ld 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
the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all
times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which
is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or
rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of
fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some
form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and
also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience,
whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as
effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most
readily understand and respond to it.

Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of
analysis, can only say: "The soul knows when in that state that it is in
the presence of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, does he
not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful
longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of
Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying "More than all
else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless
life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known
that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious
experience, in so far as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is
only of course in a limited