the light--" that is to
say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction,
harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration:
this is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic
conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The
voice which St. Mechthild heard, saying "Come and be reconciled,"
expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity.

This need for the conversion or remaking of the instinctive life,
rather than the achievement of mere beliefs, has always been appreciated
by real spiritual teachers; who are usually some generations in advance
of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the "root of evil," the
heart of the "old man" and best promise of the "new." Here is the raw
material both of vice and of virtue--namely, a mass of desires and
cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural
and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and desire," says William Law,
"consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature."[70]
The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set love in order, thou
that lovest Me!" declared the one law of mental growth.[71] To use for a
moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the
first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the
direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in
which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast
setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of
the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and
which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard,
conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and
higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true
self-conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness,
reality and worth.

"Oh, Academicus," says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would
endorse, "forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a
plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that
there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth
of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives
within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have
in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and
rules, can only help us to be