The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day — John Shaqi
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
It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional
type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which
devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an
explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to
live. But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of
modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the
explorations of history and of psychology. Even contrasted with our
every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in
a wilderness. Whilst we are inside everything seems all right.
Beauty and fragrance surround us. But emerging from its doors, we find
ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of
reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we possess has got to
accommodate itself to the conditions in which they live. If the claim of
religion be true at all, it is plain that the conservatory-type of
spiritual world is inconsistent with it. Imperfect though any conception
we frame of the universe must be--and here we may keep in mind Samuel
Butler's warning that "there is no such source of error as the pursuit
of absolute truth"--still, a view which is controlled by the religious
factor ought to be, so to speak, a hill-top view. Lifting us up to
higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. Hence, the wider
the span of experience which we are able to bring within our system, the
more valid its claim becomes: and the setting apart of spiritual
experience in a special compartment, the keeping of it under glass, is
daily becoming less possible. That experience is life in its fullness,
or nothing at all. Therefore it must come out into the open, and must
witness to its own most sacred conviction; that the universe as a whole
is a religious fact, and man is not living completely until he is living
in a world religiously conceived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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