love? that is to say with diligence and faithful purpose, without
selfish anxiety, without selfish demands and hostilities? What about the
hurried, ugly and devitalizing existence of our big towns? Can we
honestly say that young people reared in them are likely to acquire this
temper of heaven? Yet we have been given the secret, the law of
spiritual life; and psychologists would agree that it represents too the
most favourable of conditions for a full psychic life, the state in
which we have access to all our sources of power.

But man will not achieve this state unless he dwells on the idea of it;
and, dwelling on that idea, opening his mind to its suggestions, brings
its modes of expression into harmony with his thought about the world of
daily life. Our spiritual life to-day, such as it is, tends above all to
express itself in social activities. Teacher after teacher comes forward
to plume himself on the fact that Christianity is now taking a "social
form"; that love of our neighbour is not so much the corollary as the
equivalent of the love of God, and so forth. Here I am sure that all can
supply themselves with illustrative quotations. Yet is there in this
state of things nothing but food for congratulation? Is such a view
complete? Is nothing left out? Have we not lost the wonder and poetry of
the forest in our diligent cultivation of the economically valuable
trees; and shall we ever see life truly until we see it with the poet's
eyes? There is so much meritorious working and willing; and so little
time left for quiet love. A spiritual fussiness--often a material
fussiness too--seems to be taking the place of that inward resort to the
fontal sources of our being which is the true religious act, our chance
of contact with the Spirit. This compensating beat of the fully lived
human life, that whole side of existence resumed in the word
contemplation, has been left out. "All the artillery of the world," said
John Everard, "were they all discharged together at one clap, could not