ies, and in and through them is seeking and
finding its eternal end. So, in that rightful bringing-in of novelty
which is the business of the fully living soul, the most powerful agent
is love, understood as the controlling factor of behaviour, the
sublimation and union of will and desire. "Let love," says Boehme, "be
the life of thy nature. It killeth thee not, but quickeneth thee
according to its life, and then thou livest, yet not to thy own will but
to its will: for thy will becometh its will, and then thou art dead to
thyself but alive to God."[138] There is the true, solid and for us most
fruitful doctrine of divine union, unconnected with any rapture, trance,
ecstasy or abnormal state of mind: a union organic, conscious, and
dynamic with the Creative Spirit of Life.

If we now go on to ask how, specially, we shall achieve this union in
such degree as is possible to each one of us; the answer must be, that
it will be done by Prayer. If the seeking of the Eternal is actuated by
love, the finding of it is achieved through prayer. Prayer, in
fact--understood as a life or state, not an act or an asking--is the
beginning, middle and end of all that we are now considering. As the
social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the
spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual
world. And such humble yet ardent contact with the spiritual
world--opening up to its suggestions our impulses, our reveries, our
feelings, our most secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts-is
the essence of prayer, understood in its widest sense. No more than
surrender or love can prayer be reduced to "one act." Those who seek to
sublimate it into "pure" contemplation are as limited at one end of the
scale, as those who reduce it to articulate petition are at the other.
It contains in itself a rich variety of human reactions and experiences.
It opens the door upon an unwalled world, in which the self truly lives
and therefore makes widely various responses to its infinitely varying
stimuli. Into that world the self takes, or should take, its special
needs, aptitudes and longings, and matches them against its apprehension
of Eternal Truth. In this meeting of the human heart with all that it
can apprehend of Reality, not adoration alone but unbounded contrition,
not humble dependence alone but joy, peace and power, not rapture alone
but mysterious darkness, must be woven into the fabric of love. In this
wor