first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the
direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in
which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast
setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of
the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and
which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard,
conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and
higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true
self-conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness,
reality and worth.

"Oh, Academicus," says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would
endorse, "forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a
plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that
there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth
of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives
within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have
in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and
rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a
wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a
sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only
restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall
offer."[72] Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild
beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find
the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert
turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to
save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work
of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been
directed into a fresh channel of use.