On the side of spiritual experience and activity, such an excessive and one-sided development often takes place. Where this exaggeration is in the direction of intellect, the theological or philosophical mood dominates all other aspects of religion. Where the purely emotional and instinctive side of the relation of the soul to God is released from the critical action of the intelligence, it often degenerates into an objectionable sentimentality, and may lead to forms of self-indulgence which are only superficially religious. Where the volitional element takes command, unchecked by humble love, an arrogant reliance upon our own powers, a restless determination to do certain hard things, to attain certain results—a sort of super-sensual ambition—mars the harmony of the inner life. Any of these exaggerations must mean loss of balance, loss of wholeness; and their presence in the active life reflects back to their presence in the prayerful life, of which outward religion is but the visible sign. I think, therefore, that we ought to regard it as a part of our religious education to study the order in which our faculties should be employed when we turn towards our spiritual inheritance. Prayer, as a rule—save with those natural or highly trained contemplatives who live always in the prayerful state, tuned up to a perpetual consciousness of spiritual reality—begins, or should begin, with something which we can only call an intellectual act; with thinking of what we are going to do. In saying this, I am not expressing a merely personal opinion. All those great specialists of the spiritual life who have written on this subject are here in agreement. “When thou goest about to pray,” says Walter Hilton, “first make and frame betwixt thee and God a full purpose and intention; then begin, and do as well as thou canst.” “Prayer,” says the writer of the _Cloud of Unknowing_, “may not goodly be gotten in beginners or proficients, without thinking coming before.” All mediæval writers on prayer take it as a matter of course that “meditation” comes before “orison”; and meditation is simply the art of thinking steadily and methodically about spiritual things. So, too, the most modern psychologists assure us that instinctive emotion does its best work when it acts in harmony with our reasoning powers.