ld the soul may sometimes wander as if in pastures, sometimes is
poised breathless and intent. Sometimes it is fed by beauty, sometimes
by most difficult truth, and experiences the extremes of riches and
destitution, darkness and light. "It is not," says Plotinus, "by
crushing the Divine into a unity but by displaying its exuberance, as
the Supreme Himself has displayed it, that we show knowledge of the
might of God."[139]

Thus, by that instinctive and warmly devoted direction of its behaviour
which is love, and that willed attention to and communion with the
spiritual world which is prayer, all the powers of the self are united
and turned towards the seeking and finding of the Eternal. It is by
complete obedience to this exacting love, doing difficult and unselfish
things, giving up easy and comfortable things--in fact by living, living
hard on the highest levels--that men more and more deeply feel,
experience, and enter into their spiritual life. This is a fact which
must seem rather awkward to those who put forward pathological
explanations of it. And on the other hand it is only by constant
contacts with and recourse to the energizing life of Spirit, that this
hard vocation can be fulfilled. Such a power of reference to Reality, of
transcending the world of succession and its values, can be cultivated
by us; and this education of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of
the discipline of prayer. True, it is only in times of recollection or
of great emotion that this profound contact is fully present to
consciousness. Yet, once fully achieved and its obligations accepted by
us, it continues as a grave melody within our busy outward acts: and we
must by right direction of our deepest instincts so find and feel the
Eternal all the time, if indeed we are to actualize and incarnate it all
the time. From this truth of experience, religion has deduced the
doctrine of grace, and the general conception of man as able to do
nothing of himself. This need hardly surprise us. For equally on the
physical plane man can do nothing of himself, if he be cut off from his
physical sources of power: from food to eat, and air to breathe.
Therefore the fact that his spiritual life too is dependent upon the
life-giving atmosphere that penetrates him, and the heavenly food which
he receives, makes no fracture in his experience. Thus we are brought
back by another path to the fundamental need for him, in some form, of
the balanced active