enuine way of doing things, which is
inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is
neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as
superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our
neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic world of traditional
piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial
heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than
the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy. We may be sure
that both are more characteristic of the image-making and
structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate
and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value--or the value of
any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived--abides wholly in
the content: the quality of the material thus worked up. The rich
nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will
express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a
veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life. Its psychic
structures--however logic may seek to discredit them--will convey
spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak
of illumination. The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the
religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored. It
is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the
field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a
revelation. The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with
amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than
ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the
Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life. But the
crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in
from those visions and contacts, that intercourse? Is transcendental
feeling involved in them? "What fruits dost thou bring back from this
thy vision?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real
test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of
contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and
perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought. In the
second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking
is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and
actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of
the min