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
know--is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men."[29]
If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning
Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and
symbols of poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order
to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love. Such a
divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic
incarnation, though not limited by it: and it is continued into history
by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.
The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest
and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that
this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.
Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as
a genuine and abiding human fact--a form of life--independent of the
dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed. I now
wish to go on to a second point: this--that it follows that any complete
description of human life as we know it, must find room for the
spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it
finds expression. This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal
series, as we might find room for any special human activity or
aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but
deep-set in the enduring stuff of man's true life. We must believe that
the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot _in fact_ be
broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth with the universe
as a whole. But the extent in which we find and feel it is the measure
of the fullness of spiritual life that we enjoy. Organic union must be
lifted to conscious realization: and this to do, is the business of
religion. In this act of realization each aspect of the psychic
life--thought, will and feeling--must have its part, and from each must
be evoked a response. Only in so far as such all-round realization and
response are achieved by us do we live the spiritual life. We do it
perhaps in some degree, every time that we surrender to pure beauty or
unselfish devotion; for then all but the most insensitive must be
conscious of an unearthly touch, and hear the cadence of a heavenly
melody. In these partial experiences something, as it were, of the
richness of Reality overflows and is experienced by us. But it is in the
wholeness of response characteristic of religion--that uncalculated
response to stimulus which is the mark of the instinctive life--that
this Realty of love and power is most truly found and felt by us. In
this generous and heart-searching surrender of religion, rightly made,
the self achieves inner harmony, and finds a satisfying objective for
all its cravings and energies. It then finds its life, and the
possibilities before it, to be far greater than it knew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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