The problem of Pure Love, of Disinterested Religion, can hardly, in practice, be distinguished from that of Quiet and Passivity, if only because Quietists, (those who have considered perfection to diminish more and more the number of the soul’s acts, or at least to eliminate more and more the need of distinctness or difference between them), have, quite inevitably, ever given a special prominence to the question as to what should be the character of those few acts, of that one unbroken act. For once allow this their main question we should all have to answer in the Quietist’s way,--viz. that this single act must, for a perfect soul, to be the most perfect of the acts possible to man, and hence must be an act of Pure Love.--Yet it is well to realize clearly that, if Quietism necessitates an even excessive and unreal doctrine of Pure Love, a moderate and solid Pure-Love teaching has no kind of necessary connection with Quietism. For even though my interior life be necessarily one continuous stream and tissue of acts, countless in their number, variety, and degrees of inter-penetration, it in nowise follows that acts of Pure Love are not the best, or are impossible; nor that, in proportion as Pure Love informs the soul’s multiform acts, such acts must lose in depth and delicacy of variety and articulation. Indeed here, with regard to the very culmination of the interior life, we shall again find and must again test the two conceptions: the finally abstractive and materially simplifying one, which must ever have any one real thing outside of another; and the incarnational and synthetic one, which finds spiritual realities and forces working the one inside and through the other. And the latter view will appear the true one. 1. _New Testament teaching as to Pure Love._ Now we must first try and get some clear ideas as to how this difficult matter stands in the New Testament,--in the Synoptic tradition and in the Pauline-Joannine teaching respectively. Here again it is the former which, (though on its surface it appears as the more ordinary and the more locally coloured teaching), is the richer, in its grandly elastic and manifold simplicity; and it is the latter which has most profoundly penetrated and articulated the ultimate meaning and genius of a part of Our Lord’s doctrine, yet at the cost of a certain narrowing of the variety and breadth of that outlook. In both cases I shall move, from the easier and more popular teaching, to the deepest and most original enunciations and explanations.[139]