into the supersensual ground, without destroying nature?"[3] And such a
coming through into the ground, such a finding and feeling of Eternal
Life, is I take it the central business of religion. For religion is
committed to achieving a synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting,
of nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to a greater
reality, because a greater participation in eternity. Such a
participation in eternity, manifested in the time-world, is the very
essence of the spiritual life: but, set as we are in mutability, our
apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative. Absolutes are
known only to absolute mind; our measurements, however careful and
intricate, can never tally with the measurements of God. As Einstein
conceives of space curved round the sun we, borrowing his symbolism for
a moment, may perhaps think of the world of Spirit as curved round the
human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, and therefore presenting
to us innumerable angles of approach. This means that God can and must
be sought only within and through our human experience. "Where," says
Jacob Boehme, "will you seek for God? Seek Him in your soul, which has
proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living fountain of forces
wherein the Divine working stands."[4]

But, on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for
agnosticism. For this our human experience in its humbling imperfection,
however we interpret it, is as real within its own system of reference
as anything else. It is our inevitably limited way of laying hold on the
stuff of existence: and not less real for that than the monkeys' way on
one hand, or the angels' way on the other. Only we must be sure that we
do it as thoroughly and completely as we can; disdaining the indolence
which so easily relapses to the lower level and the smaller world.

And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call