anding purity: because the storehouse of
ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter,
is free from conflicting desires and images, perfectly controlled by
this feeling-tone.

It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports, from
the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic
overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral
purgation, as the beginning of all personal spiritual life. Man does
not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher
levels of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard; complexes of
which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces
which they enchain. He must, then, examine without flinching his
impulsive life, and know what is in his heart, before he is in a
position to change it. "The light which shows us our sins," says George
Fox, "is the light that heals us." All those repressed cravings, those
quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust
into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the
surface and, in the language of psychology, "abreacted"; in the language
of religion, confessed. The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges
on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of
repressing it. The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the
hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their
elements brought up into consciousness and faced: and only the self
which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.
It is a process of spiritual hygiene.

Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the
cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives,
of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge. But
the emotional colour of this process when it is undertaken in the full
conviction of the power and holiness of that life-force which we have
not used as well as we might, and with a humble and loving consciousness
of our deficiency, our falling short, will be totally different from the
feeling state of those who conceive themselves to be searching for the
merely animal sources of their mental and spiritual life. "Meekness in
itself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing," "is naught else but a true
knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is. For surely whoso might
verily see and feel himself as he is, he should veril