ilities have become a
rankling, continuous torment and depression. When life on
earth appears fragmentary and disordered, not only nonsense
but terrifying nonsense, full of hideous injustices, sickening
uncertainties, and cruel destructions, men have not infrequently
found a refuge in the divine. "Come unto me all
ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

In the religious experience man finds life to be made clear,
complete, and beautiful. What seems a contradictory fragment
finds its precise niche in the divine scheme, what seems
dark and cruel shines out in a setting of eternal beneficence
and wisdom. The experience of the individual, even the happiest,
is always partial, broken, and disordered. No ideal is
ever completely realized, or if realized leaves some perfection
to be desired. Men living in a natural existence imagine
values and ideals which can never be realized there. In religion,
if anywhere, men have found perfection, and ultimate
sufficiency.

This perfection, completion, and clarification of life has been
attained in various ways. The religious experience itself,
when intense, may give to the individual apart from a reasoned
judgment, or from any actual change in his physical
surroundings, a translucent insight during which he sees
deeply, calmly, joyously into the beautiful eternal order of
things. This mystic insight has been experienced on occasion
by quite normal and prosaic men and women. While it lasts,
reality seems to take on new colors and dimensions. It becomes
vivid, luminous, and intense. The mystic seems to
rise to a higher level of consciousness, in which he experiences
a universe more significant, ordered, and unified than any
commonly experienced through the senses. One may take,
as an example, such an instance autobiographically and anonymously
reported a few years ago, and well documented:

It was not that for a few keyed-up moments I _imagined_ all
existence as beautiful, but that my inner vision was cleared to the truth
so that I _saw_ the actual loveliness which is always there, but which
we so rarely perceive; and I knew that every man, woman, bird, and
tree, every living thing before me, was extravagantly beautiful, and
extravagantly important. And as I beheld, my heart melted out of
me in a rapture of love and delight. A nurse was walking past; the
wind caught a strand of her hair and blew it out in a momentary
gleam of sunshine, and never in my life be