essed, and reignest God, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for
ever and ever.

AMBROSIAN.

Those who live in intimate union with God, the peace of whose lives is
untroubled by the constant irruption of sin, are peculiarly sensitive to
that mode of the divine action that we call supernatural. I suppose that
it is not that God wishes to reveal Himself to souls only at crises of
their experience or under exceptional conditions, but that only souls of
an exceptional spiritual sensitivity are capable of this sort of
approach. Communications of the divine will through dream or vision of
inner voice are the accompaniment of sanctity; one may almost say that
they are the normal means in the case of advanced sanctity. Most of us
are too much immersed in the world, are too much the slaves of material
things, to be open to this still, small voice of revelation. Our eyes
are dimned by the garish light of the world, and our ears dulled by its
clamour, so that our powers of spiritual perception are of the
slightest. This is quite intelligible; and we ought not to fall into the
mistake of assuming that our undeveloped spirituality is normal, and
that what does not happen to us is inconceivable as having happened at
all. If we want to know the truth about spiritual phenomena we shall put
ourselves to school to those whose spiritual natures have attained the
highest development and in whose experience spiritual phenomena are of
almost daily happening.

To the man "whose talk is of oxen," whose whole life is absorbed in the
study of material things, a purely spiritual manifestation comes as a
surprise. His instinctive impulse is to deny its reality as a thing
obviously impertinent to his understanding of life. But one whose life
is based on spiritual postulates, who is, however feebly, attempting to
shape life in accordance with spiritual principles, though he may never
have attained anything that can be interpreted as a distinct revelation
from God by vision or voice or otherwise, yet must he by the very basic
assumptions of his life be ready to regard such manifestations of God as
intelligible, and indeed to be expected. So far from regarding divine
interventions in life as impossible, we shall regard the Christian life
which has no experience of them as abnormal, as not having realised its
inheritance. The degree and kind of such intervention in life will vary;
but it is the fact of the intervention that is important: the mode in a