in and again in
spiritual literature. This certitude of a principle of permanence within
and beyond our world of change--the sense of Eternal Life--lies at the
very centre of the religious consciousness; which will never on this
point capitulate to the attacks of philosophy on the one hand (such as
those of the New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, assuring
him that what he mistakes for the Eternal World is really his own
unconscious mind. Here man, at least in his great representatives--the
persons of transcendent religious genius--seems to get beyond all
labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that
satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that
transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art.
If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever
its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived,
as George Fox was so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know
the great passage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes
how "the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never
changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence."[7] There is
nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend
on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as
fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine
and discipline of Christian prayer have always admitted its validity.

Here and in many other examples which might be quoted, the spiritual
fact is interpreted in a non-personal and cosmic way; and we must
remember that what is described to us is always, inevitably, the more or
less emotional interpretation, never the pure immediacy of experience.
This interpretation frequently makes use of the symbolisms of space,
stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is "lost in the ocean of
the Godhead," "enters His silence" or exclaims with Dante:

"la mia vista, venendo sincera,
e piu e piu entrava per lo raggio
dell' alta luce, che da se e vera."[8]

But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the
relationship is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of
a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the
great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while
doubtless including in its span all the values we associate with
personality, must f