What are we to regard as the heart of spirituality? When we have
eliminated the accidental characters with which varying traditions have
endowed it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its
possessor from the best, most moral citizen or devoted altruist? Why do
the Christian saint, Indian _rishi,_ Buddhist _arhat,_ Moslem _S[=u]fi,_
all seem to us at bottom men of one race, living under different
sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact? This life, which they show
in its various perfections, includes it is true the ethical life, but
cannot be equated with it. Wherein do its differentia consist? We are
dealing with the most subtle of realities and have only the help of
crude words, developed for other purposes than this. But surely we come
near to the truth, as history and experience show it to us, when we say
again that the spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest
beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life that means God in all
His richness, immanent and transcendent: the whole response to the
Eternal and Abiding of which any one man is capable, expressed in and
through his this-world life. It requires then an objective vision or
certitude, something to aim at; and also a total integration of the
self, its dedication to that aim. Both terms, vision and response, are
essential to it.

This definition may seem at first sight rather dull. It suggests little
of that poignant and unearthly beauty, that heroism, that immense
attraction, which really belong to the spiritual life. Here indeed we
are dealing with poetry in action: and we need not words but music to
describe it as it really is. Yet all the forms, all the various beauties
and achievements of this life of the Spirit, can be resumed as the
reactions of different temperaments to the one abiding and inexhaustibly
satisfying Object of their love. It is the answer made by the whole
supple, plastic self, rational and instinctive, active and