happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious
day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout
people who tend to visualization have probably known. When the break
with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in
which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.
The Bible is full of examples of this. Good historic instances are the
visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first
contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and
emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the
visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this
type.[97]

I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme
types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is
with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may
live it. But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within
limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is
inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is
neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as
superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our
neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic world of traditional
piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial
heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than
the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy. We may be sure
that both are more characteristic of the image-making and
structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate
and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value--or the value of
any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived--abides wholly in
the content: the quality of the material thus worked up. The rich
nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will