Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community on the individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through; in spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a larger consciousness, the achievement of a divine sonship, a spiritual marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning his achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of wider relationships. It follows that self-mergence in the common life is an education for that self-mergence in the absolute life at which the mystic aims. Such self-mergence, and the training in humility, self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul. Union with, and to a certain extent submission to, the church, to the family—to life, in fact—an attitude of self-giving surrender: this is the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of the I, the Me, and the Mine, till it becomes one will and one love with the divine will and love. On these two counts alone—harmonious environment and salutary discipline—we shall expect, other things being equal, that the richest and most fruitful types of mystical experience will arise within religious institutions rather than outside them; and as a matter of fact this is what we do find. The Hindu ascetic has his recognized place in the Hindu system. He has but reached the summit of a pyramid which is firmly based on earth. The Sūfi is a good Moslem, and commonly the member of a religious confraternity which imposes a strict rule of life. The Christian mystic, too, grows up from the Christian society. His roots strike deep down into that favouring soil. Though his branches may shoot up to the heavens, and seem to draw thence all the light and heat by which he lives, yet he is really fed from below as well as from above. When he refuses to acknowledge this principle, when he abjures the discipline, the authority, the support of the corporate life, and regards himself as a separate individual, dependent on direct inspiration alone; how quickly he becomes unbalanced and eccentric, how difficult it is for him to avoid the disease of spiritual megalomania. Refusing the support and discipline of organized religion, he becomes like a poet who refuses to be controlled by the laws of prosody; which seem to limit, but really strengthen and beautify, his work.