the Godhead," "enters His silence" or exclaims with Dante:

"la mia vista, venendo sincera,
e più e più entrava per lo raggio
dell' alta luce, che da sè è vera."[8]

But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the
relationship is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of
a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the
great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while
doubtless including in its span all the values we associate with
personality, must far overpass it: and this conclusion has been reached
again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians
we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of
finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a
prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and
emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to
God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is
significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of
rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus
we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox
Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing--

"I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself
suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself
at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in
choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no