The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
The next strand we may perhaps call that of Recollection: for the
recognizing and the cure of imperfection depends on the compensating
search for the Perfect and its enthronement as the supreme object of our
thought and love. The self, then, soon begins to feel a strong impulsion
to some type of inward withdrawal and concentration, some kind of
prayer; though it may not use this name or recognize the character of
its mood. As it yields to this strange new drawing, such recollection
grows easier. It finds that there is a veritable inner world, not merely
of phantasy, but of profound heart-searching experience; where the soul
is in touch with another order of realities and knows itself to be an
inheritor of Eternal Life. Here unique things happen. A power is at
work, and new apprehensions are born. And now for the first time the
self discovers itself to be striking a balance between this inner and
the outer life, and in its own small way--but still, most
fruitfully--enriching action with the fruits of contemplation. If it
will give to the learning of this new art--to the disciplining and
refining of this affective thought--even a fraction of the diligence
which it gives to the learning of a new game, it will find itself repaid
by a progressive purity of vision, a progressive sense of assurance, an
ever-increasing delicacy of moral discrimination and demand.
Psychologists, as we have seen, divide men into introverts and
extroverts; but as a matter of fact we must regard both these extreme
types as defective. A whole man should be supple in his reactions both
to the inner and to the outer world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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