has found a shelter in the midst of all the chaos and welter of the natural process, [p.154] and his deepest reason has not failed to come to the assistance of his spiritual need.  He now becomes conscious of security and even of victory in the enterprise before the battle has really begun on an arena outside his own nature; a conviction is being brought into being within his deepest soul that the best and strongest elements in the universe are on his side.  Although hindrances and entanglements of all kinds increase in number, the increase in spiritual certainty, and faith in the final issue of his life, have grown at a greater ratio.  Such a man has settled his destiny; he has come to the great spiritual affirmation of life—­an affirmation which has to be repeated so often, and which each time distils something of a higher order within the soul.

It is evident that such an affirmation of the reality of spiritual ideals, which have now an existence of their own, should lead us farther.  If they mean so much, why cannot they mean more?  If they subsist in themselves, they must be what they are.  They are to us meaning and value of infinite significance.  But such and other spiritual characteristics are not things, and, as we have seen, not mere projections of our own individual selves.  There is nothing short of personality and over-personality by which they can be even partially designated and determined.  We are forced to this conclusion if they are to be objects of communion and union:  and we are forced [p.155] further to gather the Many into the One.  That was what was done on all lower planes.  Why stop short here, because infinitely much happens when the Many find their points of union and meaning in the One?[52] We have said that infinitely much happens when the Many find their meaning in the One.  A need of the nature has arisen which demands this, and it has arisen at its highest possible level alone.  Such a nature will never become absolutely certain of the meaning and value of all that has led up to this until the One obtains a self-subsistence.  If this effort fails, the whole effort of development towards unity and inwardness fails.  And when such a chain of effort snaps at its highest link of spiritual development, everything that had entered into the process at all the levels below it snaps along with it in so far as it had any validity whatever in the light of what is higher than itself.

But the fact that this conception of the One, conceived as Absolute Spiritual Life, has produced so many effects of the highest kind is a proof of its existence.  Qualities come into being which can never come with such power in any other way.  The spiritual experiences, revealed at such a level, have something to say on this matter.  These experiences, [p.156] although aware of the meaning of universal concepts, have become aware of something higher still:  Knowledge has given place to Love; a region has been reached beyond