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
which loyalty to the one Spirit governs their reactions to common daily
experience.
Here then, as in so much else, the ideal is not an arbitrary choice but
a struck balance. First, a personal contact with Eternal Reality,
deepening, illuminating and enlarging all of our experience of fact, all
our responses to it: that is, faith. Next, the fullest possible sense of
our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely
rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life: that is, charity. The
dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that
divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the
human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.
It is of course true that social groups may be regenerated. The success
of such group-formations as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of
God, the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this. But groups, in
the last resort, consist of individuals, who must each be regenerated
one by one; whose outlook, if they are to be whole men, must include in
its span abiding values as well as the stream of time, and who, for the
full development of this their two-fold destiny, require each a measure
both of solitude and of association. Hence it follows, that the final
answer to the repeated question: "Does God save men, does Spirit work
towards the regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by one, or in
groups?" is this: that the proposed alternative is illusory. We cannot
say that the Divine action in the world as we know it, is either merely
social or merely individual; but both. And the next question--a highly
practical question--is, "How _both_?" For the answer to this, if we can
find it, will give us at last a formula by which we can true up our own
effort toward completeness of self-expression in the here-and-now.
How, then, are groups of men moved up to higher spiritual levels; helped
to such an actual possession of power and love and a sound mind as shall
transfigure and perfect their lives? For this, more than all else, is
what we now want to achieve. I speak in generalities, and of average
human nature, not of these specially sensitive or gifted individuals who
are themselves the revealers of Reality to their fellow-men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account