ry relations of life. I don't think I like the book quite so
much as I did. There is a hot-house, egotistical air about much of its
piety. Other persons are, ordinarily, the appointed means of learning
the love of God; and to stifle human affections must be very often to
render the love of God impossible.

In other words, the further he pushed the one conception the further he
diverged from a Kempis, whose asceticism was built almost purely on the
other.

Most probably a reconciliation of these two conceptions will be found in
a clear recognition of the two modes in which God is apprehended and
consequently loved by the human mind and heart; the one concrete and
experimental, accessible to the simplest and least cultured, and of
necessity for all; the other, abstract in a sense--a knowledge through
the ideas and representations of the mind, demanding a certain degree of
intelligence and studious contemplation, and therefore not necessary, at
least in any high degree, for all. The difference is like that between
the knowledge of salt as tasted in solution and the knowledge of it as
seen apart in its crystallized state; or between the knowledge and love
of a musical composer as known in his compositions, and as known in
himself, from his compositions. The latter needs a not universal power
of inference which the most sympathetic musical expert may entirely
lack.

Of these two approaches to Divine love and union, the former is
certainly compatible with, and conducive to, the unlimited fulness of
every well-ordered natural affection; but the latter--a life of more
conscious, reflex, and actual attention to God--undoubtedly does require
a certain abstraction and concentration of our limited spiritual
energies, and can only be trodden at the cost of a certain inward
seclusion of which outward seclusion is normally a condition.
Instinctively, Catholic tradition has regarded it as a vocation
apart--as, like the life of continence, a call to something more than
human, and demanding a sacrifice or atrophy of functions proper to
another grade of spirituality. Even what is called a "life of thought"
makes a similar demand to a great extent; it involves a narrowing of
other interests; a departure from the conditions of ordinary practical
life. The "contemplative life" is inclusively all this and more; it is a
sort of anticipation of the future life of vision. Still, though for a
few it may be the surest or the only approach to sa