"
In the terrific energies of the stellar universe, and the smallest song
of the birds. In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much
a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the
more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive. This
sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and
transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of
effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual
experience, wherever found. It chimes well with the definition of
Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly spiritual man, though he
may not be any better morally than his non-religious neighbour, "has a
confidence in the universe and an inner joy which the other does not
know--is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men."[29]

If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning
Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and
symbols of poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order
to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love. Such a
divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic
incarnation, though not limited by it: and it is continued into history
by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.
The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest
and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that
this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.

Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as
a genuine and abiding human fact--a form of life--independent of the
dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed. I now
wish to go on to a second point: this--that it follows that any complete
description of human life as we know it, must find room for the
spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it
finds expression. This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal
series, as we might find room for any special human activity or
aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but
deep-set in the enduring stuff of man's true life. We must believe that
the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot _in fact_ be
broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth with the universe
as a whole. But the extent in which we find and feel it is the measure
of the