of one Power: "a Reality which both underlies and crowns all
our other, lesser strivings."[1] Variously manifested in partial
achievements of order and goodness, in diversities of beauty, and in our
graded apprehensions of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us
in the transcendent values of holiness and love. The more deeply it is
loved by man, the nearer he draws to its heart: and the greater his
love, the more fully does he experience its transforming and energizing
power. The words of Plotinus are still true for every one of us, and are
unaffected by the presence or absence of creed:

"Yonder is the true object of our love, which it is possible to grasp
and to live with and truly to possess, since no envelope of flesh
separates us from it. He who has seen it knows what I say, that the soul
then has another life, when it comes to God, and having come possesses
Him, and knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the
dispenser of true life and that it needs nothing further."[2]

So, if we would achieve anything like a real integration of life--and
until we have done so, we are bound to be restless and uncertain in our
touch upon experience--we are compelled to press back towards contact
with this living Reality, however conceived by us. And this not by way
of a retreat from our actual physical and mental life, but by way of a
fulfilment of it.

More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the
searching question of the disciple in Boehme's Dialogue on the
Supersensual Life: "Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature
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 wor