CONCLUSION
WHEREIN LIES THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL PERSUASIVENESS
But let us first conclude this volume by attempting an answer, however preliminary and general, to the definite question with which it opened out.
I. The Question.
We asked there, how any deeper, will-moving intercommunication can even be possible amongst men? For the mere possession of, and appeal to, the elementary forms of abstract thinking, which seem to be our only certain common material, instrument and measure of persuasion, appear never, of themselves, to move the will, or indeed the feelings; whereas all that is endowed with such directly will-moving power appears, not only as specifically concrete and as hopelessly boxed up within the four corners of our mutually exclusive individualities, but also as vitiated, even for each several owner, by an essentially fitful and fanciful subjectivity.
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.