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It is the beyond, over-personal element which has kept them alive, and this element has always had a hard struggle to overcome and transform the here-and-now elements. Whenever the historical religions are traced back to their sources, there is discovered an element above the world in the souls of their founders and of their immediate followers.
This book has been called "The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day" in order to emphasize as much as possible the practical, here-and-now nature of its subject; and specially to combat the idea that the spiritual life or the mystic life, as its more intense manifestations are sometimes called is to be regarded as primarily a matter of history. It is not. It is a matter of biology.
Thus deepening and incarnating bringing in, giving body to, and in some sense exhibiting by means of our own growing and changing experience that transcendent Otherness, the fact of the Life of the Spirit in the here-and-now.
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.
We should not starve or repress the abounding life within us; but, relieving it of its concentration on the here-and-now, give its attention and its passion a wider circle of interest over which to range, a greater love to which it can consecrate its growing powers. We do not yet know what the limit of such sublimation may be.
Preacher, need not be so encyclopedic; and you ought to be illuminating and uplifting on one subject in half an hour and no longer. That light is brightest which is condensed. The Christian religion is a livable creed, is it not? It is a day-by-day religion; a here-and-now religion. True, it comprehends eternity, and its perfect flower is immortal life and peace. But that is for the hereafter.
And it may even be that beyond the joy and renewal which come from self-conquest and unification, a level of spiritual life most certainly open to all who will really work for it; and beyond that deeper insight, more widespreading love, and perfection of adjustment to the here-and-now which we recognize and reverence as the privilege of the pure in heart beyond all these, it may be that life still reserves for man another secret and another level of consciousness; a closer identification with Reality, such as eye hath not seen, or ear heard.
Work may not be so hard, but the facts of life are a great deal harder, the hardest, barest of them being the here-and-now of all things, the dead levelness of forty an irrigated plain that has no hill of vision, no valley of dream. But it may have its hill in Hingham with a bit of meadow down below.
A refusal to get everything out of it that we can for ourselves, to be possessive, or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a sense of detachment or asceticism; of further destiny and obligation for the soul than complete earthly happiness or here-and-now success.
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