ing found God," says a
modern Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained
fresh strength."[18] All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the
same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and
endurance.

So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be
resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The
cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite
Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living
and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The
dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us.
These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving
objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into
account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual
life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be
present in some measure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine
says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same
time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power,[19] and her Indian contemporary
the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers after God must realize
Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without,
and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And
it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power,
of beauty which are contained in them.

And if the first type of experience, with the immense feeling of
assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive
contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the "world that is
unwalled,"[21] and from the mind's utter surrender and abolition of
resistances--if all this seems to lead to a merely static or
contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of
experience, with its impu