the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all
times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which
is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or
rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of
fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some
form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and
also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience,
whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as
effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most
readily understand and respond to it.


Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of
analysis, can only say: "The soul knows when in that state that it is in
the presence of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, does he
not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful
longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of
Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying "More than all
else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless
life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known
that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious
experience, in so far as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is
only of course in a limited and relative sense. The subjective element,
all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and
control it. Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an
independent objective Reality. This experience is more real and
concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which
theology seeks to explain it. We may then take it, without prejudice to
any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is _one
life_; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the