higher faculties, that few deliberately undertake this education
at all. They are content to make their contacts with things by a
vague, unregulated power, ever apt to play truant, ever apt to fail
them. Unless they be spurred to it by that passion for ultimate
things which expresses itself in religion, philosophy, or art, they
seldom learn the secret of a voluntary concentration of the mind.

Since the philosopher's interests are mainly objective, and the
artist seldom cogitates on his own processes, it is, in the end, to
the initiate of religion that we are forced to go, if we would learn
how to undertake this training for ourselves. The religious
contemplative has this further attraction for us: that he is by
nature a missionary as well. The vision which he has achieved is
the vision of an intensely loving heart; and love, which cannot
keep itself to itself, urges him to tell the news as widely and as
clearly as he may. In his works, he is ever trying to reveal the
secret of his own deeper life and wider vision, and to help his
fellow men to share it: hence he provides the clearest, most
orderly, most practical teachings on the art of contemplation that
we are likely to find. True, our purpose in attempting this art may
seem to us very different from his: though if we carry out the
principles involved to their last term, we shall probably find that
they have brought us to the place at which he aimed from the
first. But the method, in its earlier stages, must be the same;
whether we call the Reality which is the object of our quest
aesthetic, cosmic, or divine. The athlete must develop much the
same muscles, endure much the same discipline, whatever be the
game he means to play.

So we will go straight to St. Teresa, and inquire of her what
was the method by which she taught her daughters to gather
themselves together, to capture and hold the attitude most
favourable to communion with the spiritual world. She tells us--
and here she accords with the great tradition of the Christian
contemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under the pressure
of long experience--that the process is a gradual one. The method
to be employed is a slow, patient training of material which the
licence of years has made intractable; not the sudden easy turning
of the mind in a new direction, that it may minister to a new
fancy for "the mystical view of things." Recollection begins, she
says, in the deliberate and regular practice of m