there One
other than ourselves to pray to, what is there to pray for? Or, to
quote the actual question of a believer in this kind of immanence, Why
ask outside for a strength which we already possess? What a naive
question of this calibre reveals only too plainly is that
self-complacency which is the most deadly foe of the spiritual life.
One is reminded of the American story in which a bright and intelligent
wife asks her cultured but indifferent husband, "Is it true that God is
immanent in us all?" "I suppose so," he answers; "_but it does not
greatly matter._" The question is, Do we already possess the strength
for which we ask? Or rather, Does not the very fact that we ask for it
prove that we do not possess it, and that He from whom we ask it is not
ourselves? Is not the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Divine invasion of
the soul, a fact of experience, and is it not also a fact that that
gift is only to be had for the asking, only given in response to
earnest and persevering prayer, and that it effects in those who
receive it a change of thought and feeling?

All these are facts resting on irrefragable evidence; the apparent
problem is, to {31} harmonise them with the affirmation of the divinity
existing in man. If God be truly "in us all," then in what sense or to
what purpose can we pray for a consummation which, it will be urged, is
_ex hypothesi_ an accomplished fact at the time that we ask for it? We
reply that the Divine indwelling in man is of the nature of a capacity
for striving rather than of an attainment, a potentiality rather than
an actuality, a prophecy rather than a fulfilment. Man's longing for
communion with God, as for an unrealised good, is the longing of like
for Like, but it is only through struggle and effort that the goal can
be reached. The Eternal is indeed the Life of all life, and to that
extent it is true that all life expresses Him; nevertheless our
original divine endowment is no more than the material which has to be
shaped and wrought into "the type of perfect." Without this divinity
of substance as it might be called, we should never have the finished
product, divinity of character; but the latter can only be achieved
through arduous and persevering endeavour. Without a genuinely divine
element--without the Spirit breathed into man by his Creator--we could
not even realise our failure, nor aspire after a fuller portion of that
same life-giving Spirit; it is what we have th