contemplative, to any or all of those objective experiences of religion
which we considered in the first chapter; whether of an encompassing
and transcendent Reality, of a Divine Companionship or of Immanent
Spirit. Such a response we must believe to be itself divinely actuated.
Fully made, it is found on the one hand to call forth the most heroic,
most beautiful, most tender qualities in human nature; all that we call
holiness, the transfiguration of mere ethics by a supernatural
loveliness, breathing another air, satisfying another standard, than
those of the temporal world. And on the other hand, this response of the
self is repaid by a new sensitiveness and receptivity, a new influx of
power. To use theological language, will is answered by grace: and as
the will's dedication rises towards completeness the more fully does new
life flow in. Therefore it is plain that the smallest and humblest
beginning of such a life in ourselves--and this inquiry is useless
unless it be made to speak to our own condition--will entail not merely
an addition to life, but for us too a change in our whole scale of
values, a self-dedication. For that which we are here shown as a
possible human achievement is not a life of comfortable piety, or the
enjoyment of the delicious sensations of the armchair mystic. We are
offered, it is true, a new dower of life; access to the full
possibilities of human nature. But only upon terms, and these terms
include new obligations in respect of that life; compelling us, as it
appears, to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual refusal to
sink back into the next-best, to slide along a gentle incline. The
spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe
distance from the Fire of Love. It demands, indeed, very often things so
hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman: immensely
generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant
purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means a complete conquest of life's
perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance