(4) _In Our Personal Religious Life._--And the same principle holds in our personal religious life. The unobtrusiveness of God's relation to us, of which we often complain, is rather to be taken as evidence of his sacred respect for our own moral initiative, and proof of his careful adaptation to our moral need. Wherever a strong personality is in relation to a weaker, the stronger must maintain a conscientious self-restraint, lest he dominate the personality of the other, to the other's moral injury and to the hindering of his individuality. It _is_ possible for a boy to be injuriously "tied to his mother's apron-strings." Much more is it necessary that God's relation to us should not be obtrusive. God must guard our freedom and our individuality. He must even take pains to hide his hand, as a strong, influential, but wise friend would do. As we go higher, our life is and must be increasingly one of faith, the Father's relation less and less obtrusive.[113] The times of vision are given to make us patient in our progress toward the goal. And after the vision comes often what Rendel Harris calls "the dark night of faith, when every step has to be taken in absolute dependence upon God and assurance that the vision was truth and was no lie."[114] We need the invisible God for character. It is for this reason, no doubt, that God makes so rare use of overwhelming experiences in the religious life. He would be chosen with clear and rational self-consciousness, and so he rarely overpowers. And even in experiences which seem most overpowering, if the person is really awake to their true ethical and spiritual import, they will probably be found delicately adapted to call out the individual's own response. But for most of us such experiences prove a real temptation, because we allow the passively emotional to absorb our attention, and so lose the ethical and spiritual fruit. Where these marvelous experiences have been most marked, and have plainly given real help, they seem still, usually, to have been needed because of some false conception of God and the spiritual world that required a powerful corrective. Here they seem really to have been granted, as probably the transfiguration of Christ was to the disciples, as a concession to men's weakness, God consenting reluctantly to use for the time a lower line of appeal, because men are unable to rise to the higher appeal.