, and find place for, the last-comer in the evolutionary
series: the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual
consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and
pointing, not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human
growth. But it cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as
something separate from, and wholly unconditioned by, our racial past.
We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the
end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which
St. Paul calls "growing up into the stature of Christ." Here psychology
is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to
recognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us. In the
spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the
religious consciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we
perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of this deep germinal
life. And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward
the upgrowth of this spiritual life, we must take into account those
earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue
underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition
and explain so many of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that the
psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven; and that every one of us
still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many
of the characters of those stages of development through which the race
has passed--characters which inevitably give their colour to our
religious no less than to our social life.

"I desire," says a Kempis, "to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take
thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and
unmortified passions depress me. I will in my mind be above all things
but in despite of myself I am constrained to be beneath, so I unhappy
man fight with myself and am made grievous to myself while the spirit
seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath. O what I suffer
within while I think on heavenly things in my mind; the company of
fleshly things cometh against me when I pray."[63]

"Oh Master," says the Scholar in Boehme's great dialogue, "the creatures
that live in me so withhold me, that I cannot wholly yield and give
myself up as I willingly would."[64]

No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation
than have these old specialists in the spiritual