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Best Of Me

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.
 It is especially in Spinoza that this deeper, universally human and
ethical, indeed we can say religious, implication and ideal of the
rigorously scientific spirit is present in all its noble intuition and
aspiration, and that at the same time, alas, this deep truth is forced
into a ruinously inappropriate method and formulation. For the
original end of the entire quest, an end which is still emotionally
dominant and which furnishes the hidden dialectic of the whole,—
Man, his nobility and interior purification and beatitude,—has here,
intellectually, become but a means; Man, in the real logic of this
system, is, hopelessly and finally, but a wheel in the huge
mechanism of that natura naturata which Spinoza’s own richness
and nobility of character transcends with potent inconsistency. And
this very system, which is so nobly human and Christian in its ethical
tone and in its demand of a Conversion of the whole man, in its
requiring man to lose and sacrifice his petty self that he may gain his
true self and become a genuine constituent of the Universe and
Thought of God, is also the very one which, by its ruthless
Naturalism and Determinism of Doctrine and its universally
Mathematical and Quantitative form and method, logically eliminates
all such qualitative differentiation and conversion as impossible and
futile.
The prima facie view of life as it presents itself to the clarifying,
Scientific Intellect, namely the omnipresence of the determinist
mechanism, has never been more impressively felt and pictured than
by Spinoza; the dispositions and happiness of the purified,
disinterested soul have rarely been experienced and described with
more touching elevation and power. But there is no real transition,
indeed no possibility of such, in his system, from that first aspect to
this latter state; for that first aspect, that apparent determinism, is
for his logic not merely apparent or secondary, but the very truth of
truths, the very core and end of things.
And this bondage of mind to matter, this enslavement of the
master to the servant, this narrow, doctrinaire intellectualism and
determinism, is more hidden than cured in Leibniz, who, if he brings
the immense improvement because enrichment of a keen sense and
love of the Historical, loses, on the other hand, Spinoza’s grandly
Conversional tone and temper. A cheerful, easy, eminently sane but
quite inadequate bustle of manifold interests; a ready, pleasant
optimism; an endless laboriousness of the reasoning faculty; all this,
even though carried out on a scale unique since the days of
Aristotle, is necessarily unequal to face and bear “the burthen of all
this unintelligible world.”
And yet here, in him who may not unfitly be called the last of the
Dogmatic Rationalists and Optimists, we have already those great
perceptions which were destined more and more to burst the bonds
of this cold, clear, complete, confining outlook. For one thing, as
already stated, there is, alongside the love of the Material and
Mathematical, an almost equal love of the Historical and Human.
There is, for another thing, the deep consciousness of the
Individuality and Interiority of all real existences,—all that is at all,
has an inside to it. And, finally, in further enforcement of this latter
doctrine, there is the fruitful conception of Subconscious States of
feeling and of mind in all living things.
Yet it is only in Kant that,—with all his obscurities and numberless
demonstrable inconsistencies, with all his saddening impoverishment
of the outlook in many ways,—we get, little conscious as he himself
is of such a service, the deep modern explanation of the ancient pre-
scientific neglect and suspicion of natural research. Here we are led
to see that the strictly Scientific view of Nature is necessarily
quantitative, but that the strictly Ethical, Spiritual view of man is as
necessarily qualitative; that the analysis of all natural phenomena
but leads to judgments as to what is, whereas the requirements of
human action lead to judgments of what ought to be. Here the weak
point lies in the contrast, established by him and pushed to the
degree of mutual exclusion, between Reason and Will. For the
contrast which we find in actual life is really between the deeper
reason, ever closely accompanied by deep emotion, this reason and
emotion occasioning, and strengthened by, the action of the whole
man,—and all this is not directly transferable; and the more
superficial reasoning, having with it little or no emotion,—the action
of but one human faculty,—and this action is readily transferable.
3. Place and function of such science in the totality of man’s life.
The mistake in the past would thus lie, not in the doctrine that the
Visible cannot suffice for man and is not his mind’s true home; nor in
the implication that the Visible cannot directly and of itself reveal to
him the Spiritual world. The error would lie entirely in the double
implication or doctrine, that there is really nothing to be known
about Nature, or that what can be known of it can be attained by
Metaphysical or Mystical methods; and again that strictly
quantitative, severe scientific method and investigation can, even in
the long run, be safely neglected by the human soul, as far as its
own spiritual health is concerned.
We take it then that mankind has, after endless testings and
experiences, reached the following conclusions. We encounter
everywhere, both within us and without, both in the physical and
mental world, in the first instance, a whole network of phenomena;
and these phenomena are everywhere found to fall under certain
laws, and to be penetrable by certain methods of research, these
laws and methods varying indeed in character and definiteness
according to the subject-matter to which they apply, but in each
case affording to man simply indefinite scope for discovery without,
and for self-discipline within.
And all this preliminary work and knowledge does not directly
require religion nor does it directly lead to it; indeed we shall spoil
both the knowledge itself, and its effect upon our souls and upon
religion, if religion is here directly introduced. The phenomena of
Astronomy and Geology, of Botany and Zoology, of human
Physiology and Psychology, of Philology and History are and ought to
be, in the first instance, the same for all men, whether the said men
do or do not eventually give them a raison d’être and formal rational
interest by discovering the metaphysical and religious convictions
and conclusions which underlie and alone give true unity to them
and furnish a living link between the mind observing and the things
observed. Various as are these phenomena, according to the
department of human knowledge to which they severally belong, yet
they each and all have to be, in the first instance, discovered and
treated according to principles and methods immanent and special
to that department.
And the more rigorously this is accomplished, both by carrying out
these principles and methods to their fullest extent, and by
conscientiously respecting their limits of applicability and their
precise degree of truth and of range in the larger scheme of human
activity and conviction, the more will such science achieve three
deeply ethical, spiritually helpful results.
Such science will help to discipline, humble, purify the natural
eagerness and wilfulness, the cruder forms of anthropomorphism, of
the human mind and heart. This turning to the visible will thus
largely take the place of that former turning away from it; for only
since the Visible has been taken to represent laws, and, provisionally
at least, rigorously mechanical laws characteristic of itself, can it be
thus looked upon as a means of spiritual purification.
Such science again will help to stimulate those other, deeper
activities of human nature, which have made possible, and have all
along preceded and accompanied, these more superficial ones; and
this, although such science will doubtless tend to do the very
opposite, if the whole nature be allowed to become exclusively
engrossed in this one phenomenal direction. Still it remains true that
perhaps never has man turned to the living God more happily and
humbly, than when coming straight away from such rigorous,
disinterested phenomenal analysis, as long as such analysis is felt to
be both other than, and preliminary and secondary to, the deepest
depths of the soul’s life and of all ultimate Reality.
And finally, such science will correspondingly help to give depth
and mystery, drama and pathos, a rich spirituality, to the whole
experience and conception of the soul and of life, of the world and
of God. Instead of a more or less abstract picture, where all is much
on the same plane, where all is either fixed and frozen, or all is in a
state of feverish flux, we get an outlook, with foreground, middle
distances, and background, each contrasting with, each partially
obscuring, partially revealing, the other; but each doing so, with any
freshness and fulness, only in and through the strongly willing, the
fully active and gladly suffering, the praying, aspiring, and energizing
spiritual Personality, which thus both gives and gets its own true self
ever more entirely and more deeply.
4. Science to be taken, throughout our life, in a double sense and
way.
In such a conception of the place of Science, we have
permanently to take Science, throughout life, in a double sense and
way. In the first instance, Science is self-sufficing, its own end and
its own law. In the second instance, which alone is ever final,
Science is but a part of a whole, but a function, a necessary yet
preliminary function, of the whole of man; and it is but part, a
necessary yet preliminary part, of his outlook. Crush out, or in any
way mutilate or deautonomize, this part, and all the rest will suffer.
Sacrifice the rest to this part, either by starvation or attempted
suppression, or by an impatient assimilation of this immense
remainder to that smaller and more superficial part, and the whole
man suffers again, and much more seriously.
And the danger, in both directions,—let us have the frankness to
admit the fact,—is constant and profound: even to see it
continuously is difficult; to guard against it with effect, most difficult
indeed. For to starve or to suspect, to cramp or to crush this
phenomenal apprehension and investigation, in the supposed
interest of the ulterior truths, must ever be a besetting temptation
and weakness for the religious instinct, wherever this instinct is
strong and fixed, and has not yet itself been put in the way of
purification.
For Religion is ever, qua religion, authoritative and absolute. What
constitutes religion is not simply to hold a view and to try and live a
life, with respect to the Unseen and the Deity, as possibly or even
certainly beautiful or true or good: but precisely that which is over
and above this,—the holding this view and this life to proceed
somehow from God Himself, so as to bind my innermost mind and
conscience to unhesitating assent. Not simply that I think it, but
that, in addition, I feel bound to think it, transforms a thought about
God into a religious act.
Now this at once brings with it a double and most difficult
problem. For Religion thus becomes, by its very genius and in exact
proportion to its reality, something so entirely sui generis, so claimful
and supreme, that it at once exacts a two-fold submission, the one
simultaneous, the other successive; the first as it were in space, the
second in time. The first regards the relations of religion to things
non-religious. It might be parodied by saying: “Since religion is true
and supreme, religion is all we require: all things else must be bent
or broken to her sway.” She has at the very least the right to a
primacy not of honour only, but of direct jurisdiction, over and within
all activities and things. The second regards the form and concept of
religion itself. Since religion always appears both in a particular form
at a particular time and place, and as divine and hence authoritative
and eternal; and since the very strength and passion of religion
depend upon the vigorous presence and close union of these two
elements: religion will ever tend either really to oppose all change
within itself, or else to explain away its existence. Religion would
thus appear doomed to be either vague and inoperative, or
obscurantist and insincere.
And it is equally clear that the other parts of man’s nature and of
his outlook cannot simply accept such a claim, nor could religion
itself flourish at all if they could and did accept it. They cannot
accept the claim of religion to be immediately and simply all, for they
are fully aware of being themselves something also. They cannot
accept her claim to dictate to them their own domestic laws, for they
are fully aware that they each, to live truly at all, require their own
laws and their own, at least relative, autonomy. However much man
may be supremely and finally a religious animal, he is not only that;
but he is a physical and sexual, a fighting and artistic, a domestic
and social, a political and philosophical animal as well.
 Nor can man, even simply qua religious man, consent to a simple
finality in the experience and explication, in the apprehension and
application of religion, either in looking back into the past; or in
believing and loving, suffering and acting in the present; or in
forecasting the future, either of the race or of himself alone. For the
here and now, the concrete “immediacy,” the unique individuality of
the religious experience for me, in this room, on this very day, its
freshness, is as true and necessary a quality of living religion as any
other whatsoever. And if all life sustains itself only by constant,
costing renovation and adaptation of itself to its environment, the
religious life, as the most intense and extensive of all lives, must
somehow be richest in such newness in oldness, such renovative,
adaptive, assimilative power.
5. All this seen at work in man’s actual history.
Now it is deeply instructive to observe all this at work historically.
For here we find every variety of attitude towards this very point.
There are men of Religion who attempt to do without Science, and
men of Science who attempt to do without Religion. Or again, men
of Religion attempt to level up,—to assimilate the principles and
results of the various sciences directly to religion, or at least to rule
those scientific principles and results directly by religion. Or men of
Science attempt to level down, to make religion into a mere
philosophy or even a natural history. Yet we find also,—with so
persistent a recurrence in all manner of places and times, as itself to
suggest the inherent, essential, indestructible truth of the view,—
another, a far more costing attitude. This attitude refuses all
mutilation either of normal human nature or of its outlook, all
oppression of one part by the other; for it discovers that these
various levels of life have been actually practised in conjunction by
many an individual in the past and in the present; and that, where
they have been practised within a large organization of faith and
love, they have ever led to a fuller reality and helpfulness both of the
science and of the religion concerned. Hence the mind thus informed
cannot doubt the truth of this solution, however difficult at all times
may be its practice, and however little final at any time can be its
detailed intellectual analysis.

IV. Summing up: Hellenism or Harmonization, Christianity or

Spiritual Experience, and Science or Acceptance of a Preliminary
Mechanism, all three necessary to Man.

To sum up all this first chapter, we have got so far as this. We

have seen that humanity has, so far, found and worked out three
forces and conceptions of life, forces which are still variously
operative in each of us, but which find their harmonious interaction
in but few men, their full theoretical systematization in none.[33]
There is the ancient, Greek contribution, chiefly intellectual and
aesthetic, mostly cold and clear, quick and conclusive, with, upon the
whole, but a slight apprehension of personality and freedom, of
conscience and of sin, and little or no sense of the difference and
antagonism between these realities and simply Mathematical,
Mechanical laws and concepts. It is a view profoundly abstract, and,
at bottom, determinist: the will follows the intellect necessarily, in
exact proportion to the clearness of information of the former. And
the strength of this view, which was possible even to that gifted race
just because of the restrictedness of its knowledge concerning the
length and breadth of nature and of history, and still more with
regard to the depths of the human character and conscience,
consists in its freshness, completeness, and unity. And this ideal of
an ultimate harmonization of our entire life and of its theory we
must never lose, more and more difficult though its even
approximate realization has of necessity become.
There is next the middle, Christian contribution, directly moral and
religious, deep and dim and tender, slow and far-reaching,
immensely costly, infinitely strong; with its discovery and
exemplification of the mysterious depth and range and complexity of
human personality and freedom, of conscience and of sin; a view
profoundly concrete and at bottom libertarian. The goodwill here
first precedes, and then outstrips, and determines the information
supplied by the intellect: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they
shall see God.” And the strength of this position consists in its being
primarily not a view, but a life, a spiritual, religious life, requiring,
implying, indeed proclaiming, definite doctrines concerning God and
man, and their relations to each other, but never exhausted by these
doctrines even in their collectivity, inexhaustible though these in
their turn are by their union with the life of the spirit, their origin and
end.
There is finally the modern, Scientific contribution, intensely
impersonal and determinist, directly neither metaphysical nor
religious, but more abstract even than the Greek view, in the
mathematical constituent of its method, and more concrete in a
sense than Christianity itself, in the other, the sensible-experiment
constituent of its method. The most undeniable of abstractions,
those of mathematics, (undeniable just because of their enunciation
of nothing but certain simplest relations between objects, supposing
those objects to exist,) are here applied to the most undeniable of
concretions, the direct experiences of the senses. And this
mysterious union which, on the surface, is so utterly heterogeneous,
is itself at all explicable only on mental, metaphysical assumptions
and on the admission of the reality and priority of Mind. It is a union
that has turned out as unassailable in its own province, as it is
incapable of suppressing or replacing the wider and deeper truths
and lives discovered for us respectively by Hellenism and Christianity.
Only in the case that man could but reckon mathematically and
observe with his senses, or in the case that man were indeed
provided with other faculties, but that he found Reality outside him
and within him to be properly apprehensible by the mathematico-
experimental process alone, could there be any serious question of
such a final suppression of by far the greater and deeper portion of
himself. Instead of any such deadlock the facts of these last four
centuries bear out the contention that neither can the religious life
suppress or do without the philosophical and the scientific, nor can
either of these other two lives suppress or permanently do without
its fellow or without religion.
But all this and its detailed practical application will, I trust,
become much clearer as we proceed.

CHAPTER II
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION

Introductory.

We have found then that all life and all truth are, for all their unity,
deeply complex, for us men at all events; indeed that they are both
in exact proportion to their reality. In this, our second chapter, I
should like to show the complexity special to the deepest kind of life,
to Religion; and to attempt some description of the working
harmonization of this complexity. If Religion turned out to be simple,
in the sense of being a monotone, a mere oneness, a whole without
parts, it could not be true; and yet if Religion be left too much a
mere multiplicity, a mere congeries of parts without a whole, it
cannot be persuasive and fully operative. And the several
constituents are there, whether we harbour, recognize, and discipline
them or not; but these constituents will but hinder or supplant each
other, in proportion as they are not somehow each recognized in
their proper place and rank, and are not each allowed and required
to supplement and to stimulate the other. And though no amount of
talk or theory can, otherwise than harmfully, take the place of life,
yet observation and reflection can help us to see where and how life
acts: what are the causes, or at least the concomitants, of its
inhibition and of its stimulation and propagation, and can thus
supply us with aids to action, which action will then, in its turn, help
to give experimental fulness and precision to what otherwise
remains a more or less vague and empty scheme.
I. The Three Elements, as they successively appear in the Child, the
Youth, and the Adult Man.

Now if we will but look back upon our own religious life, we shall
find that, in degrees and in part in an order of succession varying
indefinitely with each individual, three modalities, three modes of
apprehension and forms of appeal and of outlook, have been and
are at work within us and around.[34]
1. Sense and Memory, the Child’s means of apprehending Religion.
In the doubtless overwhelming majority of cases, there came first,
as far as we can reconstruct the history of our consciousness, the
appeal to our infant senses of some external religious symbol or
place, some picture or statue, some cross or book, some movement
of some attendant’s hands and eyes. And this appeal would
generally have been externally interpreted to us by some particular
men or women, a Mother, Nurse, Father, Teacher, Cleric, who
themselves would generally have belonged to some more or less
well-defined traditional, institutional religion. And their appeal would
be through my senses to my imaginative faculty first, and then to my
memory of that first appeal, and would represent the principle of
authority in its simplest form.
All here as yet works quasi-automatically. The little child gets
these impressions long before itself can choose between, or even is
distinctly conscious of them; it believes whatever it sees and is told,
equally, as so much fact, as something to build on. If you will, it
believes these things to be true, but not in the sense of contrasting
them with error; the very possibility of the latter has not yet come
into sight. And at this stage the External, Authoritative, Historical,
Traditional, Institutional side and function of Religion are everywhere
evident. Cases like that of John Stuart Mill, of being left outside of all
religious tradition, we may safely say, will ever remain exceptions to
help prove the rule. The five senses then, perhaps that of touch first,
and certainly that of sight most; the picturing and associative
powers of the imagination; and the retentiveness of the memory, are
the side of human nature specially called forth. And the external,
sensible, readily picturable facts and the picturing functions of
religion correspond to and feed this side, as readily as does the
mother’s milk correspond to and feed that same mother’s infant.
Religion is here, above all, a Fact and Thing.
2. Question and Argument, the Youth’s mode of approaching
Religion.
But soon there wakes up another activity and requirement of
human nature, and another side of religion comes forth to meet it.
Direct experience, for one thing, brings home to the child that these
sense-informations are not always trustworthy, or identical in its own
case and in that of others. And, again, the very impressiveness of
this external religion stimulates indeed the sense of awe and of
wonder, but it awakens curiosity as well. The time of trustful
questioning, but still of questioning, first others, then oneself, has
come. The old impressions get now more and more consciously
sought out, and selected from among other conflicting ones; the
facts seem to clamour for reasons to back them, against the other
hostile facts and appearances, or at least against those men in
books, if not in life, who dare to question or reject them. Affirmation
is beginning to be consciously exclusive of its contrary: I begin to
feel that I hold this, and that you hold that; and that I cannot do
both; and that I do the former, and exclude and refuse the latter.
Here it is the reasoning, argumentative, abstractive side of human
nature that begins to come into play. Facts have now in my mind to
be related, to be bound to other facts, and men to men; the facts
themselves begin to stand for ideas or to have the latter in them or
behind them. The measuring-rod seems to be over all things. And
religion answers this demand by clear and systematic arguments and
concatenations: this and this is now connected with that and that;
this is true or this need not be false, because of that and that.
Religion here becomes Thought, System, a Philosophy.
3. Intuition, Feeling, and Volitional requirements and evidences,
the Mature Man’s special approaches to Faith.
 But yet a final activity of human nature has to come to its fullest,
and to meet its response in a third side of Religion. For if in
Physiology and Psychology all action whatsoever is found to begin
with a sense-impression, to move through the central process of
reflection, and to end in the final discharge of will and of action, the
same final stage can be found in the religious life. Certain interior
experiences, certain deep-seated spiritual pleasures and pains,
weaknesses and powers, helps and hindrances, are increasingly
known and felt in and through interior and exterior action, and
interior suffering, effort, and growth. For man is necessarily a
creature of action, even more than of sensation and of reflection;
and in this action of part of himself against other parts, of himself
with or against other men, with or against this or that external fact
or condition, he grows and gradually comes to his real self, and
gains certain experiences as to the existence and nature and growth
of this his own deeper personality.
Man’s emotional and volitional, his ethical and spiritual powers,
are now in ever fuller motion, and they are met and fed by the third
side of religion, the Experimental and Mystical. Here religion is rather
felt than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather than
analyzed, is action and power, rather than either external fact or
intellectual verification.

II. Each Element ever accompanied by some amount of the other two.
Difficulty of the Transitions from one stage to the other.

Now these three sides of the human character, and corresponding

three elements of Religion, are never, any one of them, without a
trace or rudiment of the other two; and this joint presence of three
such disparate elements ever involves tension, of a fruitful or
dangerous kind.[35]
1. Utility of this joint presence.
In the living human being indeed there never exists a mere
apprehension of something external and sensible, without any
interior elaboration, any interpretation by the head and heart. We
can hardly allow, we can certainly in nowise picture to ourselves,
even an infant of a few hours old, as working, and being worked
upon, by nothing beyond these sense-perceptions alone. Already
some mental, abstractive, emotional-volitional reaction and
interpretation is presumably at work; and not many weeks or
months pass before this is quite obviously the case. And although,
on the other hand, the impressions of the senses, of the imagination
and the memory are, normally, more numerous, fresh, and lasting in
early than in later years, yet up to the end they continue to take in
some new impressions, and keep up their most necessary functions
of supplying materials, stimulants, and tests to the other powers of
the soul.
Thus, too, Religion is at all times more or less both traditional and
individual; both external and internal; both institutional, rational, and
volitional. It always answers more or less to the needs of authority
and society; of reason and proof; of interior sustenance and
purification. I believe because I am told, because it is true, because
it answers to my deepest interior experiences and needs. And,
everything else being equal, my faith will be at its richest and
deepest and strongest, in so far as all these three motives are most
fully and characteristically operative within me, at one and the same
time, and towards one and the same ultimate result and end.
2. The two crises of the soul, when it adds Speculation to
Institutionalism, and Mysticism to both.
Now all this is no fancy scheme, no petty or pretty artificial
arrangement: the danger and yet necessity of the presence of these
three forces, the conflicts and crises within and between them all, in
each human soul, and between various men and races that typify or
espouse one or the other force to the more or less complete
exclusion of the other, help to form the deepest history, the truest
tragedy or triumph of the secret life of every one of us.
The transition from the child’s religion, so simply naïve and
unselfconscious, so tied to time and place and particular persons and
things, so predominantly traditional and historical, institutional and
external, to the right and normal type of a young man’s religion, is
as necessary as it is perilous. The transition is necessary. For all the
rest of him is growing,—body and soul are growing in clamorous
complexity in every direction: how then can the deepest part of his
nature, his religion, not require to grow and develop also? And how
can it permeate and purify all the rest, how can it remain and
increasingly become “the secret source of all his seeing,” of his
productiveness and courage and unification, unless it continually
equals and exceeds all other interests within the living man, by its
own persistent vitality, its rich and infinite variety, its subtle, ever-
fresh attraction and inexhaustible resourcefulness and power? But
the crisis is perilous. For he will be greatly tempted either to cling
exclusively to his existing, all but simply institutional, external
position, and to fight or elude all approaches to its reasoned,
intellectual apprehension and systematization; and in this case his
religion will tend to contract and shrivel up, and to become a
something simply alongside of other things in his life. Or he will feel
strongly pressed to let the individually intellectual simply supplant
the institutional, in which case his religion will grow hard and
shallow, and will tend to disappear altogether. In the former case he
will, at best, assimilate his religion to external law and order, to
Economics and Politics; in the latter case he will, at best, assimilate
it to Science and Philosophy. In the first case, he will tend to
superstition; in the second, to rationalism and indifference.
But even if he passes well through this first crisis, and has thus
achieved the collaboration of these two religious forces, the external
and the intellectual, his religion will still be incomplete and semi-
operative, because still not reaching to what is deepest and nearest
to his will. A final transition, the addition of the third force, that of
the emotional-experimental life, must yet be safely achieved. And
this again is perilous: for the two other forces will, even if single, still
more if combined, tend to resist this third force’s full share of
influence to the uttermost. To the external force this emotional
power will tend to appear as akin to revolution; to the intellectual
side it will readily seem mere subjectivity and sentimentality ever
verging on delusion. And the emotional-experimental force will, in its
turn, be tempted to sweep aside both the external, as so much
oppressive ballast; and the intellectual, as so much hair-splitting or
rationalism. And if it succeeds, a shifting subjectivity, and all but
incurable tyranny of mood and fancy, will result,—fanaticism is in full
sight.

III. Parallels to this Triad of Religious Elements.

If we would find, applied to other matters, the actual operation

and co-operation, at the earliest stage of man’s life, of the identical
powers under discussion, we can find them, by a careful analysis of
our means and processes of knowledge, or of the stages of all reflex
action.
1. The three constituents of Knowledge.
Even the most elementary acquisition, indeed the very possibility,
of any and all certitude and knowledge, is dependent for us upon
the due collaboration of the three elements or forces of our nature,
the sensational, the rational, the ethico-mystical.[36]
There is, first, in the order of our consciousness and in the degree
of its undeniableness, the element of our actual impressions, the flux
of our consciousness as it apprehends particular sights and sounds,
smells and tastes and touches; particular sensations of rest and
movement, pleasure and pain, memory, judgment, and volition, a
flux, “changeless in its ceaseless change.” We have so far found
neither a true object for thought, nor a subject which can think. And
yet this element, and this alone, is the simply, passively received, the
absolutely undeniable part of our experience,—we cannot deny it if
we would. And again, it is the absolutely necessary pre-requisite for
our exercise or acquisition, indeed for our very consciousness, of the
other two means or elements, without which there can be no real
knowledge.
 For there is, next in the logical order of the analysis of our
consciousness and in the degree of its undeniableness, the element
of the various forms of necessary thought, in as much as these are
experienced by us as necessary. We can, with Aristotle, simply call
them the ten categories; or we can, with greater precision and
extension, group them, so far with Kant, under the two main heads
of the two pure “aesthetic” Perceptions of time and space, on the
one hand; and of the various “analytic” Forms of judgment and of
the Categories of Unity, Reality, Substance, Possibility, etc., on the
other hand. Now it can be shown that it is only by means of this
whole second element, only through the co-operation of these
“perceptions” and forms of thought, that any kind even of dim
feeling of ordered succession or of system, of unity or meaning, is
found by our mind in that first element. Only these two elements,
found and taken together, present us, in their interaction, with even
the impression and possibility of something to reason about, and
something wherewith to reason.
The second element then differs from the first in this, that
whereas the first presents its contents simply as actual and
undeniable, yet without so far any necessity or significance: the
second presents its contents as both actual and necessary. By means
of the first element I see a red rose, but without any feeling of more
than the fact that a rose, or at least this one, is red; it might quite as
well be yellow or blue. By means of the second element, I think of a
body of any kind, not only as actually occupying some particular
space and time, but as necessarily doing so; I feel that I must so
think of it.
And yet there is a third and last element necessary to give real
value to the two previous ones. For only on the condition that I am
willing to trust these intimations of necessity, to believe that these
necessities of my subjective thought are objective as well, and
correspond to the necessities of Being, can I reach the trans-
subjective, can I have any real knowledge and experience of
anything whatsoever, either within me or without. The most
elementary experience, the humblest something to be granted as
really existing and as to be reasoned from, is thus invariably and
inevitably composed for me of three elements, of which only the first
two are directly experienced by me at all. And the third element, the
ethico-mystical, has to be there, I have to trust and endorse the
intimations of necessity furnished by the second element, if anything
is to come of the whole movement.
Thus, here also, at the very source of all our certainty, of the
worth attributable to the least or greatest of our thoughts and
feelings and acts, we already find the three elements: indubitable
sensation, clear thought, warm faith in and through action. And thus
life here already consists of multiplicity in unity; and what in it is
absolutely indubitable, is of value only because it constitutes the
indispensable starting-point and stimulation for the apprehension
and affirmation of realities not directly experienced, not absolutely
undeniable, but which alone bear with them all the meaning, all the
richness, all the reality and worth of life.
2. The three links in the chain of Reflex Action.
We can also find this same triad, perhaps more simply, if we look
to Psychology, and that most assured and most far-reaching of all its
results, the fact and analysis of Reflex Action. For we find here that
all the activities of specifically human life begin with a sense-
impression, as the first, the one simply given element; that they
move into and through a central process of mental abstraction and
reflection, as the second element, contributed by the mind itself;
and that they end, as the third element, in the discharge of will and
of action, in an act of free affirmation, expansion, and love.
In this endless chain composed of these groups of three links
each, the first link and the last link are obscure and mysterious: the
first, as coming from without us, and as still below our own thought;
the third, as going out from us, and seen by us only in its external
results, never in its actual operation, nor in its effect upon our own
central selves. Only the middle link is clear to us. And yet the most
mysterious part of the whole process, the effect of it all upon the
central self, is also the most certain and the most important result of
the whole movement, a movement which ever culminates in a
modification of the personality and which prepares this personality
for the next round of sense-perception, intellectual abstraction,
ethical affirmation and volitional self-determination,—acts in which
light and love, fixed and free, hard and cold and warm, are so
mysteriously, so universally, and yet so variously linked.

IV. Distribution of the Three Elements amongst Mankind and

throughout Human History.

Let us now watch and see where and how the three elements of
Religion appear among the periods of man’s life, the human
professions, and the races of mankind; then how they succeed each
other in history generally; and finally how they exist among the chief
types and phases of the Oriental, Classical Graeco-Roman, and
Judaeo-Christian religions.
1. The Elements: their distribution among man’s various ages,
sexes, professions, and races.
We have already noticed how children incline to the memory-side,
to the external, social type; and it is well they should do so, and
they should be wisely helped therein. Those passing through the
storm-and-stress period insist more upon the reason, the internal,
intellectual type; and mature souls lay stress upon the feelings and
the will, the internal, ethical type. So again, women generally tend
either to an excess of the external, to superstition; or of the
emotional, to fanaticism. Men, on the contrary, appear generally to
incline to an excess of the intellectual, to rationalism and
indifference.
Professions, too, both by the temperaments which they
presuppose, and the habits of mind which they foster, have various
affinities. The fighting, administrative, legal and political sciences
and services, readily incline to the external and institutional; the
medical, mathematical, natural science studies, to the internal-
intellectual; the poetical, artistic, humanitarian activities, to the
internal-emotional.
And whole races have tended and will tend, upon the whole, to
one or other of these three excesses: e.g. the Latin races, to
Externalism and Superstition; the Teutonic races, to the two
Interiorisms, Rationalism and Fanaticism.
2. Co-existence and succession of the Three Elements in history
generally.
The human race at large has evidently been passing, upon the
whole, from the exterior to the interior, but with a constant tendency
to drop one function for another, instead of supplementing,
stimulating, purifying each by means of the other two.
If we go back as far as any analyzable records will carry us, we
find that, in proportion as religion emerges from pure fetichism, it
has ever combined with the apprehension of a Power conceived, at
last and at best, as of a Father in heaven, that of a Bond with its
brethren upon earth. Never has the sacrifice, the so-to-speak vertical
relation between the individual man and God, between the
worshipper and the object of his worship, been without the sacrificial
meal, the communion, the so-to-speak lateral, horizontal relations
between man and his fellow-man, between the worshippers one and
all. Never has religion been purely and entirely individual; always has
it been, as truly and necessarily, social and institutional, traditional
and historical. And this traditional element, not all the religious
genius in the world can ever escape or replace: it was there,
surrounding and moulding the very pre-natal existence of each one
of us; it will be there, long after we have left the scene. We live and
die its wise servants and stewards, or its blind slaves, or in futile,
impoverishing revolt against it: we never, for good or for evil, really
get beyond its reach.
And yet all this stream and environment of the traditional and
social could make no impression upon me whatsoever unless it were
met by certain secret sympathies, by certain imperious wants and
energies within myself. If the contribution of tradition is
quantitatively by far the most important, and might be compared to
the contribution furnished by the Vocabulary to the constitution of a
definite, particular language,—the contribution of the individual is,
qualitatively and for that individual, more important still, and might
be compared to the contribution of the Grammar to the constitution
of that same language: for it is the Grammar which, though
incomparably less in amount than the Vocabulary, yet definitely
constitutes any and every language.
And there is here no necessary conflict with the claim of Tradition.
It is true that all real, actual Religion is ever an act of submission to
some fact or truth conceived as not only true but as obligatory, as
coming from God, and hence as beyond and above our purely
subjective fancies, opinings, and wishes. But it is also true that, if I
could not mentally hear or see, I should be incapable of hearing or
seeing anything of this kind or of any other; and that without some
already existing interior affinity with and mysterious capacity for
discriminating between such intimations—as either corresponding to
or as traversing my existing imperious needs and instincts—I could
not apprehend the former as coming from God. Without, then, such
non-fanciful, non-wilful, subjective capacities and dispositions, there
is for us not even the apprehension of the existence of such
objective realities: such capacities and dispositions are as necessary
pre-requisites to every act of faith, as sight is the absolute pre-
requisite for my discrimination between black and white. Hence as
far back as we can go, the traditional and social, the institutional
side of religion was accompanied, in varying, and at first small or
less perceptible degrees and forms, by intellectual and experimental
interpretation and response.
3. The Three Elements in the great Religions.
Even the Greek religion, so largely naturalistic up to the very end,
appears, in the centuries of its relative interiorization, as a triad
composed of a most ancient traditional cultus, a philosophy of
religion, and an experimental-ethical life; the latter element being
readily exemplified by the Demon of Socrates, and by the Eleusinian
and Orphic Mysteries.
In India and Tibet, again, Brahmanism and Buddhism may be said
to have divided these three elements between them, the former
representing as great an excess of the external as Buddhism does of
abstruse reasoning and pessimistic emotion. Mahometanism, while
combining, in very imperfect proportions, all three elements within
itself, lays special stress upon the first, the external element; and
though harbouring, for centuries now and more or less everywhere,
the third, the mystical element, looks, in its strictly orthodox
representatives, with suspicion upon this mysticism.
Judaism was slow in developing the second, the intellectual
element; and the third, the mystical, is all but wholly absent till the
Exilic period, and does not become a marked feature till still later on,
and in writers under Hellenistic influence. It is in the Book of
Wisdom, still more in Philo, that we find all three sides almost
equally developed. And from the Hasmonean period onwards till the
destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, we find a severe and ardent
external, traditional, authoritative school in the Pharisees; an
accommodating and rationalizing school in the Sadducees; and,
apart from both, more a sect than a school, the experimental,
ascetical, and mystical body of the Essenes.
But it is in Christianity, and throughout its various vicissitudes and
schools, that we can most fully observe the presence,
characteristics, and interaction of these three modalities. We have
already seen how the New Testament writings can be grouped, with
little or no violence, according to the predominance of one of these
three moods, under the heads of the traditional, historic, external,
the “Petrine” school; the reasoning, speculative-internal, the Pauline;
and the experimental, mystical-internal, the Joannine school. And in
the East, up to Clement of Alexandria, in the West up to St.
Augustine, we find the prevalence of the first type. And next, in the
East, in Clement and Origen, in St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the
Alexandrian and the Antiochene school generally, and in the West, in
St. Augustine, we find predominantly a combination of the second
and third types. The Areopagitic writings of the end of the fifth
century still further emphasize and systematize this Neo-Platonic
form of mystical speculation, and become indeed the great treasure-
house from which above all the Mystics, but also largely the
Scholastics, throughout the Middle Ages, drew much of their literary
material.
And those six or seven centuries of the Middle Ages are full of the
contrasts and conflicts between varying forms of Institutionalism,
Intellectualism, and Mysticism. Especially clearly marked is the
parallelism, interaction, and apparent indestructibleness of the
Scholastic and Mystical currents. Abelard and St. Bernard, St.
Thomas of Aquin and the great Franciscan Doctors, above all the
often largely latent, yet really ceaseless conflict between Realism
and Nominalism, all can be rightly taken as caused by various
combinations and degrees, insufficiencies or abnormalities in the
action of the three great powers of the human soul, and of the three
corresponding root-forms and functions of religion. And whereas,
during the prevalence of Realism, affective, mystical religion is the
concomitant and double of intellectual religion; during the later
prevalence of Nominalism, Mysticism becomes the ever-increasing
supplement, and at last, ever more largely, the substitute, for the
methods of reasoning. “Do penance and believe in the Gospel”
becomes now the favourite text, even in the mouth of Gerson (who
died in 1429), the great Nominalist Doctor, the Chancellor of the
then greatest intellectual centre upon earth, the University of Paris.
A constant depreciation of all dialectics, indeed largely of human
knowledge generally, appears even more markedly in the pages of
the gentle and otherwise moderate Thomas of Kempen (who died in
1471).
Although the Humanist Renaissance was not long in carrying away
many minds and hearts from all deeper consciousness and effort of
a moral and religious sort, yet in so far as men retained and but
further deepened and enriched their religious outlook and life, the
three old forms and modalities reappear, during the earlier stages of
the movement, in fresh forms and combinations. Perhaps the most
truly comprehensive and Christian representative of the new at its
best, is Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, the precursor of modern
philosophy. For he combines the fullest adhesion to, and life-long
labour for, External Institutional authority, with the keenest
Intellectual, Speculative life, and with the constant temper and
practice of experimental and Mystical piety. And a similar
combination we find in Blessed Sir Thomas More in England, who
lays down his life in defence of Institutional Religion and of the
authority of the visible Church and its earthly head; who is a devoted
lover of the New Learning, both Critical and Philosophical; and who
continuously cultivates the Interior Life. A little later on, we find the
same combination in Cardinal Ximenes in Spain.
But it is under the stress and strain of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation movements that the depth and vitality of the
three currents gets specially revealed. For in Germany, and in
Continental Protestantism generally, we see (immediately after the
very short first “fluid” stage of Luther’s and Zwingli’s attitude
consequent upon their breach with Rome) the three currents in a
largely separate condition, and hence with startling distinctness.
Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, different as are their temperaments and both
their earlier and their later Protestant attitudes and doctrines, all
three soon fall back upon some form and fragmentary continuation,
or even in its way intensification, of Institutional Religion,—driven to
such conservatism by the iron necessity of real life and the
irrepressible requirements of human nature. They thus formed that
heavy untransparent thing, orthodox Continental Protestantism.
Laelius and Faustus Socinus attempt the construction of a purely
Rationalistic Religion, and capture and intensify the current of a
clear, cold Deism, in which the critical mind is to be supreme. And
the Anabaptist and other scattered sects and individuals (the latter
represented at their best by Sebastian Frank) attempt, in their turn,
to hold and develop a purely interior, experimental, emotional-
intuitive, ecstatic Religion, which is warm, indeed feverish and
impulsive, and distrusts both the visible and institutional, and the
rational and critical.
In England the same phenomenon recurs in a modified form. For
in Anglicanism, the most characteristic of its parties, the High Church
school, represents predominantly the Historical, Institutional
principle. The Latitudinarian school fights for the Rational, Critical,
and Speculative element. The Evangelical school stands in close
spiritual affinity to all but the Unitarian Nonconformists in England,
and represents the Experimental, Mystical element. We readily think
of Laud and Andrewes, Pusey and Keble as representatives of the
first class; of Arnold, Stanley, and Jowett as figures of the second
class; of Thomas Scott, John Newton, and Charles Simeon as types
of the third class. The Tracts for the Times, Essays and Reviews, and
(further back) Bunyan’s Works, would roughly correspond to them in
literature.
And this trinity of tendency can also be traced in Catholicism.
Whole Religious Orders and Congregations can be seen or felt to
tend, upon the whole, to one or the other type. The Jesuits can be
taken as predominantly making for the first type, for fact, authority,
submission, obedience; the Dominicans for the second type, for
thought, a philosophico-speculative, intellectual religion; the
Benedictines, in their noble Congregation of St. Maur, for a historico-
critical intellectual type; the French Oratory, for a combination of
both the speculative (Malebranche) and the critical (Simon,
Thomassin); and the Franciscans, for the third, for action and
experimental, affective spirituality.
And yet none of these Orders but has had its individuals, and even
whole secondary periods, schools, and traditions, markedly typical of
some current other than that specially characteristic of the Order as
a whole. There are the great Critics and Historians of the Jesuit
Order: the Spanish Maldonatus, the New Testament Scholar,
admirable for his time, and helpful and unexhausted still; the French
Denys Petau, the great historian of Christian Doctrine and of its
development; the Flemish Bollandists, with their unbroken tradition
of thorough critical method and incorruptible accuracy and
impartiality. There are the great Jesuit Mystics: the Spanish
Venerable Balthazar Alvarez, declared by St. Teresa to be the holiest
mystical soul she had ever known; and the Frenchmen, Louis
Lallemant and Jean Joseph Surin. There are those most attractive
figures, combining the Scholar and the Mystic: Blessed Edmund
Campion, the Oxford Scholar and Elizabethan Martyr; and Jean
Nicolas Grou, the French translator of Plato, who died in exile in
England in 1800. The Dominicans have, from the first, been really
representative of external authority as well of the speculative
rational bent; and the mystical side has never been wanting to them,
so amongst the early German Dominicans, Tauler and Suso, and
many a Dominican female Saint. The Benedictines from the first
produced great rulers; such striking types of external authority as
the Pope-Saints, Gregory the Great and Gregory VII (Hildebrand),
and the great Benedictine Abbots and Bishops throughout the Middle
Ages are rightly felt to represent one whole side of this great Order.
And again such great mystical figures as St. Hildegard of Bingen and
the two Saints Gertrude are fully at home in that hospitable Family.
And the Franciscans have, in the Conventuals, developed
representatives of the external authority type; and in such great
philosopher-theologians as Duns Scotus and Occam, a combination
which has more of the intellectual, both speculative and critical, than
of the simply ascetical or even mystical type.
And if we look for individual contrasts, we can often find them in
close temporal and local juxtaposition, as in France, in the time of
Louis XIV, in the persons of Bossuet, Richard Simon, and Fénelon, so
strikingly typical of the special strengths and limitations of the
institutional, rational, experimental types respectively. And yet the
most largely varied influence will necessarily proceed from
characters which combine not only two of the types, as in our times
Frederick Faber combined the external and experimental; but which
hold them all three, as with John Henry Newman in England or
Antonio Rosmini in Italy.
 V. Causes operative in all Religion towards Minimizing or
Suppressing one or other Element, or towards denying the need of
any Multiplicity.

Let us end this chapter with some consideration of the causes and
reasons that are ever tending to produce and to excuse the quiet
elimination or forcible suppression of one or other of the elements
that constitute the full organism of religion, and even to minimize or
to deny altogether the necessity of any such multiplicity.
1. The religious temper longs for simplification.
To take the last point first. How obvious and irresistible seems
always, to the specifically religious temper, the appeal to boundless
simplification. “Can there be anything more sublimely, utterly simple
than religion?” we all say and feel. In these regions, if anywhere, we
long and thirst to see and feel all things in one, to become ourselves
one, to find the One Thing necessary, the One God, and to be one
with Him for ever. Where is there room here, we feel even angrily,
for all these distinctions, all this balancing of divers faculties and
parts? Is not all this but so much Aestheticism, some kind of subtle
Naturalism, a presumptuous attempting to build up bit by bit in
practice, and to analyze part from part in theory, what can only
come straight from God Himself, and, coming from Him the One,
cannot but bear the impress of His own indistinguishable Unity? And
can there be anything more unforcedly, unanalyzably simple than all
actual religion,—and this in exact proportion to its greatness? Look
at St. Francis of Assisi, or St. John Baptist; look above all at the
Christ, supremely, uniquely great, just because of His sublime
simplicity! Look at, feel, the presence and character of those
countless souls that bear, unknown even to themselves, some
portion of this His impress within themselves, forming thus a kind of
indefinitely rich extension of His reign, of the kingdom of His
childlikeness. Away then with everything that at all threatens to
break up a corresponding simplicity in ourselves! Poverty of spirit,
emptiness of heart, a constant turning away from all distraction,
from all multiplicity both of thought and of feeling, of action and of
being; this, surely, is the one and only necessity for the soul, at least
in proportion to the height of her spiritual call.
2. Yet every truly living Unity is constituted in Multiplicity.
Now in all this there is a most subtle mixture of truth and of error.
It is profoundly true that all that is at all, still more all personality,
and hence above all God, the Spirit of spirits is, just in that
proportion, profoundly mysteriously One, with a Unity which all our
best thinking can only distantly and analogously represent. And all
religion will ever, in proportion as it is vigorous and pure, thirst after
an ever-increasing Unification, will long to be one and to give itself
to the One,—to follow naked the naked Jesus. Yet all the history of
human thought and all the actual experience of each one of us
prove that this Unity can be apprehended and developed, by and
within our poor human selves, only in proportion as we carefully
persist in stopping at the point where it can most thoroughly
organize and harmonize the largest possible multiplicity of various
facts and forces.
No doubt the living soul is not a whole made up of separate parts;
still less is God made up of parts. Yet we cannot apprehend this
Unity of God except in multiplicity of some sort; nor can we
ourselves become rightly one, except through being in a true sense
many, and very many, as well. Indeed the Christian Faith insists that
there is something most real actually corresponding to this our
conception of multiplicity even and especially in God Himself. For it
as emphatically bids us think of Him as in one sense a Trinity as in
another a Unity. And it is one of the oldest and most universal of
Christian approaches to this mystery, to conceive it under the
analogy of the three powers of the soul. God the Father and Creator
is conceived as corresponding to the sense-perception and
Imagination, to Memory-power; God the Son and Redeemer, as the
Logos, to our reason; and God the Holy Spirit, as corresponding to
the effective-volitional force within us; and then we are bidden to
remember that, as in ourselves these three powers are all united in
One personality, so in God the three Persons are united in One
substance and nature. Even the supremely and ineffably simple
Godhead is not, then, a mere, undifferentiated One.
 And if we take the case of Our Lord, even when He is
apprehended in the most abstract of orthodox ways: we get either
the duality of natures, God and Man; or a trinity of offices, the
Kingly, the Prophetic, and the Priestly,—these latter again
corresponding roughly to the External, the Intellectual, and the
Mystical element of the human soul. And even if we restrict
ourselves to His Humanity, and as pictured in any one Gospel, nay in
the earliest, simplest, and shortest, St. Mark, we shall still come
continually upon a rich multiplicity, variety, and play of different
exterior and interior apprehensions and activities, emotions and
sufferings, all profoundly permeated by one great end and aim, yet
each differing from the other, and contributing a different share to
the one great result. The astonishment at the disciples’ slowness of
comprehension, the flash of anger at Peter, the sad reproachfulness
towards Judas, the love of the children, the sympathy with women,
the pity towards the fallen, the indignation against the Pharisees, the
rejoicing in the Father’s revelation, the agony in the Garden, the
desolation on the Cross, are all different emotions. The perception of
the beauty of the flowers of the field, of the habits of plants and of
birds, of the varieties of the day’s early and late cloud and sunshine,
of the effects of storm and rain; and again of the psychology of
various classes of character, age, temperament, and avocation; and
indeed of so much more, are all different observations. The lonely
recollection in the desert, the nights spent in prayer upon the
mountains, the preaching from boats and on the lake-side, the long
foot-journeyings, the many flights, the reading and expounding in
the Synagogues, the curing the sick and restoring them to their right
mind, the driving the sellers from the Temple-court, and so much
else, are all different activities.
And if we take what is or should be simplest in the spiritual life of
the Christian, his intention and motive; and if we conceive this
according to the evidence of the practice of such Saints as have
themselves revealed to us the actual working of their souls, and of
the long and most valuable series of controversies and ecclesiastical
decisions in this delicate matter, we shall again find the greatest
possible Multiplicity in the deepest possible Unity. For even in such a
Saint as St. John of the Cross, whose own analysis and theory of the
interior life would often seem all but directly and completely to
exclude the element of multiplicity, it is necessary ever to interpret
and supplement one part of his teaching by another, and to
understand the whole in the light of his actual, deliberate, habitual
practice. This latter will necessarily ever exceed his explicit teaching,
both in its completeness and in its authority. Now if in his formal
teaching he never wearies of insisting upon detachment from all
things, and upon the utmost simplification of the intentions of the
soul, yet he occasionally fully states what is ever completing this
doctrine in his own mind,—that this applies only to the means and
not to the end, and to false and not to true multiplicity. “The spiritual
man,” he writes in one place, “has greater joy and comfort in
creatures, if he detaches himself from them; and he can have no joy
in them, if he considers them as his own.” “He,” as distinct from the
unspiritual man, “rejoices in their truth,” “in their best conditions,”
“in their substantial worth.” He “has joy in all things.”[37] A real
multiplicity then exists in things, and in our most purified
apprehension of them; varied, rich joys related to this multiplicity are
facts in the life of the Saints; and these varied joys may legitimately
be dwelt on as incentives to holiness for oneself and others. “All that
is wanting now,” he writes to Donna Juana de Pedraça, his penitent,
“is that I should forget you. But consider how that is to be forgotten
which is ever present to the soul.”[38] An affection then, as pure as it
was particular, was ever in his heart, and fully accepted and willed
and acknowledged to its immediate object, as entirely conformable
to his own teaching. St. Teresa, on the other hand, is a character of
much greater natural variety, and yet it is she who has left us that
most instructive record of her temporary erroneous ideal of a false
simplicity, in turning away, for a number of years, from the
consideration of the Humanity of Christ. And a constant, keen
interest in the actual larger happenings of her time, in the
vicissitudes of the Church in her day, was stamped upon all her
teaching, and remained with her up to the very end.
 Perhaps the most classic expression of the true Unity is that
implied by St. Ignatius of Loyola, when he tells us that “Peace is the
simplicity of order.” For order as necessarily implies a multiplicity of
things ordered as the unity of the supreme ordering principle.
Fénelon, doubtless, at times, especially in parts of his condemned
Explication des Maximes des Saints, too much excludes, or seems to
exclude, the element of multiplicity in the soul’s intention. Yet, both
before and after this book, some of the clearest and completest
statements in existence, as to the true unity and diversity to be
found in the most perfect life, are to be found among his writings. In
his Latin Epistle to Pope Clement XI he insists upon the irreducible
element of multiplicity in the motives of the very highest sanctity.
For he maintains first that, though “in the specific act of Love, the
chief of the theological virtues, it is possible to love the absolute
perfection of God considered in Himself, without the addition of any
motive of the promised beatitude,” yet that “this specific act of love,
of its own nature, never excludes, and indeed most frequently
includes, this same motive of beatitude.” He asserts next that
though, “in the highest grade of perfection amongst souls here
below, deliberate acts of simply natural love of ourselves, and even
supernatural acts of hope which are not commanded by love mostly
cease,” yet that in this “habitual State of any and every most perfect
soul upon earth, the promised beatitude is desired, and there is no
diminution of the exercise of the virtue of hope, indeed day by day
there is an increase in this desire, from the specific motive of hope
of this great good, which God Himself bids us all, without exception,
to hope for.” And he declares finally that “there is no state of
perfection in which souls enjoy an uninterrupted contemplation, or in
which the powers of the soul are bound by an absolute incapacity for
eliciting the discursive acts of Christian piety; nor is there a state in
which they are exempted from following the laws of the Church, and
executing all the orders of superiors.”[39]
All the variety, then, of the interested and of the disinterested; of
hope and fear and sorrow; of gratitude and adoration and love; of
the Intuitive and Discursive; of Recollection and external Action, is to
be found, in a deeper, richer, more multiple and varied and at the
same time a more unified unity, in the most perfect life; and all this
in proportion to its approach to its own ideal and normality.
Indeed the same multiplicity in unity is finely traced by St.
Bernard, the great contemplative, in every human act that partakes
of grace at all. “That which was begun by Grace, gets accomplished
alike by both Grace and Free Will, so that they operate mixedly not
separately, simultaneously not successively, in each and all of their
processes. The acts are not in part Grace, in part Free Will; but the
whole of each act is effected by both in an undivided operation.”[40]

VI. The Special Motives operating in each Element towards the

Suppression of the other Elements.

Now the elements of Multiplicity and Friction and of Unity and

Harmonization, absolutely essential to all life, everywhere and
always cost us much to keep and gain. But there are also, very
special reasons why the three great constituents of religion should,
each in its own way, tend continually to tempt the soul to retain only
it, and hence to an impoverishing simplification. Let us try and see
this tendency at work in the two chief constituents, as against each
other, and in combination against the third.
1. In the Historical and Institutional Element, as against all else.
We have seen how all religiousness is ever called into life by some
already existing religion. And this religion will consist in the
continuous commemoration of some great religious facts of the past.
It will teach and represent some divine revelation as having been
made, in and through such and such a particular person, in such and
such a particular place, at such and such a particular time; and such
a revelation will claim acceptance and submission as divine and
redemptive in and through the very form and manner in which it was
originally made. The very peculiarity, which will render the teaching
distinctively religious, will hence be a certain real, or at least an at