conceptions to birth; the powers of resistance displayed by George Fox
and other Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slessor living and working
bare-foot and bare-headed under the tropical sun, disdaining the use of
mosquito nets, eating native food, and taking with impunity daily risks
fatal to the average European.[75] It shows us, too, why the great
heroes of the spiritual life so seldom think out their positions, or
husband their powers. They act because they are impelled: often in
defiance of all prudent considerations! yet commonly with an amazing
success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by "the impulses
and urgings of an undying ambition" to save souls. What was this impulse
and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a
sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced
will determine its value for life; but its character is much the same in
the convert at a revival, in the postulant's vivid sense of vocation and
consequent break with the world? in the disinterested man of science
consecrated to the search for truth, and in the apostle's self-giving to
the service of God, with its answering gift of new strength and
fruitfulness. Its secret, and indeed the secret of all transcendence is
implied In the direction of the old English mystic: "Mean God all, all
God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God,"[76]
The over-belief, the religious formula in which this instinctive
passion is expressed, is comparatively unimportant The revivalist,
wholly possessed by concrete and anthropomorphic ideas of God which are
impossible to a man of different--and, as we suppose,
superior--education, can yet, because of the burning reality with which
he lives towards the God so strangely conceived, infect those with whom
he comes in contact with the spiritual life.

We are now in a position to say that the first necessity of the life of
the Spirit is the sublimation of the instinctive life, involving the