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
But the influence of the crowd-compeller, the leader, whether in the
crude form of the revivalist or in the more penetrating and enduring
form of the creative mystic or religious founder, the loyalty and
imitation of the disciple, the corporate and generalized enthusiasm of
the group can only be the first educative phase in any veritable
incarnation of Spirit upon earth. Each member of the herd is now
committed to the fullest personal living-out of the new life he has
received. Only in so far as the first stage of suggestion and imitation
is carried over to the next stage of personal actualization, can we say
that there is any real promotion of spiritual _life_: any hope that this
life will work a true renovation of the group into which it has been
inserted and achieve the social phase.
If, then, it does achieve the social phase what stages may we expect it
to pass through, and by what special characters will it be graced?
Let us look back for a moment at some of our conclusions about the
individual life. We said that this life, if fully lived, exhibited the
four characters of work and contemplation, self-discipline and service:
deepening and incarnating within its own various this-world experience
its other-world apprehensions of Eternity, of God. Its temper should
thus be both social and ascetic. It should be doubly based, on humility
and on given power. Now the social order--more exactly, the social
organism--in which Spirit is really to triumph, can only be built up of
individuals who do with a greater or less perfection and intensity
exhibit these characters, some upon independent levels of creative
freedom, some on those of discipleship: for here all men are not equal,
and it is humbug to pretend that they are. This social order, being so
built of regenerate units, would be dominated by these same implicits of
the regenerate consciousness; and would tend to solve in their light the
special problems of community life. And this unity of aim would really
make of it one body; the body of a fully socialized _and_ fully
spiritualized humanity, which perhaps we might without presumption
describe as indeed the son of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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