and contemplative life.

In spite of this, many people seem to take it for granted that if a man
believes in and desires to live a spiritual life, he can live it in
utter independence of spiritual food. He believes in God, loves his
neighbour, wants to do good, and just goes ahead. The result of this is
that the life of the God-fearing citizen or the Social Christian, as now
conceived and practised, is generally the starved life. It leaves no
time for the silence, the withdrawal, the quiet attention to the
spiritual, which is essential if it is to develop all its powers. Yet
the literature of the Spirit is full of warnings on this subject.
_Taste_ and see that the Lord is sweet. They that wait upon the Lord
shall renew their _strength_. In quietness and confidence shall be your
_strength_. These are practical statements; addressed, not to
specialists but to ordinary men and women, with a normal psycho-physical
make-up. They are literally true now, or can be if we choose. They do
not involve any peculiar training, or unnatural effort. A sliding scale
goes from the simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to that
complete self-loss and complete self-finding, which is called the
transforming union of the saint; and somewhere in this series, every
human soul can find a place.

If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to receive what St.
Augustine called the food of the full-grown, to find and feel the
Eternal, we must give time and place to it in our lives. I emphasize
this, because its realization seems to me to be a desperate modern need;
a need exhibited supremely in our languid and ineffectual spirituality,
but also felt in the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of
the artist, the reformer and the teacher. St. John of the Cross says in
one of his letters: "What is wanting is not writing or talking--there is
more than enough of that--but, silence and action. For silence joined to
action produces recollection, and gives the spirit a marvellous
strength." Such recollection, such a gathering up of our interior forces
and retreat of consciousness to its "ground," is the preparation of all
great endeavour, whatever its apparent object may be. Until we realize
that it is better, more useful, more productive of strength, to spend,
let us say, the odd ten minutes in the morning in feeling and finding
the Eternal than in flicking the newspaper--that this will send us off
to the day's work properly orient