gains greatly
from such communion with, and meek learning from, its cultural
background. Ever more and more as it advances, it will discover within
that background the records of those very experiences which it must now
so poignantly relive; and which seem to it, as his own experience seems
to every lover, unique. There it can find, without any betrayal of its
secret, the wholesome assurance of its own normality; standards of
comparison; companionship, alike in its hours of penitence, of light,
and of deprivation. Yet such fruitful communion with the past is not the
privilege of an aristocratic culture. It is seen in its perfection in
many simple Christians who have found in the Bible all the spiritual
food they need. The great literature of the Spirit tells its secrets to
those alone who thus meet it on its own ground. Not only the works of
Thomas a Kempis, of Ruysbroeck, or of St. Teresa, but also the Biblical
writers--and especially, perhaps, the Psalms and the Gospels--are read
wholly anew by us at each stage of our advance. Comparative study of
Hindu and Moslem writers proves that this is equally true of the great
literatures of other faiths.[143] Beginners may find in all these
infinite stimulus, interest, and beauty. But to the mature soul they
become road-books, of which experience proves the astonishing
exactitude; giving it descriptions which it can recognize and directions
that it needs, and constituting a steady check upon individualism.

Now let us look at the emergence of this life which we have been
considering, and at the typical path which it will or may follow, in an
ordinary man or woman of our own day. Not a saint or genius, reaching
heroic levels; but a member of that solid wholesome spiritual population
which ought to fill the streets of the City of God. We noticed when we
were studying its appearance in history, that often this life begins in
a sort of restlessness, a feeling that there is something more in
existence, some absolute meaning, some more searching obligation, that
we have not reached. This dissatisfaction, this uncertainty and hunger,
may show itself in many different forms. It may speak first to the
intellect, to the moral nature, to the social conscience, even to the
artistic faculty; or, directly, to the heart. Anyhow, its abiding
quality is a sense of contraction, of limitation; a feeling of something
more that we could stretch out to, and achieve, and be. Its impulsion is
always