ck to our Father's heart, where now we are at home.

EVELYN UNDERHILL in _Immanence_, p. 82.

{xi}

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS "SPIRITUAL RELIGION"

I

There is no magic in words, though, it must be confessed, they often
exercise a psychological influence so profound and far-reaching that
they seem to possess a miracle-working efficacy. Some persons live all
their lives under the suggestive spell of certain words, and it
sometimes happens that an entire epoch is more or less dominated by the
mysterious fascination of a sacred word, which needs only to be spoken
on the house-top to set hearts beating and legs marching.

"Spiritual" has always been one of these wonder-working words. St.
Paul, in Christian circles, was the first to give the word its unique
value. For him it named a new order of life and a new level of being.
In his thought, a deep cleavage runs through the human race and divides
it into two sharply-sundered classes, "psychical men" and "pneumatical
men"--men who live according to nature, and men who live by the life of
the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth
earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, _empirical_, parts of a vast
nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and
mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural,
psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the
other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on"
incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is
"heavenly," a creation "not made with hands," but wrought out of the
substance of the spiritual world, and furnished with the inherent
capacity of eternal duration, so that "mortality is swallowed up of
life."[2]

This word, thus made sacred by St. Paul's great use of it to designate
the new race of the saved, was made the bearer in the Johannine
writings of a no less exalted message, which has become a living and
indissoluble part of the religious consciousness of the Christian
world. "Eternal life"--or, what in these writings is the same thing,
"life"--comes through the reception of the Spirit, in a birth from
above. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is
born of the Spirit is Spirit."[3] When the Spirit comes as the
initiator of this abundant life, then we "know that we abide in Him and
He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit," and it becomes
possible for the Spir