we are dealing with poetry in action:  and we need not words but music to describe it as it really is.  Yet all the forms, all the various beauties and achievements of this life of the Spirit, can be resumed as the reactions of different temperaments to the one abiding and inexhaustibly satisfying Object of their love.  It is the answer made by the whole supple, plastic self, rational and instinctive, active and contemplative, to any or all of those objective experiences of religion which we considered in the first chapter; whether of an encompassing and transcendent Reality, of a Divine Companionship or of Immanent Spirit.  Such a response we must believe to be itself divinely actuated.  Fully made, it is found on the one hand to call forth the most heroic, most beautiful, most tender qualities in human nature; all that we call holiness, the transfiguration of mere