-dedication. For that which we are here shown as a
possible human achievement is not a life of comfortable piety, or the
enjoyment of the delicious sensations of the armchair mystic. We are
offered, it is true, a new dower of life; access to the full
possibilities of human nature. But only upon terms, and these terms
include new obligations in respect of that life; compelling us, as it
appears, to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual refusal to
sink back into the next-best, to slide along a gentle incline. The
spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe
distance from the Fire of Love. It demands, indeed, very often things so
hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman: immensely
generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant
purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means a complete conquest of life's
perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance
of hardship and pain. And if we ask how this can be, what it is that
makes possible such enhancement of human will and of human courage, the
only answer seems to be that of the Johannine Christ: that it does
consist in a more abundant life.

In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding
of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its
general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely
physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral
conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full
integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in
fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and
for the new ideals. There was something of the penitent, something of
the contemplative, and something of the apostle in every man or woman
who thus grew to their full stature and realized all their latent
possibilities. But above all there was a fortitude, an all-round power
of tackling existence, which comes from complete indifference to
personal suffering or personal success. And further, psychology showed
us, that those workings and readjustments which we saw preparing this
life of the Spirit, were in line with those which prepare us for
fullness of life on other levels: that is to say the harnessing of the
impulsive nature to the purposes chosen by consciousness, the resolving
of conflicts, the unification of the whole personality about one's
dominant i