Part 3 — CHAPTER XV SUMMING UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK THROUGH ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION, AND THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT OF MIND, TO THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION.

I now propose to conclude, by getting, through three successively easier matters, back to the starting-point of this whole book, and, in doing so, to sum up and delimitate, more and more clearly, the practical lessons learnt during its long course. These three last matters and points of observation shall be Asceticism, Institutionalism, and Mental Activity and Discipline, or the Scientific Habit—all three in their relation to the Mystical Element of Religion.

I. Asceticism and Mysticism.

Now in the matter of Asceticism, we can again conveniently consider three points.

1. Ordinary Asceticism practised by Mystics.

There is, first, the (generally severe) Asceticism which is ever connected with at least some one phase, an early one, of every genuine Mystic’s history, yet which does not differ essentially from the direct training in self-conquest to which practically all pre-Protestant, and most of the old Protestant earnest Christians considered themselves obliged.

(1) Now it is deeply interesting to note how marked has been, off and on throughout the last century and now again quite recently, the renewal of comprehension and respect for the general principle of Asceticism, in quarters certainly free from all preliminary bias in favour of Medieval Christianity. Schopenhauer wrote in 1843: “Not only the religions of the East but also genuine Christianity shows, throughout its systems, that fundamental characteristic of Asceticism which my philosophy elucidates.… Precisely in its doctrines of renunciation, self-denial, complete chastity, in a word, of general mortification of the will, lie the deepest truth, the high value, the sublime character of Christianity. It thus belongs to the old, true, and lofty ideal of mankind, in opposition to the false, shallow, and ruinous optimism of Greek Paganism, Judaism and Islam.” “Protestantism, by eliminating Asceticism and its central point, the meritoriousness of celibacy, has, by this alone, already abandoned the innermost kernel of Christianity.… For Christianity is the doctrine of the deep guilt of the human race … and of the heart’s thirst after redemption from it, a redemption which can be acquired only through the abnegation of self,—that is, through a complete conversion of human nature.”[432]—And the optimistically tempered American Unitarian, the deeply versed Psychologist, Prof. William James, tells us in 1902: “In its spiritual meaning, Asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy.” “The Metaphysical mystery, that he who feeds on death, that feeds on men, possesses life supereminently, and meets best the secret demands of the Universe, is the truth of which Asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has, yet, its indestructible, vital meaning.… Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and sponge-cake in comparison.”[433]

(2) Indeed, the only thing at all special to Mysticism, in its attitude towards this general principle and practice of Asceticism, is that it ever practises Asceticism as a means towards, or at least as the make-weight and safeguard of, Contemplation, which latter is as essentially Synthetic, and, in so far, peaceful and delightful, as the former is Analytic, polemical and painful; whereas non-Mystical souls will practise Asceticism directly with a view to greater aloofness from sin, and greater readiness and strength to perform the various calls of duty. And hence, if we but grant the legitimacy of the general principle of ordinary Asceticism, we shall find the Mystical form of this Asceticism to be the more easily comprehensible variety of that principle. For the Mystic’s practice, as concerns this point, is more varied and inclusive than that of others, since he does not even tend to make the whole of his inner life into a system of checks and of tension. The expansive, reconciling movement operates in him most strongly also, and, where of the right kind, this expansive movement helps, even more than the restrictive one, to purify, humble, and deepen his heart and soul.

2. God’s Transcendence a source of suffering.

There is, however, a second, essentially different source and kind of suffering in some sorts and degrees of Mysticism, and indeed in other attraits of the spiritual life, which is deeply interesting, because based upon a profound Metaphysical apprehension. Although, at bottom, the opposite extreme to Pantheism, it readily expresses itself, for reasons that will presently appear, in terms that have a curiously Pantheistic colour.

(1) St. John of the Cross writes in 1578: “It is a principle of philosophy, that all means must … have a certain resemblance to the end, such as shall be sufficient for the object in view. If therefore the understanding is to be united to God, … it must make use of those means which can effect that union, that is, means which are most like unto God.… But there is no essential likeness or communion between creatures and Him, the distance between His divine nature and their nature is infinite. No creature therefore … nothing that the imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend … in this life … can be a proximate means of union with God,” for “it is all most unlike God, and most disproportionate to Him.” “The understanding … must be pure and empty of all sensible objects, all clear intellectual perceptions, resting on faith: for faith is the sole proximate and proportionate means of the soul’s union with God.”[434]

Now it is certain, as we have already found, that the awakened human soul ever possesses a dim but real experience of the Infinite, and that, in proportion as it is called to the Mystical way, this sense will be deepened into various degrees of the Prayer of Quiet and of Union, and that here, more plainly than elsewhere, will appear the universal necessity of the soul’s own response, by acts and the habit of Faith, to all and every experience which otherwise remains but so much unused material for the soul’s advance. And it is equally certain that St. John of the Cross is one of the greatest of such contemplatives, and that neither his intuition and actual practice, nor even his sayings, (so long as any one saying belonging to one trend is set off against another belonging to the other trend), contravenes the Christian and Catholic positions.—Yet it cannot be denied that, were we to press his “negative way” into becoming the only one; and especially were we to take, without discount, such a virtual repudiation, as is furnished by any insistence upon the above words, of any essential, objective difference in value between our various apprehensions of Him and approaches to Him: the whole system and rationale of External, Sacramental and Historical Religion, indeed of the Incarnation, in any degree and form, would have to go, as so many stumbling-blocks to the soul’s advance. For the whole principle of all such Religion implies the profound importance of the Here and the Now, the Contingent and the Finite, and of the Immanence of God, in various degrees and ways, within them.

Indications of this incompatibility, as little systematically realized here as in the Areopagite, are afforded by various remarks of his, belonging in reality to another trend. Thus, immediately before his denial of any essential likeness or communion between any creature and God, he says: “It is true that all creatures bear a certain relation to God and are tokens of His being, some more, some less, according to the greater perfection of their nature.” And of Our Lord’s sacred Humanity he says: “What a perfect living image was Our Saviour upon earth: yet those who had no faith, though they were constantly about Him, and saw His wonderful works, were not benefited by His presence.”[435] But even here the immense importance, indeed downright necessity for Faith, of such external and historical stimuli, objects and materials,—in the latter instance all this at its very deepest,—remains unemphasized, through his engrossment in the necessity of Faith for the fructification of all these things.

In other places this Faith appears as though working so outside of all things imageable, as to have to turn rapidly away from all picturings, as, at best, only momentary starting-points for the advanced soul. “Let the faithful soul take care that, whilst contemplating an image, the senses be not absorbed in it, whether it be material or in the imagination, and whether the devotion it excites be spiritual or sensible. Let him … venerate the image as the Church commands and lift up his mind at once from the material image to those whom it represents. He who shall do this, will never be deluded.”[436] Here, again, along the line of argument absorbing the saint in this book, there is no fully logical ground left for the Incarnational, Historical, Sacramental scheme of the Infinite immanent in the finite, and of spirit stimulated in contact with matter, with everywhere the need of the condescensions of God and of our ascensions by means of careful attention to them.

Sören Kierkegaard, that deep solitary Dane, with so much about him like to Pascal the Frenchman, and Hurrell Froude the Englishman, and who, though Lutheran in all his bringing up, was so deeply attracted by Catholic Asceticism, has, in recent times (he died in 1855), pushed the doctrine of the qualitative, absolute difference between God and all that we ourselves can think, feel, will or be, to lengths beyond even the transcendental element,—we must admit this to be the greatly preponderant one,—in the great Spaniard’s formal teaching. And it is especially in this non-Mystical Ascetic that we get an impressive picture of the peculiar kind of suffering and asceticism, which results from such a conviction to a profoundly sensitive, absorbedly religious soul; and here too we can, I think, discover the precise excess and one-sidedness involved in this whole tendency. Professor Höffding, in his most interesting monograph on his friend, tells us how “for Kierkegaard, … the will gets monopolized by religious Ethics from the very first; there is no time for Contemplation or Mysticism.” “To tear the will away,” Kierkegaard himself says, “from all finite aims and conditions … requires a painful effort and this effort’s ceaseless repetition. And if, in addition to this, the soul has, in spite of all its striving, to be as though it simply were not, it becomes clear that the religious life signifies a dedication to suffering and to self-destruction. What wonder, then, that, for the Jew, death was the price of seeing God; or that, for the Gentile, the soul’s entering into closer relations with the Deity meant the beginning of madness?” For “the soul’s relation to God is a relation to a Being absolutely different from Man, who cannot confront him as his Superlative or Ideal, and who, nevertheless, is to rule in his inmost soul. Hence a necessary division, ever productive of new pains, is operative within man, as long as he perseveres in this spiritual endeavour.… A finite being, he is to live in the Infinite and Absolute: he is there like a fish upon dry land.”[437]

Now Prof. Höffding applies a double, most cogent criticism to this position.—The one is religious, and has already been quoted. “A God Who is not Ideal and Pattern is no God. Hence the contention that the Nature of the Godhead is, of necessity, qualitatively different from that of Man, has ever occasioned ethical and religious misgivings.”—And the other is psychological. “Tension can indeed be necessary for the truth and the force of life. But tension, taken by itself, cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity: not only contrast, but also concentration, must make itself felt, as long as the life of consciousness endures.”[438]

It is deeply interesting to note how Catherine, and at bottom St. John of the Cross and the Exclusive Mystics generally, escape, through their practice and in some of their most emphatic teachings, from Kierkegaard’s excess, no doubt in part precisely because they are Mystics, since the exclusive Mystic’s contemplative habit is, at bottom, a Synthetic one. Yet we should realize the deep truth which underlies the very exaggerations of this one-sidedly Analytic and Ascetical view. For if God is the deepest ideal, the ultimate driving force and the true congenital element and environment of Man, such as Man cannot but secretly wish to will deliberately, and which, at his best, Man truly wills to hold and serve: yet God remains ever simply incompatible with that part of each man’s condition and volition which does not correspond to the best and deepest which that Man himself sees or could see to be the better, hic et nunc; and, again, He is ever, even as compared with any man’s potential best, infinitely more and nobler, and, though here not in simple contradiction, yet at a degree of perfection which enables Him, the Supreme Spirit, to penetrate, as Immanent Sustainer or Stimulator, and to confront, as Transcendent Ideal and End, the little human spirit, so great in precisely this its keen sense of experienced contrast.

Catherine exhibits well this double relation, of true contradiction, and of contrast, both based upon a certain genuine affinity between the human soul and God. On one side of herself she is indeed a veritable fish out of water; but, on the other side of her, she is a fish happily disporting itself in its very element, in the boundless ocean of God. On the one side, snapping after air, in that seemingly over-rarified atmosphere in which the animal man, the mere selfish individual, cannot live; on the other side, expanding her soul’s lungs and drinking in light, life, and love, in that same truly rich atmosphere, which, Itself Spirit, feeds and sustains her growing spiritual personality. And the Dialogo, in spite of its frequently painful abstractness and empty unity, has, upon the whole, a profound hold upon this great doctrine.

Yet it is in Catherine’s own culminating intuition,—of the soul’s free choice of Purgatory, as a joyful relief from the piercing pain of what otherwise would last for ever,—the vividly perceived contrast between God’s purity and her soul’s impurity, that we get, in the closest combination, indeed mutual causation, this double sense of Man’s nearness to and distance from, of his likeness and unlikeness to God. For only if man is, in the deepest instincts of his soul, truly related to God, and is capable of feeling, (indeed he ever actually, though mostly dimly, experiences,) God’s presence and this, man’s own, in great part but potential, affinity to Him: can suffering be conceived to arise from the keen realization of the contrast between God and man’s own actual condition at any one moment; and can any expectation, indeed a swift vivid instinct, arise within man’s soul that the painful, directly contradictory, discrepancy can and will, gradually though never simply automatically, be removed. And though, even eventually, the creature cannot, doubtless, ever become simply God, yet it can attain, in an indefinitely higher degree, to that affinity and union of will with God, which, in its highest reaches and moments, it already now substantially possesses; and hence to that full creaturely self-constitution and joy in which, utterly trusting, giving itself to, and willing God, it will, through and in Him, form an abidingly specific, unique constituent and link of His invisible kingdom of souls, on and on.

3. Discipline of fleeing and of facing the Multiple and Contingent.

But there is a third attitude, peculiar (because of its preponderance) to the Mystics as such, an attitude in a manner intermediate between that of ordinary Asceticism, and that of the Suffering just described. The implications and effects of, and the correctives for, this third attitude will occupy us up to the end of this book. I refer to the careful turning-away from all Multiplicity and Contingency, from the Visible and Successive, from all that does or can distract and dissipate, which is so essential and prevailing a feature in all Mysticism, which indeed, in Exclusive Mysticism, is frankly made into the one sole movement towards, and measure of, the soul’s perfection.

(1) It is true that to this tendency, when and in so far as it has come so deeply to permeate the habits of a soul as to form a kind of second nature, the name Asceticism cannot, in strictness, be any more applied; since now the pain will lie, not in this turning away from all that dust and friction, but, on the contrary, in any forcing of the soul back into that turmoil. And doubtless many, perhaps most, souls with a pronouncedly mystical attrait, are particularly sensitive to all, even partial and momentary, conflict. Yet we can nevertheless appropriately discuss the matter under the general heading of Asceticism, since, as a rule, much practice and sacrifice go to build up this habit; since, in every case, this Abstractive Habit shares with Ordinary Asceticism a pronounced hostility to many influences and forces ever actually operative within and around the undisciplined natural man; and since, above all, the very complements and correctives for this Abstractiveness will have to come from a further, deeper and wider Asceticism, to be described presently.

(2) As to Ordinary Asceticism and this Abstractiveness, the former fights the world and the self directly, and then only in so far as they are discovered to be positively evil or definitely to hinder positive good; it is directly attracted by the clash and friction involved in such fighting; and it has no special desire for even a transitory intense unification of the soul’s life: whereas the Abstractiveness turns away from, and rises above, the world and the phenomenal self; their very existence, their contingency, the struggles alive within them, and their (as it seems) inevitably disturbing effect upon the soul,—are all felt as purely dissatisfying; and an innermost longing for a perfect and continuous unification and overflowing harmony of its inner life here possess the spirit.

(3) Now we have just seen how a movement of integration, of synthesizing all the soul’s piecemeal, inter-jostling acquisitions, of restful healing of its wounds and rents, of sinking back, (from the glare and glitter of clear, and then ever fragmentary perception, and from the hurry, strain and rapidly ensuing distraction involved in all lengthy external action), into a peaceful, dim rumination and unification, is absolutely necessary, though in very various degrees and forms, for all in any way complete and mature souls.—And we have, further back, realized that a certain, obscure but profoundly powerful, direct instinct and impression of God in the soul is doubtless at work here, and, indeed, throughout all the deeper and nobler movements of our wondrously various inner life. But what concerns us here, is the question whether the complete action of the soul, (if man would grow in accordance with his ineradicable nature, environment, and specific grace and call), does not as truly involve a corresponding counter-movement to this intensely unitive and intuitive movement which, with most men, and in most moments of even the minority of men, forms but an indirectly willed condition and spontaneous background of the soul.

(4) We have been finding, further, that all the Contingencies, Multiplicities and Mediations which, one and all, tend to appear to the Mystic as so many resistances and distractions, can roughly be grouped under two ultimate heads. These intruders are fellow-souls, or groups of fellow-souls,—some social organism, the Family, Society, the State, the Church, who provoke, in numberless degrees and ways, individual affection, devotion, distraction, jealousy, as from person towards person. Or else the intruders are Things and Mechanical Laws, and these usually leave the Mystic indifferent or irritate or distract him; but they can become for him great opportunities of rest, and occasions for self-discipline.

Yet this distinction between Persons and Things, (although vital for the true apprehension of all deeper, above all of the deepest Reality, and for the delicate discrimination between what are but the means and what are the ends in a truly spiritual life), does not prevent various gradations within, and continuous interaction between, each of these two great groups. For in proportion as, in the Personal group, the Individual appears as but parcel and expression of one of the social organisms, does the impression of determinist Law, of an impersonal Thing or blind Force, begin to mix with, and gradually to prevail over, that of Personality. And in proportion as, in the Impersonal group, Science comes to include all careful and methodical study, according to the most appropriate methods, of any and every kind of truth and reality; and as it moves away from the conceptions of purely quantitative matter, and of the merely numerically different, entirely interchangeable, physical happenings, (all so many mere automatic illustrations of mechanical Law), on, through the lowly organisms of plant-life, and the ever higher interiority and richer consciousness of animal life, up to Man, with his ever qualitative Mind, and his ever non-interchangeable, ever “effortful,” achievements and elaborations of types of beauty, truth and goodness in Human History,—does Science itself come back, in its very method and subject-matter, ever more nearly, to the great personal starting-point, standard and ultimate motive of all our specifically human activity and worth.

(5) Indeed, the two great continuous facts of man’s life, first that he thinks, feels, wills, and acts, in and with the help or hindrance of that profoundly material Thing, his physical body, and on occasion of, and with regard to, the materials furnished by the stimulations and impressions of his senses; and again, that these latter awaken within him those, in themselves, highly abstract and Thing-like categories of his mind which penetrate and give form to these materials; are enough to show how close is the pressure, and how continuous the effect, of Things upon the slow upbuilding of Personality.

(6) Fair approximations to these two kinds of Things, with their quite irreplaceable specific functions within the economy of the human mental life,—the intensely concrete and particular Sense-Impressions, and the intensely abstract and general Mental Categories,—reappear within the economy of Characteristic Religion, in its Sacraments and its Doctrine. And conversely, there exists, in rerum natura, no Science worth having which is not, ultimately, the resultant of, and which does not require and call forth, on and on, certain special qualities, and combinations of qualities, of the truly ethical, spiritual Personality. Courage, patience, perseverance, candour, simplicity, self-oblivion, continuous generosity towards others and willing correction of even one’s own most cherished views,—these things and their like are not the quantitative determinations of Matter, but the qualitative characteristics of Mind.

(7) I shall now, therefore, successively take Mysticism in its attitude towards these two great groups of claimants upon its attention, the Personal and the Impersonal, even though any strictly separate discussion of elements which, in practice, ever appear together, cannot but have some artificiality. And an apparent further complication will be caused by our having, in each case, to contrast what Mysticism would do, if it became Exclusive, with what it must be restricted to doing, if it is to remain Inclusive, i.e. if it is to be but one element in the constitution of that multiplicity in unity, the deep spiritual Personality. The larger Asceticism will thus turn out to be a wider and deeper means towards perfection than even genuine Mysticism itself, since this Asceticism will have to include both this Mysticism and the counter movement within the one single, disciplined and purified life of the soul.

II. Social Religion and Mysticism.

Introductory: the ruinousness of Exclusive Mysticism.

Prof. Harnack says in his Dogmengeschichte: “An old fairy tale tells of a man who lived in ignorance, dirt and wretchedness; and whom God invited, on a certain day, to wish whatsoever he might fancy, and it should be given him. And the man began to wish things, and ever more things, and ever higher things, and all these things were given him. At last he became presumptuous, and desired to become as the great God Himself: when lo, instantly he was sitting there again, in his dirt and misery. Now the history of Religion,—especially amongst the Greeks and Orientals,—closely resembles this fairy tale. For they began by wishing for themselves certain sensible goods, and then political, aesthetic, moral and intellectual goods: and they were given them all. And then they became Christians and desired perfect knowledge and a super-moral life: they even wished to become, already here below, as God Himself, in insight, beatitude and life. And behold, they fell, not at once indeed, but with a fall that could not be arrested, down to the lowest level, back into ignorance, dirt and barbarism.… Like unto their near spiritual relations, the Neo-Platonists, they were at first over-stimulated, and soon became jaded, and hence required ever stronger stimulants. And in the end, all these exquisite aspirations and enjoyments turned into their opposite extreme.”[439]

However much may want discounting or supplementing here, there is, surely, a formidable amount of truth in this picture. And, if so, is Mysticism, at least in its Dionysian type, not deeply to blame? And where is the safeguard against such terrible abuses?

Now Prof. Harnack has himself shown us elsewhere that there is a sense in which Monasticism should be considered eternal, even among and for Protestants. “Monasticism,” he says plaintively, in his account of the first three centuries of Protestantism, “even as it is conceivable and necessary among Evangelical Christians, disappeared altogether. And yet every community requires persons, who live exclusively for its purposes; hence the Church too requires volunteers who shall renounce ‘the world’ and shall dedicate themselves entirely to the service of their neighbour.”[440]—And again, scholars of such breadth of knowledge and independence of judgement as Professor Tiele and his school, insist strongly upon the necessity of Ecclesiastical Institutions and Doctrines. The day of belief in the normality, indeed in the possibility for mankind in general, of a would-be quite individual, entirely spiritual, quite “pure” religion, is certainly over and gone, presumably for good and all, amongst all competent workers.—Nor, once more, can the general Mystical sense of the unsatisfying character of all things finite, and of the Immanence of the Infinite in our poor lives, be, in itself, to blame: for we have found these experiences to mingle with, and to characterize, all the noblest, most fully human acts and personalities.—But, if so, what are the peculiarities in the religion of those times and races, which helped to produce the result pictured in the Dogmengeschichte?

Now here, to get a fairly final answer, we must throw together the question of the ordinary Christian Asceticism and that of the Abstraction peculiar to the Mystics; and we must ask whether the general emotive-volitional attitude towards Man and Life,—the theory and practice as to Transcendence and Immanence, Detachment and Attachment, which, from about 500 A.D. to, say, 1450 A.D., predominantly preceded, accompanied, and both expanded and deflected the specific ally Christian and normally human experience in Eastern Christendom, were not (however natural, indeed inevitable, and in part useful for those times and races), the chief of the causes which turned so much of the good of Mysticism into downright harm. At bottom this is once more the question as to the one-sided character of Neo-Platonism,—its incapacity to find any descending movement of the Divine into Human life.

1. True relation of the soul to its fellows. God’s “jealousy.”

Let us take first the relation of the single human soul to its fellow-souls.

(1) Now Kierkegaard tells us: “the Absolute is cruel, for it demands all, whilst the Relative ever continues to demand some attention from us.”[441] And the Reverend George Tyrrell, in his stimulating paper, Poet and Mystic, shows us that, as regards the relations between man’s love for man and man’s love for God, there are two conceptions and answers in reply to the question as to the precise sense in which God is “a jealous God,” and demands to be loved alone. In the first, easier, more popular conception, He is practically thought of as the First of Creatures, competing with the rest for Man’s love, and is here placed alongside of them. Hence the inference that whatever love they win from us by reason of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him: He is not loved perfectly, till He is loved alone. But in the second, more difficult and rarer conception, God is placed, not alongside of creatures but behind them, as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have. He is loved here, not apart from, but through and in them. Hence if only the affection be of the right kind as to mode and object, the more the better. The love of Him is the “form,” the principle of order and harmony; our natural affections are the “matter” harmonized and set in order; it is the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose adequate object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures.[442] Thus we have already found that even the immensely abstractive and austere St. John of the Cross tells us: “No one desires to be loved except for his goodness; and when we love in this way, our love is pleasing unto God and in great liberty; and if there be attachment in it, there is greater attachment to God.” And this doctrine he continuously, deliberately practises, half-a-century after his Profession, for he writes to his penitent, Donna Juana de Pedrazas in 1589: “All that is wanting now, is that I should forget you; but consider how that is to be forgotten which is ever present to the soul.”[443]

But Father Tyrrell rightly observes: “To square this view with the general ascetic tradition of the faithful at large is exceedingly difficult.”[444] Yet I cannot help thinking that a somewhat different reconciliation, than the one attempted by him,[445] really meets all the substantial requirements of the case.

(2) I take it, then, that an all-important double law or twin fact, or rather a single law and fact whose unity is composed of two elements, is, to some extent, present throughout all characteristically human life, although its full and balanced realization, even in theory and still more in practice, is ever, necessarily, a more or less unfulfilled ideal: viz. that not only there exist certain objects, acts, and affections that are simply wrong, and others that are simply right or perfect, either for all men or for some men: but that there exist simply no acts and affections which, however right, however obligatory, however essential to the perfection of us all or of some of us, that do not require, on our own part, a certain alternation of interior reserve and detachment away from, and of familiarity and attachment to, them and their objects. This general law applies as truly to Contemplation as it does to Marriage.

And next, the element of detachment which has to penetrate and purify simply all attachments,—even the attachment to detachment itself,—is the more difficult, the less obvious, the more profoundly spiritual and human element and movement, although only on condition that ever some amount of the other, of the outgoing element and movement, and of attachment, remains. For here, as everywhere, there is no good and operative yeast except with and in flour; there can be no purification and unity without a material and a multiplicity to purify and to unite.

And again, given the very limited power of attention and articulation possessed by individual man, and the importance to the human community of having impressive embodiments and examples of this, in various degrees and ways, universally ever all-but-forgotten, universally difficult, universally necessary, universally ennobling renunciation: we get the reason and justification for the setting apart of men specially drawn and devoted to a maximum, or to the most difficult kinds, of this renunciation. As the practically universal instinct, or rudimentary capacity, for Art, Science, and Philanthropy finds its full expression in artists, scientists, philanthropists, whose specific glory and ever necessary corrective it is that they but articulate clearly, embody massively and, as it were, precipitate what is dimly and intermittingly present, as it were in solution, throughout the consciousness and requirements of Mankind; and neither the inarticulate instinct, diffused among all, would completely suffice for any one of the majority, without the full articulation by a few, nor the full articulation by this minority could thrive, even for this minority itself, were it not environed by, and did it not voice, that dumb yearning of the race at large: so, and far more, does the general religiosity and sense of the Infinite, and even its ever-present element and requirement of Transcendence and Detachment, seek and call forth some typical, wholesomely provocative incorporation,—yet, here, with an even subtler and stronger interdependence, between the general demand and the particular supply.

And note that, if the minority will thus represent a maximum of “form,” with a minimum of “matter,” and the majority a maximum of “matter,” with a minimum of “form”: yet some form as well as some matter must be held by each; and the ideal to which, by their mutual supplementations, antagonisms, and corrections, they will have more and more to approximate our corporate humanity will be a maximum of “matter,” permeated and spiritualized by a maximum of “form.” If it is easy for the soul to let itself be invaded and choked by the wrong kind of “matter,” or even simply by an excess of the right kind, so that it will be unable to stamp the “matter” with spiritual “form”; the opposite extreme also, where the spiritual forces have not left to them a sufficiency of material to penetrate or of life-giving friction to overcome, is ever a most real abuse.

2. Ordinary Ascesis corrected by Social Christianity.

Now it is very certain that Ordinary Asceticism and Social Christianity are, in their conjunction, far less open to this latter danger than is the Mystical and Contemplative Detachment. For the former combination possesses the priceless conception of the soul’s personality being constituted in and through the organism of the religious society,—the visible and invisible Church. This Society is no mere congeries of severally self-sufficing units, each exclusively and directly dependent upon God alone; but, as in St. Paul’s grand figure of the body, an organism, giving their place and dignity to each several organ, each different, each necessary, and each influencing and influenced by all the others. We have here, as it were, a great living Cloth of Gold, with, not only the woof going from God to Man and from Man to God, but also the warp going from Man to Man,—the greatest to the least, and the least back to the greatest. And thus here the primary and full Bride of Christ never is, nor can be, any individual soul, but only this complete organism of all faithful souls throughout time and space; and the single soul is such a Bride only in so far as it forms an operative constituent of this larger whole.—And hence the soul of a Mystical habit will escape the danger of emptiness and inflation if it keeps up some,—as much indeed as it can, without permanent distraction or real violation of its special helps and call,—of that outgoing, social, co-operative action and spirit, which, in the more ordinary Christian life, has to form the all but exclusive occupation of the soul, and which here, indeed, runs the risk of degenerating into mere feverish, distracted “activity.”

I take the right scheme for this complex matter to have been all but completely outlined by Plato, in the first plan of his Republic, and indeed to have been largely derived by Christian thinkers from this source; and the excessive and one-sided conception to have been largely determined by his later additions and changes in that great book, especially as these have been all but exclusively enforced, and still further exaggerated, by Plotinus and Proclus. As Erwin Rhode finely says of this later teaching of Plato: “It was at the zenith of his life and thinking that Plato completed his ideal picture of the State, according to the requirements of his wisdom. Over the broad foundation of a population discriminated according to classes, (a foundation which, in its totality and organization, was to embody the virtue of justice in a form visible even from afar, and which formerly had seemed to him to fulfil the whole function of the perfect State), there now soars, pointing up into the super-mundane ether, a highest crown and pinnacle, to which all the lower serves but as a substructure to render possible this life in the highest air. A small handful of citizens, the Philosophers, form this final point of the pyramid of the State. In this State, ordered throughout according to the ends of ethics, these Philosophers will, it is true, take part in the Government, not joyously, but for duty’s sake; as soon, however, as duty permits, they will eagerly return to that super-mundane contemplation, which is the end and true content of their life’s activity. Indeed, in reality, the Ideal State is now built up, step by step, for the ‘one ultimate’ purpose of preparing an abode for these Contemplatives, of training them in their vocation, the highest extant, and of providing a means for the insertion of Dialectic, as a special form of life and the highest aim of human endeavour, into the general organism of the earthly, civilized life. ‘The so-called virtues’ all here sink into the shade before the highest force of the soul, the mystic Contemplation of the Eternal.… To bring his own life to ripeness for its own redemption, that is now the perfect sage’s true, his immediate duty. If, nevertheless, he has still to bethink himself of acting upon and of moulding the world the virtues will spontaneously present themselves to him: for he now possesses Virtue itself; it has become his essential condition.”[446]

It is truly impressive to find here, in its most perfect and most influential form, that ruinously untrue doctrine of the separation of any one set of men from the mass of their fellows, and of Contemplation from interest in other souls, taking the place, (in the same great mind, in the same great book), of the beautifully humble, rich, and true view of a constant, necessary interchange of gifts and duties between the various constituents of a highly articulated organism, a whole which is indefinitely greater than, and is alone the full means, end and measure of, all its several, even its noblest, parts.—Yet the Christian, indeed every at all specifically religious, reader, will have strongly felt that the second scheme possesses, nevertheless, at least one point of advantage over the earlier one. For it alone brings out clearly that element of Transcendence, that sense and thirst of the Infinite, which we have agreed upon as the deepest characteristic of man. And if this point be thus true and important, then another,—the making of Contemplation into a special vocation,—can hardly be altogether incorrect.

But if this is our judgment, how are we to harmonize these two points of Plato’s later scheme with the general positions of the earlier one. Or, rather, how are we to actuate and to synthesize our complex present-day requirements and duties, Christian and yet also Modern, Transcendental and yet Immanental too? For if we have any delicately vivid sense of, and sympathy with, the original, very simple, intensely transcendental, form and emphasis of the Christian teaching, and any substantial share in the present complex sense of obligation to various laws and conceptions immanent in different this-world organizations and systems: we shall readily feel how indefinitely more difficult and deep the question has become since Plato’s, and indeed since the Schoolmen’s time.

3. Preliminary Pessimism and ultimate Optimism of Christianity.

Now I think it is Prof. Ernst Troeltsch who has most fully explicitated the precise centre of this difficulty, which, in its acuteness, is a distinctly modern one, and the direction in which alone the problem’s true solution should be sought.

(1) “The chief problem of Christian Ethics,” he says, “is busy,” not with the relation between certain subjective means and dispositions, but “with the relation between certain objective ends, which have, in some way, to be thought together by the same mind as so many several objects, and to be brought by it and within it to the greatest possible unity. And the difficulty here lies in the fact, that the sublunar among these ends are none the less moral ends, bearing the full specific character of moral values,—that they are ends-in-themselves, and necessary for their own sakes, even at the cost of man’s natural happiness; and yet that they operate in the visible world, and adhere to historical formations which proceed from man’s natural constitution, and dominate his earthly horizon; whilst the Super-worldly End cannot share its rule with any other end. Yet the special characteristic of modern civilization resides precisely in such a simultaneous insistence upon the Inner-worldly Ends, as possessing the nature of ends-in-themselves, and upon the Religious, Super-worldly End: it is indeed from just this combination that this civilization derives its peculiar richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful, interior tension and its difficult problems.”

(2) The true solution of the difficulty surely is that “Ethical life is not, in its beginnings, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amidst a number of moral ends, whose unification is not his starting-point but his problem. And this multiplicity can be still further defined as the polarity of two poles, inherent in man’s nature, of which the two chief types proceed respectively from the religious and from the inner-worldly self-determination of the soul,—the polarity of Religious, and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be dispensed with without moral damage, yet which cannot be brought completely under a common formula. On this polarity depends the richness, but also the difficulty, of our life, since the sublunar ends remain, to a large extent, conditioned by the necessities and prerequisites of their own special subject-matters, and since only on condition of being thus recognized as ends in themselves, can they attain to their morally educative power.”[447]

(3) Or, to put the same matter from the point of view of definitely Christian experience and conviction: “The formula, for the specific nature of Christianity, can only be a complex conception,—the special Christian form,” articulation and correction, “of the fundamental thoughts concerning God, World, Man and Redemption which,” with indefinite variations of fulness and worth, “are found existing together in all the religions. And the tension present in this multiplicity of elements thus brought together is of an importance equal to that of the multiplicity itself; indeed in this tension resides the main driving-force of Religion. Christianity” in particular “embraces a polarity within itself, and its formula must be dualistic; it resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two focuses. For Christianity is,” unchangeably, “an Ethics of Redemption, with a conception of the world both optimistic and pessimistic, both transcendental and immanental, and an apprehension both of a severe antagonism and of a close interior union between the world and God. It is, in principle, a Dualism, and yet a Dualism which is ever in process of abolition by Faith and Action. It is a purely Religious Ethic, which concentrates man’s soul, with abrupt exclusiveness, upon the values of the interior life; and yet, again, it is a Humane Ethic, busy with the moulding and transforming of nature, and through love bringing about an eventual reconciliation with it. At one time the one, at another time the other, of these poles is prominent: but neither of them may be completely absent, if the Christian outlook is to be maintained.—And yet the original germ of the whole vast growth and movement ever remains an intensely, abruptly Transcendent Ethic, and can never simply pass over into a purely Immanental Ethic. The Gospel ever remains, with all possible clearness and keenness, a Promise of Redemption, leading us, away from the world, from nature and from sin, from earthly sorrow and earthly error, on and on to God; and which cannot allow the last word to be spoken in this life. Great as are its incentives to Reconciliation, it is never entirely resolvable into them. And the importance of that classical beginning ever consists in continuously calling back the human heart, away from all Culture and Immanence, to that which lies above both.”[448]

(4) We thus get at last a conception which really covers, I think, all the chief elements of this complex matter. But the reader will have noted that it does so by treating the whole problem as one of Spiritual Dynamics, and not of Intellectual Statics. For the conception holds and requires the existence and cultivation of three kinds of action and movement in the soul. There are, first, the various centres of human energy and duty of a primarily This-world character, each of which possesses its own kind and degree of autonomy, laws, and obligations. There is, next, the attempt at organizing an increasing interaction between, and at harmonizing, (whilst never emasculating or eliminating), these various, severally characteristic, systems of life and production into an ever larger ultimate unity. And, lastly, there is as strong a turning away from all this occupation with the Contingent and Finite, to the sense and apprehension of the Infinite and Abiding. And this dynamic system is so rich, even in the amount of it which can claim the practice of the majority of souls, as to require definite alternations in the occupations of such souls, ranging thus, in more or less rhythmic succession, from earth to Heaven and from Heaven back again to earth.

(5) And so great and so inexhaustible is this living system, even by mankind at large, that it has to be more or less parcelled out amongst various groups of men, each group possessing its own predominant attrait,—either to work out one of those immanental interests, say Art, Natural Science, Politics; or to fructify one or more of these relatively independent interests, by crossing it with one or more of the others; or to attempt to embrace the whole of these intra-mundane interests in one preliminary final system; or to turn away from this whole system and its contents to the Transcendent and Infinite; or finally to strive to combine, as far as possible, this latter Fleeing to the Infinite with all that former Seeking of the Finite.—We shall thus get specialists within one single domain; and more many-sided workers who fertilize one Science by another; and philosophers of Science or of History, or of both, who strive to reach the rationale of all knowledge of the Finite and Contingent; and Ascetics and Contemplatives who, respectively, call forth and dwell upon the sense and presence of the Infinite and Abiding, underlying and accompanying all the definite apprehensions of things contingent; and finally, the minds and wills that feel called to attempt as complete a development and organization as possible of all these movements.

4. Subdivision of spiritual labour: its necessity and its dangers.

And yet all the subdivision of labour we have just required can avoid doing harm, directly or indirectly, (by leading to Materialism, Rationalism, or Fanaticism, to one or other of the frequent but ever mischievous “Atomisms”), only on condition that it is felt and worked as such a subdivision. In other words, every soul must retain and cultivate some sense of, and respect for, the other chief human activities not primarily its own. For, as a matter of fact, even the least rich or developed individual requires and practises a certain amount, in an inchoate form, of each and all of these energizings; and he can, fruitfully for himself and others, exercise a maximum amount of any one of them, only if he does not altogether and deliberately neglect and exclude the others; and, above all, if, in imagination and in actual practice, he habitually turns to his fellow-men, of the other types and centres, to supplement, and to be supplemented by, them.

It will be found, I think, that the quite undeniable abuses that have been special to the Ascetic and Contemplative methods and states, have all primarily sprung from that most plausible error that, if these energizings are, in a sense, the highest in and for man, then they can, at least in man’s ideal action and condition, dispense with other and lower energizings and objects altogether. Yet both for man’s practice here and even for his ideal state in the hereafter, this is not so. There is no such thing,—either in human experience or in the human ideal, when both are adequately analyzed and formulated,—as discursive reasoning, without intuitive reason; or clear analysis and sense of contrast, without dim synthesis and a deep consciousness of similarity or continuity; or detachment of the will from evil, without attachment of the higher feelings to things good; or the apprehension and requirements of Multiplicity, without those of Unity; or the vivid experience of Contingency, Mutation, and the Worthlessly Subjective, without the, if obscure yet most powerful, instinct of the Infinite and Abiding, of the true Objective and Valuable Subjective. Thus, for humanity at large entirely, and for each human individual more or less, each member of these couples requires, and is occasioned by, the other, and vice versa.

The maxims that follow from this great fact are as plain in reason, and as immensely fruitful in practice, as they are difficult, though ever freshly interesting, to carry out, at all consistently, even in theory and still more in act. For the object of a wise living will now consist in introducing an ever greater unity into the multiplicity of our lives,—up to the point where this unity’s constituents would, like the opposing metals in an electric battery, become too much alike still to produce a fruitful interaction, and where the unity would, thus and otherwise, become empty and mechanical; and an ever greater multiplicity into the unity,—up to the point where that multiplicity would, seriously and permanently, break up or weaken true recollection; and in more and more expanding this whole individual organism, by its insertion, as a constituent part, into larger groups and systems of interests. The Family, the Nation, Human Society, the Church,—these are the chief of the larger organizations into which the inchoate, largely only potential, organism of the individual man is at first simply passively born, yet which, if he would grow, (not in spite of them, a hopeless task, but by them), he will have deliberately to endorse and will, as though they were his own creations.

5. Mystics and Spiritual Direction.

It is interesting to note the special characteristics attaching to the one social relation emphasized by the medieval and modern varieties of Western Catholic Mysticism; and the effect which a larger development of the other chief forces and modalities of the Catholic spiritual life necessarily has upon this relation. I am thinking of the part played by the Director, the soul’s leader and adviser, in the lives of these Mystics,—a part which differs, in three respects, from that of the ordinary Confessor in the life of the more active or “mixed” type of Catholic.

(1) For one thing, there is here a striking variety and range, in the ecclesiastical and social position of the persons thus providentially given and deliberately chosen. The early German Franciscan Preacher, Berthold of Regensburg, owes his initiation into the Interior Life to his Franciscan Novice-Master, the Partial Mystic, David of Augsburg, whose writings still give forth for us their steady light and genial warmth; the French widowed noblewoman and Religious Foundress, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, is helped on her course to high contemplation by the Secular Priest and Bishop, St. Francis de Sales; the French Jesuit, Jean Nicolas Grou, is initiated, after twenty-four years’ life and training in his Order, by the Visitation Nun, Soeur Pélagie, into that more Mystical spirituality, which constitutes the special characteristic of his chief spiritual books; the great Spaniard, St. Teresa herself, tells us how “a saintly nobleman … a married layman, who had spent nearly forty years in prayer, seems to me to have been, by the pains he took, the beginning of salvation to my soul”—“his power was great”; and the English Anchorite, Mother Juliana of Norwich, “a simple, unlettered creature,” seems to have found no special leader on to her rarely deep, wide, and tender teachings, but to have been led and stimulated, beyond and after her first general Benedictine training, by God’s Providence alone, working through the few and quite ordinary surroundings and influences of her Anchorage at Norwich.[449] It would be difficult to find anything to improve in this noble liberty of these great children of God; nor would a larger influence of the other modalities necessarily restrict this ample range.

(2) Again, the souls of this type seem, for the most part, to realize more fully and continuously than those of the ordinary, simply active and ascetical kind, that the “blind obedience” towards such leaders, so often praised in their disciples and penitents, is, where wholesome and strengthening, essentially a simple, tenacious adherence, during the inevitable times of darkness and perplexity, to the encouragements given by the guide to persevere along the course and towards the truths which this soul itself saw clearly, often through the instrumentality of this leader, when it was in light and capable of a peaceful, deliberate decision. For however much the light may have been given it through this human mediation, (and the most numerous, and generally the most important, of our lights, have been acquired thus through the spoken, written, or acted instrumentality of fellow-souls),—yet the light was seen, and had (in the first instance), to be seen, by the disciple’s own spiritual eye; and it is but to help it in keeping faithful to this light (which, in the first and last instance, is God’s light and its own) that the leader stands by and helps. But, given this important condition, there remains the simple, experimental fact that, not only can and do others often see our spiritual whereabouts and God’s attrait for us more clearly than we do ourselves, but such unselfseeking transmission and such humbly simple reception of light between man and man adds a moral and spiritual security and beauty to the illumination, (all other conditions being equal and appropriate), not to be found otherwise. It is interesting to note the courageous, balanced, and certainly quite unprejudiced, testimony borne to these important points, by so widely read, and yet upon the whole strongly Protestant, a pair of scholars, as Miss Alice Gardner and her very distinguished brother, Professor Percy Gardner.[450]

(3) And finally, the souls of this type have, (at least for the two purposes of the suscitation of actual insight, and for bearing witness to this, now past, experience during the soul’s periods of gloom), often tended,—in Western Christendom and during Medieval and still more in Modern times,—to exalt the office and power of the Director, in the life of the soul of the Mystical type, very markedly beyond the functions, rights and duties of the ordinary Confessor in the spiritual life of the ordinary Catholic.

Indeed they and their interpreters have, in those times and places, often insisted upon the guarantee of safety thus afforded, and upon the necessity of such formal and systematic mediation, with an absoluteness and vehemence impossible to conciliate with any full and balanced, especially with any at all orthodox, reading of Church History. For this feature is as marked in the condemned book of Molinos and of most of the other Quietists, as it is in such thoroughly approved Partial Mysticism as that of Père Lallemant and Père Grou: hence it alone cannot, surely, render a soul completely safe against excesses and delusions. And this feature was markedly in abeyance, often indeed, for aught we know, completely wanting, at least in any frequent and methodic form, in the numerous cases of the Egyptian and other Fathers of the Desert: hence it cannot be strictly essential to all genuine Contemplation in all times and places.

(4) The dominant and quite certain fact here seems to be that, in proportion as the Abstractive movement of the soul is taken as self-sufficient, and a Contemplative life is attempted as something substantially independent of any concrete, social, and devotional helps and duties, the soul gets into a state of danger, which no amount of predominance of the Director can really render safe; whereas, in proportion as the soul takes care to practise, in its own special degree and manner, the outgoing movement towards Multiplicity and Contingency, (particular attention to particular religious facts and particular service of particular persons), does such right, quite ordinary-seeming, active subordination to, and incorporation within, the great sacred organisms of the Family, Society, and the Church, or of any wise and helpful subdivision of these, furnish material, purgation and check for the other movement, and render superfluous any great or universal predominance of Direction. St. Teresa is, here also, wonderfully many-sided and balanced. Just as she comes to regret having ever turned aside from Christ’s Sacred Humanity, so too she possesses, indeed she never loses, the sense of the profoundly social character of Christianity: she dies as she had lived, full of an explicit and deep love for the Kingdom of God and the Church.

6. Mysticism predominantly Individualistic.

Yet it is clear that the strong point of the Mystics, as such, does not lie in the direction of the great social spirituality which finds God in our neighbour and in the great human organizations, through and in which, after all, man in great part becomes and is truly man. They are, as such, Individualistic; the relation between God and the individual soul here ever tends to appear as constituted by these two forces alone. A fresh proof, if one were still wanting, that Mysticism is but one of the elements of Religion,—for Religion requires both the Social and the Individual, the Corporate and the Lonely movement and life.

It is truly inspiring to note how emphatic is the concurrence of all the deepest and most circumspect contemporary Psychology, Epistemology, Ethics, and History and Philosophy of the Sciences and of Religion, in these general conclusions, which find, within the slow and many-sided growth and upbuilding of the spiritual personality, a true and necessary place and function for all the great and permanent capabilities, aspirations and energizings of the human soul. Thus no system of religion can be complete and deeply fruitful which does not embrace, (in every possible kind of healthy development, proportion and combination), the several souls and the several types of souls who, between them, will afford a maximum of clear apprehension and precise reasoning, and of dim experience and intuitive reason; of particular attention to the Contingent (Historical Events and Persons, and Institutional Acts and Means) and of General Recollection and Contemplation and Hungering after the Infinite; and of reproductive Admiration and Loving Intellection, and of quasi-creative, truly productive Action upon and within Nature and other souls, attaining, by such Action, most nearly to the supreme attribute, the Pure Energizing of God.

Thus Pseudo-Dionysius and St. John of the Cross will, even in their most Negative doctrines, remain right and necessary in all stages of the Church’s life,—on condition, however, of being taken as but one of two great movements, of which the other, the Positive movement, must also ever receive careful attention: since only between them is attained that all-important oscillation of the religious pendulum, that interaction between the soul’s meal and the soul’s yeast, that furnishing of friction for force to overcome, and of force to overcome the friction, that material for the soul to mould, and in moulding which to develop itself, that alternate expiration and inspiration, upon which the soul’s mysterious death-in-life and life-in-death so continuously depends.

III. The Scientific Habit and Mysticism.

Introductory. Difficulty yet Necessity of finding a True Place and Function for Science in the Spiritual Life.

Now it is certain that such an oscillatory movement, such a give-and-take, such a larger Asceticism, built up out of the alternate engrossment in and abstraction from variously, yet in each case really, attractive levels, functions and objects of human life and experience, is still comparatively easy, as long as we restrict it to two out of the three great groups of energizings which are ever, at least potentially, present in the soul, and which ever inevitably help to make or mar, to develop or to stunt, the totality of the soul’s life, and hence also of the strictly spiritual life. The Historical-Institutional, and the Mystical-Volitional groups and forces, the High-Church and the Low-Church trend, the Memory- and the Will-energies, do indeed coalesce, in times of peace, with the Reason-energy, though, even then, with some difficulty. But in times of war,—on occasion of any special or excessive action on the part of this third group, the Critical-Speculative, the Broad-Church trend, and the energizing of the Understanding,—they readily combine against every degree of the latter. It is as though the fundamental vowels A and U could not but combine to oust the fundamental vowel I; or as if the primary colours Red and Blue must join to crush out the primary colour Yellow.

Indeed, it is undoubtedly just this matter of the full and continuous recognition of, and allocation of a special function to, this third element within the same great spiritual organism which englobes the other two, which is now the great central difficulty and pressing problem of more or less every degree and kind of religious life. For the admission of this third element appears frequently to be ruinous to the other two; yet the other two, when kept away from it, seem to lose their vigour and persuasive power.—And yet it is, I think, exactly at this crucial point that the conception of the spiritual life as essentially a Dynamism, a slow constitution of an ever fuller, deeper, more close-knit unity in, and by means of, the soul’s ineradicable trinity of forces, shows all its fruitfulness, if we but work down to a sufficiently large apprehension of the capacities and requirements of human nature, moved and aided by divine grace, and to a very precise delimitation of the special object and function of Mysticism.

1. Science and Religion: each autonomous at its own level; and, thus, each helpful to the other.

Erwin Rhode has well described Plato’s attitude towards Science and Mysticism respectively, and towards the question of their inter-relation. “The flight from the things of this World is, for Plato, already in itself an acquisition of those of the Beyond, and an assimilation to the Divine. For this poor world, that solicits our senses, the philosopher has, at bottom, nothing but negation. Incapable as it is of furnishing a material that can be truly known, the whole domain of the Transitory and Becoming has no intrinsic significance for Science as understood by him. The perception of things which are ever merely relative, and which simultaneously manifest contradictory qualities, has its sole use in stimulating and inviting the soul to press on to the Absolute.”[451]

Here we should frankly admit that the soul’s hunger for the Infinite is, as the great Athenian so deeply realized, the very mainspring of Religion; and yet we must maintain that it is precisely this single bound away, instead of the ever-repeated double movement of a coming and a going, which not only helped to suppress, or at least gravely to stunt, the growth of the sciences of external observation and experiment, but (and this is the special point,—the demonstrable other side of the medal,) also, in its degree, prevented religion from attaining to its true depth, by thus cutting off, as far as Plato’s conviction prevailed, the very material, stimulation, and in part the instruments, for the soul’s outgoing, spiritualizing work, together with this work’s profound reflex effect upon the worker, as a unique occasion for the growth and self-detachment of the soul.

Now the necessity for such a first stage and movement, which, as far as possible both immanental and phenomenalist, shall be applied and restricted to the special methods, direct objects, and precise range of each particular Science, and the importance of the safeguarding of this scientific liberty, are now clearly perceived, by the leading men of Religion, Philosophy, Psychology and Physics, in connection with the maintenance and acquisition of sincere and fruitful Science.—It is also increasingly seen that, even short of Religion, a second, an interpretative, an at least Philosophical stage and movement is necessary for the full explicitation of Science’s own assumptions and affinities. And the keeping of these two movements clearly distinct or even strongly contrasted, is felt, by some far-sighted Theologians, to be a help towards securing, not only a candid attitude of Science towards its own subject matters, but also a right independence of Philosophy and Theology towards the other Sciences. Thus Cardinal Newman has brought out, with startling force, the necessarily non-moral, non-religious character of Physico-Mathematical Science, taken simply within its direct subject-matter and method. “Physical science never travels beyond the examination of cause and effect. Its object is to resolve the complexity of phenomena into simple elements and principles; but when it has reached those first elements, principles and laws, its mission is at an end; it keeps within that material system with which it began, and never ventures beyond the ‘flammantia moenia mundi.’ The physicist as such will never ask himself by what influence, external to the universe, the universe is sustained; simply because he is a physicist. If, indeed, he be a religious man, he will, of course, have a very different view of the subject; … and this, not because physical science says anything different, but simply because it says nothing at all on the subject, nor can do by the very undertaking with which it set out.” Or, as he elsewhere sympathetically sums up Bacon’s method of proceeding: “The inquiry into physical causes passes over for the moment the existence of God. In other words, physical science is, in a certain sense, atheistic, for the very reason that it is not theology.”[452]

2. Science builds up a preliminary world that has to be corrected by Philosophy and Religion, at and for their deeper levels.

The additional experience and analysis of the last half-century apparently forces us, however, to maintain not only that Physico-Mathematical Science, and all knowledge brought strictly to the type of that Science, does not itself pronounce on the Ultimate Questions; but that this Science, as such, actually presents us with a picture of reality which, at the deeper level even of Epistemology and of the more ultimate Psychology, and still more at that of Religion, requires to be taken as more or less artificial, and as demanding, not simply completion, but, except for its own special purposes, correction as well. Thus we have seen how M. Bergson finds Clock-Time to be an artificial, compound concept, which seriously travesties Duration, the reality actually experienced by us; and Space appears as in even a worse predicament. M. Emil Boutroux in France, Dottore Igino Petrone in Italy, Profs. Eucken and Troeltsch in Germany, Profs. James Ward and Pringle Pattison in Great Britain, and Profs. William James, Hugo Münsterberg and Josiah Royce in America are, in spite of differences on other points, united in insistence upon, or have even worked out in much detail, such a distinction between the first stage and level of Determinist, Atomistic, Inorganic Nature and our concepts of it, and the second stage and level of Libertarian, Synthetic, and Organic Spiritual Reality, and our experience of it. And the penetrating labours of Profs. Windelband, Rickert, and others, towards building up a veritable Organon of the Historical Sciences, are bringing into the clearest relief these two several degrees of Reality and types of Knowledge, the Historical being the indefinitely deeper and more adequate, and the one which ultimately englobes the other.[453]

A profoundly significant current in modern philosophy will thus be brought, in part at least, to articulate expression and application. This current is well described by Prof. Volkelt. “German philosophy since Kant reveals, in manifold forms and under various disguises, the attempt to recognize, in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics, such kinds of Certainty, such domains of Being, such human Volitions and Values, as lie beyond reason, constitute a something that it cannot grasp, and are rooted in some other kind of foundation. In variously struggling, indeed stammering utterances, expression is given to the assurance that not everything in the world is resolvable into Logic and Thought, but that mighty resisting remainders are extant, which perhaps even constitute the most important thing in the world.… Such a longing after such a Reality can be traced in Hamann, Jacobi, Herder, in Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the youthful Schleiermacher, and Jean Paul. Indeed, even in Hegel, the adorer of Reason, the movement of Negation, which is the very soul of his philosophy, is, at bottom, nothing but the Irrational,” the Super-Rational, “element violently pressed into the form of Reason; and again the single Thing, the This, the Here and the Now, are felt by him as … a something beyond Reason. And has not the Irrational found expression in Kant, in his doctrines of the unconditional Liberty of the Will and of Radical Evil? In the later Schelling and his spiritual relatives the Irrational has found far more explicit recognition; whilst Schopenhauer brings the point to its fullest expression. Yet even Nietzsche still possesses such an element, in his doctrine of the ‘Over-Man.’”[454] And in England we find this same element, in various degrees and in two chief divergent forms, in the Cambridge Platonists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Hill Green on the one hand; and in Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman on the other hand.

We can thus point to much clear recognition, or at least to a considerable influence, of the profound truth that Science and Wisdom can each prosper and help and supplement the other, only if each possesses a certain real autonomy, a power fully to become and to remain itself, and, in various degrees and ways, to stimulate, check and thwart the other. And this truth ever presupposes, what human experience, in the long run, proves to be a fact,—that the different kinds, spheres, and levels of man’s apprehension, and of the total reality thus apprehended by him, are already immanently planned each for the other, within a great, largely dormant system of the world. Thus Man can and should call this congenital inter-relatedness into ever more vigorous and more fruitful play; whereas, if it were not already present deep within the very nature of things, no amount of human effort or ingenuity could ever evoke or insert it. Prof. Volkelt has, as we have seen, illustrated this great fact very strikingly, with regard to the relation extant between the apparently sheer contingencies of human History and the requirements of Philosophy, of normative thought and ideal truth. Yet a similar inter-connection can be traced elsewhere, between any other two or more levels and spheres of wholesome and permanent human apprehension and action, in their relation to various degrees and kinds of reality, as this environs man or inheres in him.

3. Necessity of the “Thing-element” in Religion.

But let us note that the recognition, of an at all emphatic, systematic kind, of such inter-relatedness is, so far, almost limited to the moods and persons preoccupied with the right claims of Science or of Philosophy upon each other or upon the remainder of Life; and is, as yet, all but wanting, when Life is approached from the side of the specifically Religious requirements and of the Spiritual consolidation of man’s soul. Yet here especially, at by far the most important point of the whole matter, the unique place and significance of Science can now be very clearly grasped.

Indeed it is deeply interesting to note how largely the fundamental characteristics of Catholicism really meet, or rather how they strictly require, some such vivid conception and vigorous use of the Determinist Thing and of its level for the full constitution of our true depth, our Spiritual Personality itself. If we take, e.g., the criticisms addressed, by so earnest and acute a mind as the intensely Protestant Emile Sulze, to the whole Thing-Element and -Concept, as these are at work in the Catholic practice and position, we shall find his sense of the difference between Thing and Spirit to be as enviably keen, and his idea of the end and ultimate measure of Religion to be as sound and deep, as his conception of the means towards developing Religion and the Spirit is curiously inadequate.

(1) “Personality,” says Sulze, “is, for Religion and Morality, the supreme Good, of which the source is in God, and the end, the fruit, and the manifestation is in Man.”[455] This I take to be profoundly true, especially if we insist upon Perfect Personality being Supreme and Perfect Spirit; and, again, upon our imperfect personality and spirit as possessed of certain profound affinities to, and as penetrable and actually moved by, that Perfect Spirit.

(2) “The value of Personality nowhere finds a full recognition in Catholicism; Catholicism indeed is Pantheism.” Now this harsh judgment is based upon two sets of allegations, which, though treated by Sulze as of the same nature, are, I would submit, essentially different, and this because of their definitely different places and functions in the Catholic system.

“The Impersonal Godhead, the bond which unites the three Persons, stands above the Persons. Hence those who took religion seriously had to lose themselves, pantheistically, in the abyss of the Divinity. And in Christ the Person was even looked upon as the product of two Natures, the Divine and the Human, hence of two Impersonal Forces.”[456] Here two peculiarities in the early Conciliar Definitions are emphasized, which were doubtless as helpful, indeed necessary, for the apprehension of the great abiding truths thus conveyed to the Graeco-Roman mind, as they are now in need of reinterpretation in the light of our greater sensitiveness to the difference, in character and in value, which obtains between the concept of Spirit and Personality and that of Substances and Things.

But Sulze continues, without any change in the kind or degree of his criticism: “Impersonal miraculous means, created by the Hierarchy, are put by it in the place of the sanctifying mutual intercourse of the children of God.” “Christianity, torn away from the religious and moral life, became thus a special, technical apparatus, without any religious or spiritual worth. Ecclesiastical Christianity has become a Pantheism, Materialism, indeed Atheism.”[457] We have so continuously ourselves insisted upon the profound danger, and frequently operative abuse, of any and all complete apartness between any one means, function, or attrait of the spiritual life and the others, that we can, without any unfairness, restrict ourselves here to the attack upon the general acceptation of Impersonal means as helps towards the constitution of Personality. Now Sulze’s principle here,—that only directly personal means can help to achieve the end of Personality,—is most undoubtedly false, unless Mathematico-Physical Science is also to be ruled out of life, as necessarily destructive of, or at least as necessarily non-conductive to, Personality.

(3) Indeed Sulze himself tells us, most truly, that, “for Religion also, Science is a bath of purification”; and that “Doctrine and the Sacraments are aids, in the hands of Christ and of the Community, towards representing the riches of their interior life and offering these to believing hearts.”[458] This latter pronouncement is, however, still clearly insufficient. For if there is a double truth which, at the end of well-nigh five centuries, ought to have burnt itself indelibly into the mind and conscience of us all, it is, surely, the following. On the one hand, Man, unless he develops a vigorous alternating counter-movement, ever grows like to the instruments of his labour and self-development, and hence, whilst busy with Things, (whether these be Natural Happenings and their Sciences, or Religious Institutions and Doctrines), he inclines to become, quite unawares, limited and assimilated to them,—himself thus a Thing among Things, instead of, through such various Things, winning an ever fuller apprehension of and growth in Spiritual Personality. Yet, on the other hand, without such a movement of close contact with the Thing, (both the intensely concrete, the Here and Now Contingency, and the profoundly Abstract, the stringent Universal Law) and without the pleasure and pain derived from the accompanying sense of contraction and of expansion, of contrast, conflict, supplementation and renovation,—there is no fullest discipline or most solid growth of the true spiritual Personality.

(4) Thus Science, as Sulze himself clearly sees, not merely aids us to represent and to communicate our personality acquired elsewhere, but the shock, friction, contrast, the slow, continuous discipline, far more, beyond doubt, than any positive content furnished by such science, can and should constitute an essential part of the soul’s spiritual fertilization. And similarly, if we move on into the directly religious life, the Sacramental contacts and Doctrinal systems (the former so intensely concrete, the latter often so abstract,) are not simply means towards representing and transmitting spirituality acquired elsewhere: but they are amongst the means, and, in some form and degree, the necessary, indeed actually universal means, towards the awakening and developing and fulfilling of this our spiritual personality.

4. Three possible relations between Thing and Thought, Determinism and Spirit.

It remains no doubt profoundly true that, with the awakening of the Mystical sense, will come a more or less acute consciousness of an at least superficial and preliminary, difference between this sense, with its specific habits and informations, and those means and forms, in part so contingent and external, in part so intensely abstract and yet so precise. But it is equally certain that such a soul, and at such a stage, even as it continues to require, in some respects more than ever, for its general balanced development, some of the irreplaceable discipline and manly, bracing humiliation of the close external observation and severe abstract generalization of Science: so also does it continue to require, for the deepening of the spirit and for the growth of creatureliness, the contact with religious Things,—the profoundly concrete Sacraments and the intensely abstract Doctrines of the religious community.

(1) In one of Trendelenburg’s most penetrating essays, he shows us how, between blind Force and conscious Thought,—if we presuppose any tendency towards unity to exist between them,—there can be but three possible relations. “Either Force stands before Thought, so that Thought is not the primitive reality, but the result and accident of blind Force; or Thought stands before Force, so that blind Force is not itself the primitive reality, but the effluence of Thought; or finally, Thought and Force are, at bottom, only one and the same thing, and differ only in our mind’s conception of them.” And only one of these three positions can, by any possibility, be the true one: hence their internecine conflict.[459]

(2) Now Religion, in its normal, central stream, stands most undoubtedly for Thought before Force, the second, the Theistic view. And yet it would be profoundly impoverishing for our outlook and practice, and would but prepare a dangerous reaction in ourselves or others, were we ever to ignore the immense influence, in the history, not only of philosophical speculation, but even of religious feeling and aspiration, not indeed of the first, the Materialist, view, (which owes all its strength to non-religious causes or to a rebound against religious excesses), but of the third, the Pantheistic, Monistic, view, whose classical exponent Spinoza will probably remain unto all time.

(3) If we examine into what constitutes the religious plausibility and power of this view, we shall find, I think, that it proceeds, above all, from the fact that, only too often, the second, the Theistic view and practice, leaves almost or quite out of sight the purification and slow constitution of the Individual into a Person, by means of the Thing-element, the apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law and Natural Happenings. Yet nothing can be more certain than that we must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive, element and power somewhere in our lives: if we will not own it as a means, it will grip us as our end. The unpurified, all but merely natural, animal, lustful and selfish individual man, is far too like to the brutes and plants, indeed even to the inorganic substances that so palpably surround him, for it not to be a fantastic thought to such thinkers as Spinoza, (and indeed it would be an excessive effort to himself,) to believe that he is likely, taken simply in this condition, to outlast, and is capable of dominating, the huge framework of the visible world, into which his whole bodily and psychical mechanism is placed, and to which it is bound by a thousand ties and closest similarities: his little selfish thinkings cannot but seem mere bubbles on a boundless expanse of mere matter; all creation cannot, surely, originate in, depend from, and move up to, a Mind and Spirit in any way like unto this trivial ingenuity.

(4) It is true, of course, that Spinoza ended,—as far as the logic of his system went,—by “purifying” away not only this animal Individualism, but Spiritual Personality as well, and this because he takes Mathematico-Physical concepts to be as directly applicable and as adequate to Ultimate Reality as are the Ethico-Spiritual categories. We have then to admit that even so rich and rare, so deeply religious a spirit as Spinoza could insist upon purification by the “preliminary Pantheism,” and yet could remain, in theory, the eager exponent of an ultimate Pantheism. Like the Greeks, he not only passes through a middle distance, a range of experience which appears dominated by austere Fate and blind Fortune, but finds Fate even in ultimate Reality. Whilst, however, the Greeks often thought of Fate as superior even to the Gods, Spinoza finds Ultimate Reality to be neither Nature nor Spirit, but simply Being in General, with a Law which is neither Natural nor Spiritual Law, but Law in general. This General Being and General Law then bifurcate, with the most rigorous determinism and complete impartiality, step by step, into parallel and ever co-present manifestations of Nature and of Spirit, and of their respective laws, which, though different, are also each strictly determined within their own series.[460]

(5) But Spinoza’s error here undoubtedly lies in his de facto violent bending (in spite of this theoretical Parallelism) of all Knowledge, Reality, and Life, under the sole Mathematico-Physical categories and method; and in the insistence upon attaining to ultimate Truth by one single bound and with complete adequacy and clearness. And the greatness here consists in the keen and massive sense of three profound truths. He never forgets that Mathematico-Physical Science is rigidly determinist, and that it stands for a certain important truth and penetrates to a certain depth of reality. He never ceases to feel how impure, selfish, petty is the natural man, and how pure, disinterested, noble, can and should be the spiritual personality. And he never lets go the sense that, somehow, that science must be able to help towards this purification.

(6) Now these three truths must be preserved, whilst the Mathematico-Physical one-sidedness and the “one-step” error must be carefully eliminated. And indeed it is plain that only by such elimination can those truths operate within a fully congenial system. For only thus, with a dissimilarity between the Ultimate, Libertarian, Spiritual Reality, and the Intermediate, Determinist, Physico-Mathematical Range, can we explain and maintain the pain, not only of the selfish but also of the true self, in face the Mere Thing; and only thus is all such pain and trouble worth having, since only thus it leads to the fuller development and the solid constitution of an abiding, interior, mental and volitional Personality.

5. Purification of the Personality by the impersonal.

Prof. H. J. Holtzmann has got an eloquent page concerning the kind of Dualism which is more than ever desirable for souls, if they would achieve a full and virile personality in this our day. “It would appear to be the wiser course for us to recognize the incompatibility between merely natural existence and truly personal life, just as it is, in its whole acute non-reconciliation; to insert this conflict into our complete outlook on to Life in its full breadth and depth, and to find the harmonization in God the Infinite, in whom alone such parallels can meet, and not deliberately to blind our right eye or our left, in order to force that outlook into one single aspect,—a degree of unification which, when achieved in this violent manner, would mean for us, at the same time, a point of absolute inertia, of eternal stagnation.” And he then shows how it is precisely the interaction within our minds, feelings, and volitions, of, on the one hand, the boundless world of nature, with its majestic impersonality, and on the other hand, the inexhaustible, indefinitely deeper realm of personal life, as it appears within the stream of human history, which is best adapted to give us some fuller glimpses of the greatness of God and of the specific character of religion.[461]

The religious imagination, mind, heart, and will,—that is to say, the complete, fully normal human being at his deepest,—has thus been more and more forced, by an increasingly articulated experience of the forces and requirements of actual life, to hold and to practise, with ever-renewed attempts at their most perfect inter-stimulation and mutual supplementation, a profoundly costing, yet immensely fruitful, trinity in unity of convictions on this point.

In every time, place, and race, man will continue to be or to become religious, in proportion to his efficacious faith in, and love of, the overflowing reality and worth of the great direct objects of religion,—God and the soul, and their inter-relation in and through the Kingdom of God, the Church, and its Divine-Human Head,—the whole constituting God’s condescension towards and immanence in man, and man’s response and orientation towards the transcendent God.

And again, in every age, place, and race, man will be or will become deeply religious, in proportion to the keenness with which he realizes the immense need of spiritual growth and purification for his, at best, but inchoate personality.

But,—and this third point we must admit, in the precise extension and application given to it here, to be characteristically modern,—man will, (if he belongs to our time and to our Western races, and is determined fully to utilize our special circumstances, lights and trials, as so many means towards his own spiritualization), have carefully to keep in living touch with that secondary and preliminary reality, the Thing-world, the Impersonal Element, Physical Science and Determinist Law. He will have to pass and repass beneath these Caudine forks; to plunge and to replunge into and through this fiery torrent; and, almost a merely animal individual at the beginning and on this side of such docile bendings and such courageous plungings, he will, (if he combines them with, and effects them through, those two other, abiding and ultimate, directly religious convictions), straighten himself up again to greater heights, and will come forth from the torrent each time a somewhat purer and more developed spiritual person than he was before such contraction and purgation.

6. This position new for Science, not for Religion.

Yet even this third point has, if we will but look to its substantial significance and religious function, been equivalently held and practised ever since the Twice-Born life, the deeper religion, has been lived at all.

(1) The Ascetic’s self-thwarting, and the Mystic’s self-oblivion and seeking after Pure Love, what are they but the expressions of the very same necessities and motives which we would wish to see fully operative here? For we are not, of course, here thinking of anything simply intellectual, and fit only for the educated few. Any poor laundry-girl, who carefully studies and carries out the laws of successful washing, who moves, in alternation, away from this concentration on the Thing, to recollection and increasingly affective prayer and rudimentary contemplation, and who seeks the fuller growth of her spirit and of its union with God, in this coming and going, to and from the Visible and Contingent, to and from the Spiritual and Infinite, and in what these several levels have of contrast and of conflict; or any lowly farm-labourer or blacksmith or miner, who would proceed similarly with his external determinist mechanical work, and with his deeply internal requirements and spiritual growth and consolidation: would all be carrying out precisely what is here intended.

(2) As a matter of fact, the source of such novelty, as may be found here, is not on the side of religion, but on that of science. For the conception of Nature of the ancient Greek Physicists, and indeed that of Aristotle, required to be profoundly de-humanized, de-sentimentalized: a rigorous mathematical Determinism and soulless Mechanism became the right and necessary ideal of Physical Science. But, long before the elaboration of this concept of the ruthless Thing, and of its blind Force, Our Lord had, by His Life and Teaching, brought to man, with abidingly unforgettable, divine depth and vividness, the sense of Spirit and Personality, with its liberty and interiority, its far-looking wisdom and its regenerating, creative power of love. And for some thirteen centuries after this supreme spiritual revelation and discovery, that old anthropomorphic and anthropocentric conception of the Physical Universe continued, well-nigh unchanged, even among the earlier and middle schoolmen, and was readily harmonized with that Spiritual world. Yet they were harmonized, upon the whole, by a juxtaposition which, in proportion as the conception of Nature became Determinist and Mechanical, has turned out more and more untenable; and which, like all simple juxtapositions, could not, as such, have any spiritually educative force. But Spiritual Reality has now,—for those who have become thoroughly awake to the great changes operated, for good and all, in man’s conception of the Physical Universe during now three centuries,—to be found under, behind, across these Physical Phenomena and Laws, which both check and beckon on the mind and soul of man, in quest of their ultimate mainstay and motivation.

(3) And let us note how much some such discipline and asceticism is required by the whole Christian temper and tradition, and the weakening of some older forms of it.

During the first three generations Christians were profoundly sobered by the keen expectation of Our Lord’s proximate Second Coming, and of the end of the entire earthly order of things, to which all their natural affections spontaneously clung; and again and again, up to well-nigh the Crusading Age, this poignant and yet exultant expectation seized upon the hearts of Christians. And then, especially from St. Augustine’s teaching onwards, an all-pervading, frequently very severe, conviction as to the profound effects of Original Sin, a pessimistic turning away from the future of this sublunar world, as leading up to the great Apostacy, and a concentration upon Man’s prehistoric beginnings, as incomparably eclipsing all that mankind would ever achieve here below, came and largely took the place, as the sobering, detaching element in Christianity, of the vivid expectation of the Parousia which had characterized the earlier Christian times.

Clearly, the Parousia and the Original Sin conception have ceased to exercise their old, poignantly detaching power upon us. Yet we much require some such special channel and instrument for the preservation and acquisition of the absolutely essential temper of Detachment and Other-Worldiness. I think that this instrument and channel of purification and detachment—if we have that thirst for the More and the Other than all things visible can give to our souls, (a thirst which the religious sense alone can supply and without which we are religiously but half-awake)—is offered to us now by Science, in the sense and for the reasons already described.

7. Three kinds of occupation with Science.

Let the reader note that thus, and, I submit, thus only, we can and do enlist the religious passion itself on the side of disinterested, rightly autonomous science. For thus the harmony between the different aspects and levels of life is not, (except for our general faith in its already present latent reality, and in its capacity for ultimate full realization and manifestation), the static starting-point or automatically persisting fact in man’s life; but it is, on the contrary, his ever difficult, never completely realized goal,—a goal which can be reached only by an even greater transformation within the worker than within the materials worked upon by him,—a transformation in great part effected by the enlargement and purification, incidental to the inclusion of that large range of Determinist Thing-laws and experiences within the Spirit’s Libertarian, Personal life.

It is plain that there are three kinds and degrees of occupation with Things and Science, and with their special level of truth and reality; and that in proportion as their practice within, and in aid of, the spiritual life is difficult, in the same proportion, (given the soul’s adequacy to this particular amount of differentiation and pressure)—is this practice purifying. And though but few souls will be called to any appreciable amount of activity within the third degree, all souls can be proved, I think, to require a considerable amount of the first two kinds, whilst mankind at large most undoubtedly demands careful, thorough work of all three sorts.

The first kind is that of the man with a hobby. His directly religious acts and his toilsome bread-winning will thus get relieved and alternated by, say, a little Botany or a little Numismatics, or by any other “safe” science, taken in a “safe” dose, in an easy, dilettante fashion, for purposes of such recreation. This kind is already in fairly general operation, and is clearly useful in its degree and way, but it has, of course, no purificatory force at all.

The second kind is that of the man whose profession is some kind of science which has, by now, achieved a more or less secure place alongside of, or even within, religious doctrines and feelings,—such as Astronomy or Greek Archaeology. Here the purification will be in proportion to the loyal thoroughness with which he fully maintains, indeed develops, the special characteristics and autonomy both of these Sciences, as the foreground, part-material and stimulation, and of Religion, as the groundwork, background and ultimate interpreter and moulder of his complete and organized life; and with which he makes each contribute to the development of the other and of the entire personality, its apprehensions and its work. This second kind is still comparatively rare, doubtless, in great part, because of the considerable cost and the lifelong practice and training involved in what readily looks like a deliberate complicating and endangering of things, otherwise, each severally, simple and safe.

And the third kind is that of him whose systematic mental activity is devoted to some science or research, which is still in process of winning full and peaceful recognition by official Theology,—say, Biological Evolution or Biblical Criticism. Here the purification will, for a soul capable of such a strain, be at its fullest, provided such a soul is deeply moved by, and keeps devotedly faithful to, the love of God and of man, of humble labour and of self-renouncing purification, and, within this great ideal and determination, maintains and ameliorates with care the methods, categories and tests special both to these sciences and investigations, and to their ultimate interpretation and utilization in the philosophy and life of religion. For here there will, as yet, be no possibility of so shunting the scientific activity on to one side, or of limiting it to a carefully pegged-out region, as to let Religion and Science energize as forces of the same kind and same level, the same clearness and same finality; but the Science will here have to be passed through, as the surface-level, on the way to Religion as underlying all. What would otherwise readily tend to become, as it were, a mental Geography, would thus here give way to what might be pictured as a spiritual Geology.