ethics by a supernatural loveliness, breathing another air, satisfying another standard, than those of the temporal world.  And on the other hand, this response of the self is repaid by a new sensitiveness and receptivity, a new influx of power.  To use theological language, will is answered by grace:  and as the will’s dedication rises towards completeness the more fully does new life flow in.  Therefore it is plain that the smallest and humblest beginning of such a life in ourselves—­and this inquiry is useless unless it be made to speak to our own condition—­will entail not merely an addition to life, but for us too a change in our whole scale of values, a self-dedication.  For that which we are here shown as a possible human achievement is not a life of comfortable piety, or the enjoyment of the delicious sensations of the armchair mystic.  We are offered, it is true, a new dower of life; access to the full possibilities of human nature.  But only upon terms, and these terms include new obligations in respect of that life; compelling us, as it appears, to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual refusal to sink back into the next-best, to slide along a gentle incline.  The spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe distance from the Fire of Love.  It demands, indeed, very often things so hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman:  immensely generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant purity, self-forgetting zeal.  It means a complete conquest of life’s perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance of hardship and pain.  And if we ask how this can be, what it is that makes possible such enhancement of human will and of human courage, the only answer seems to be that of the Johannine Christ:  that it does consist in a more abundant life.

In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and for the new ideals.  There was something of the penitent, something of the contemplative, and something of the apostle in every man or woman who thus grew to their full stature and realized all their latent possibilities.  But above all there was a fortitude, an all-round power of tackling existence, which comes from complete indifference to personal suffering or personal success.  And further, psychology showed us, that those workings and readjustments which we saw preparing this life of the Spirit, were in line with those which prepare us for fullness of life on other levels:  that is to say the harnessing of the impulsive nature to the purposes chosen by consciousness, the resolving of conflicts, the unification of the whole personality about one’s dominant interest.  These readjustments were helped by the deliberate acceptance of the useful suggestions of religion, the education of the foreconscious, the formation of habits of charity and prayer.