of your spirit," as
the mystics say--the great forces of love, beauty, wonder, grief,
may do for you now and again. These lift you perforce from the
consideration of the details to the contemplation of the All: turn
you from the tidy world of image to the ineffable world of fact.
But they are fleeting and ungovernable experiences, descending
with dreadful violence on the soul. Are you willing that your
participation in Reality shall depend wholly on these incalculable
visitations: on the sudden wind and rain that wash your windows,
and let in the vision of the landscape at your gates? You can, if
you like, keep those windows clear. You can, if you choose to
turn your attention that way, learn to look out of them. These are
the two great phases in the education of every contemplative: and
they are called in the language of the mystics the purification of
the senses and the purification of the will.

Those who are so fortunate as to experience in one of its many
forms the crisis which is called "conversion" are seized, as it
seems to them, by some power stronger than themselves and
turned perforce in the right direction. They find that this
irresistible power has cleansed the windows of their homely coat
of grime; and they look out, literally, upon a new heaven and new
earth. The long quiet work of adjustment which others must
undertake before any certitude rewards them is for these
concentrated into one violent shattering and rearranging of the
self, which can now begin its true career of correspondence with
the Reality it has perceived. To persons of this type I do not
address myself: but rather to the ordinary plodding scholar of life,
who must reach the same goal by a more gradual road.

What is it that smears the windows of the senses? Thought,
convention, self-interest. We throw a mist of thought between
ourselves and the external world: and through this we discern, as
in a glass darkly, that which we have arranged to see. We see it in
the way in which our neighbours see it; sometimes through a
pink veil, sometimes through a grey. Religion, indigestion,
priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes. The prismatic
colours of a fashionable school of art may stain them. Inevitably,
too, we see the narrow world our windows show us, not "in
itself," but in relation to our own needs, moods, and preferences;
which exercise a selective control upon those few aspects of the
whole which penetrate to the field of conscio