thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their
consciousness of direct communion with God. I need not point out how
easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and
Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their
characteristic experience. "Blessed is that soul," says à Kempis, "that
heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of
consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and
take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the
Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the
most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such
a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate
presence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the
contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as
it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude
thrown open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have
already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.

Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the
experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather
than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the
material. Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it
is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in
those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of
those experiences. But many minds are, as it were, their own religious
artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to
their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes
be for them that--to revert again to our original simile--the self turns
from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the
time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the
room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this