and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And
it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power,
of beauty which are contained in them.

And if the first type of experience, with the immense feeling of
assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive
contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the "world that is
unwalled,"[21] and from the mind's utter surrender and abolition of
resistances--if all this seems to lead to a merely static or
contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of
experience, with its impulse towards action, its often strongly felt
accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and
dynamic interpretation of that life. Indeed, if the first moment in the
life of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal Life, the second
moment--without which the first has little worth for him--consists of
his response to that transcendent Reality. Perception of it lays on him
the obligation of living in its atmosphere, fulfilling its meaning, if
he can: and this will involve for him a measure of inward
transformation, a difficult growth and change. Thus the ideas of new
birth and regeneration have always been, and I think must ever be,
closely associated with man's discovery of God: and the soul's true path
seems to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral effort, and