II. The Answer.
Now I think that even the survey of the three great lives, and of those four minor ones, which has been just attempted, forcibly suggests, both positively and negatively, at least the general outlines of the true answer to this pressing question.
1. Only a life sufficiently large and alive to take up and retain, within its own experimental range, at least some of the poignant question and conflict, as well as of the peace-bringing solution and calm: hence a life dramatic with a humble and homely heroism which, in rightful contact with and in rightful renunciation of the Particular and Fleeting, ever seeks and finds the Omnipresent and Eternal; and which again deepens and incarnates (for its own experience and apprehension and for the stimulation of other souls) this Transcendence in its own thus gradually purified Particular: only such a life can be largely persuasive, at least for us Westerns and in our times.
We would thus have an attempt, ever renewed, ever widening, ever deepening, at the formation of, as it were, a concrete, living, breathing image of the Abiding and the One; of Law, Love, and Duty; of God: an image formed out of the seemingly shifting, shrinking flux, and the apparently shapeless mass of our actual, bewildering human manyfold; our flesh and sweat, and tears and blood, our joy and laughter, our passions and petty revolts, our weariness and isolations. Attend primarily to minimizing or eliminating all such friction and pain; to being clear, materially simple and static, a fixed Thing, rather than vivid, formally unified, and dynamic, a growing Personality: or again, let the friction be so great, or the courage and fidelity so small, as to lead to the break-up of all genuine recollection and harmonization; and, in the former case, such a character or outlook may be considered “safe” or “correct” or “sensible”; and, in the latter, the character and outlook will not be consolidated at all, or will be breaking up: but in neither case will the life be persuasive. For to be truly winning, the soul’s life must become and must keep itself full and true.
2. Now it is simply false that man can, even for his own self alone, hold spiritual reality, even from the first, in a simply passive, purely dependent, entirely automatic and painless fashion; or that he can, even at the last, possess it in a full, continuous and effortless harmony and simultaneousness.
God no doubt holds all Truth and Reality as one great Here and Now, or rather He possesses them entirely outside of space and time; nor can we attribute to Him directly any interior conflict, effort, or suffering. And, again, we ourselves too possess within our minds an element and an apprehension of the Abiding and the Simultaneous; and their rudiments operate within us, if all-diffusively yet most powerfully, from the very first. Indeed the continuous increase in definiteness and influence of that element and of its apprehension here, and the indefinite expansion and continuously conscious possession of this same element hereafter, are respectively the highest aim and fullest achievement of our spiritual life. And finally, the further the soul advances, the more it sees and realizes the profound truth, that all it does and is, is somehow given to it; and hence that, inasmuch as it is permanent at all, it is grounded upon, environed, supported, penetrated and nourished by Him who is its origin and its end. Here all the soul’s actions tend to coalesce to simply being, and this being, in so far as there and then acceptable to the conscience, comes more and more to be felt and considered as the simple effect of the one direct action of God alone.
And yet as to God, some kind and degree of Incarnational doctrine is necessary, and is indeed (in varyingly perfect or imperfect forms) the common property of all higher religion; and Christians have learnt to think the profound thought, of God Himself being in a mysterious closeness to even our most secret perplexities and inarticulate pain.—And by ourselves, poor weaklings, that vast, continuous Simultaneity and Harmony of God can only be more and more nearly approached, if, upon our mostly shadowy, and (when at all clear) our short-lived consciousness of an inchoate simultaneity and harmony of our own, we work an orderly successiveness, and attempt a Melody: an humble, creaturely imitation of the Eternal, Spaceless Creator, under the deliberately accepted conditions and doubly refracting media of time and space. Real temptation, true piercing conflict, heavy darkness, and bewildering perplexity; the constant encountering (as a necessary condition and occasion of all growth) of numberless and multiform remoter risks of failing and of falling: all this forms an essential part of this painful-joyous probation and virile, because necessarily costing and largely gradual, self-constitution of man’s free-willing spirit.
And the place and function, in all this spiritual growth-in-conflict, of Science, both in its most determinist and apparently most anti-spiritual mood, and in its subtler though no less destructive-seeming attitudes, will turn out, we shall find,—now that our generation is getting to know Science’s special scope and implications,—to be of simply irreplaceable value and potency.
And though, in the other life, our earthly pain and temptation are to be no more, we may be sure that, even there, the essential characteristics of our nature will not be reversed. Hence we may be able, later on in this book, to hazard some not all-ungrounded conjecture as to the possible substitute and form in Heaven for what is essentially noble and creaturely in our sufferings and self-renunciations here on earth.
And lastly, though God’s action in all things in general, and in our individual soul in particular, be more and more recognized as all-pervasive in proportion as the soul advances: yet this action will have to be conceived as operating in and through and with our own; as in each case finding, in one sense, its very matter, in another, its very form, in our own free-willings. For Spirit and spirit, God and the creature, are not two material bodies, of which one can only be where the other is not: but, on the contrary, as regards our own spirit, God’s Spirit ever works in closest penetration and stimulation of our own; just as, in return, we cannot find God’s Spirit simply separate from our own spirit within ourselves. Our spirit clothes and expresses His; His Spirit first creates and then sustains and stimulates our own. The two, as regards the inner life of the human soul, rise and sink together. But more as to this too hereafter.
3. We shall indeed, throughout the next volume, have ample opportunities for noting how numerous, definite, far-reaching and at all times operative, even though still but partially unfolded, are the evidences for, and the consequences and applications of, such a fundamental conception, as they are furnished and required by all deeper human life; hence, above all, by Religion; and in Religion, again, specially by its ever largely elusive, yet ever profoundly important, constituent, the Mystical Element.