rge. And if we ask
those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say
that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul
towards its Source;[133] which impels every living thing to pursue the
most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of
self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God. Love is
for them much more than its emotional manifestations. It is "the
ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things"--no less.
This definition, which I take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas
Aquinas,[134] would be agreeable to the most modern psychologist; he
might give the hidden steersman of the psyche in its perpetual movement
towards novelty a less beautiful and significant name. "This indwelling
Love," says Plotinus, "is no other than the Spirit which, as we are
told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several
nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular soul,
strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Love, the
guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its being."[135]

Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at whatever level it be
experienced, the psychic craving, the urgent spirit within us pressing
out to life, is always _one;_ and that the sublimation of this vital
craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regeneration? There, in
our instinctive nature--which, as we know, makes us the kind of animal
we are--abides that power of loving which is, really, the power of
living; the cause of our actions, the controlling factor in our
perceptions, the force pressing us into any given type of experience,
turning aside for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater
vigour. Each level of the universe makes solicitations to this power:
the worlds of sense, of thought, of beauty, and of action. According to
the degree of our development, the trend of the conscious will, is our
response; and according to that response will be our life. "The world to
which a man turns himself," says Boehme, "and in which he produces
fruit, the same is lord in him, and this world becomes manifest in
him."[136]

From all this it becomes clear what the love of God is; and what St.
Augustine meant when he said that all virtue--and virtue after all means
power not goodness--lay in the right ordering of love, the conscious
orientation of desire. Christians, on the authority of their