This linking up of the devotional life with the instinct for beauty and wonder, will check its concentration on the more sentimental and anthropomorphic aspects of religion; and so discourage that religious emotionalism which wise educationalists rightly condemn. Hence these two ways of approach, merged as they should be into one, can bring the self into that simple kind of contemplation which is a normal birthright of every soul, but of which our defective education deprives so many men and women; who cannot in later life quicken those faculties which have been left undeveloped in youth. As logic is a supreme exercise of the mind, so contemplation is a supreme exercise of the spirit: it represents the full activity of that intuitional faculty which is our medium of contact with absolute truth. Before the inevitable smile appears on the face of the reader, I say at once that I am not suggesting that we should teach young children contemplation; though I am sure that many brought up in a favouring atmosphere naturally practise it long before they know the meaning of the word. But I do suggest that we should bring them up in such a way that their developed spirits might in the end acquire this art, without any more sense of break with the normal than that which is felt by the developed mind when it acquires the art of logic.
What is contemplation? It is attention to the things of the spirit: surely no outlandish or alarming practice, foreign to the general drift of human life. Were we true to our own beliefs, it should rather be our central and supremely natural activity; the way in which we turn to the spiritual world, and pick up the messages it sends to us. That world is always sending us messages of liberation, of hope, and of peace. Are we going to deprive our children of this unmeasured heritage, this extension of life—perhaps the greatest of the rights of man—or leave their enjoyment of it to some happy chance? We cannot read the wonderful records of the spiritually awakened without a sense of the duty that is laid on us, to develop if we can this spiritual consciousness in the generation that is to be.
All great spiritual literature is full of invitations to a newness of life, a great change of direction; which shall at last give our human faculties a worthy objective and redeem our consciousness from its present concentration upon unreal interests. It urges us perpetually, as a practical counsel, as something which is within human power and has already been achieved by the heroes of the race, to “put on the new man”; to “bring to birth the Son of God in the soul.” But humanity as a whole has never responded to that invitation, and therefore its greatest possibilities are still latent. We, the guardians of the future, by furnishing to each emerging consciousness committed to our care such an apperceiving mass as shall enable it to discern the messages of reality, may do something to bring those possibilities into manifestation.
THE PLACE OF WILL, INTELLECT AND FEELING IN PRAYER
The psychology of religious experience, as yet so little understood, has few more important problems proposed to it than that which concerns the true place and right use of will, intellect, and feeling in prayer. This question, which to some may appear merely academic, really involves the whole problem of the method and proportion in which the various powers and activities of our being may best be used, when they turn from the natural world of concrete things to attend to the so-called “supernatural” world of Spirit—in fact, to God, Who is the source and sum of the reality of that world. That problem must be of practical interest to every Christian—more, to every one who believes in the spiritual possibilities of man—for it concerns itself with all those responses which are made by human personality to the impact of Infinite Life. It deals, in Maeterlinck’s words, with “the harshest and most uninhabitable headlands of the Divine ‘know thyself,’” and includes in its span the whole region “where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God.”
In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely just this: that part of our active and conscious life which is deliberately orientated towards, and exclusively responds to, spiritual reality. The Being of God, Who is that spiritual reality, we believe to be immanent in all things: “He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.” In fact, as Christians we must believe this. Therefore in attending to those visible and concrete things, we are in a way attending to that immanent God; and in this sense all honest work is indeed, as the old proverb says, a sort of prayer. But when we speak of prayer as a separate act or activity of the self, we mean more than this. We mean, in fact, as a rule the other aspect of spiritual experience and communion; in the language of theology, attention to transcendent rather than to immanent Reality. Prayer, says Walter Hilton, in terms of which the origin goes back to the Neoplatonists, “is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God, by withdrawing it from all earthly thoughts”—an ascent, says Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law defines it as “the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity.” It entails, then, a going up or out from our ordinary circle of earthly interests; a cutting off, so far as we may, of “the torrent of use and wont,” that we may attend to the changeless Reality which that flux too often hides. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of things; but rather to that “Eternal truth, true Love, and loved Eternity” wherein the world is felt to be enshrined; and in this act it brings to full circle the activities of the human soul—that
“Swinging-wicket set between
The Unseen and the Seen.”
The whole of man’s life really consists in a series of balanced responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality; because man lives under two orders, is at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time. Like a pendulum, his consciousness moves perpetually—or should move if it be healthy—between God and his neighbour, between this world and that. The wholeness, sanity, and balance of his existence will entirely depend upon the perfection of his adjustment to this double situation; on the steady alternating beat of his outward swing of adoration, his homeward-turning swing of charity. Now, it is the outward swing which we are to consider: the powers that may be used in it, the best way in which these powers may be employed.
First, we observe that those three capacities or faculties which we have under consideration—the thinking faculty, the feeling faculty, the willing or acting faculty—practically cover all the ways in which the self can react to other selves and other things. From their combination come all the possibilities of self-expression which are open to man. In his natural life he needs and uses all of them. Shall he need and use all of them in his spiritual life too? Christians, I think, are bound to answer this question in the affirmative. According to Christianity, it is the whole self which is called to turn towards Divine Reality—to enter the Kingdom—not some supposed “spiritual” part thereof. “Thou hast made us for Thyself,” said Augustine; not, as the Orphic initiate would have said, “Thou hast made one crumb out of our complex nature for Thyself, and the rest may go on to the rubbish heap.” It is the whole man of intellect, of feeling, and of will, which finds its only true objective in the Christian God.