eems to be
needed, if this deep tendency is to be brought up into consciousness;
and some education, if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus and
this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition; that is to say,
by religious belief and practice. Or they may come from the countless
minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few
of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or
environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual
order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied,
the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule,
this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of
conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and
reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. There is, however,
nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself. It has its parallel
in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a
method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the
union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.

Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for
the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the
Divine. But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very
little. Thus we see that the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" spoke as
a true psychologist when he said that "a secret blind love pressing
towards God" held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do;
"for He may well be loved but not thought--by love He may be gotten and
holden, but by thought never."[80] Nevertheless, if that consistency of
deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by
us, every man's conception of the God Whom he serves ought to be the
very best of which he is capable. Because ideas which we recognize as
partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of
other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and
seeking a Reality which fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and
beauty, as well, as our instinct for good. It is easy, natural, and
always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a
little bit below its highest possible. On one hand to wallow in easy
loves, rest in traditional formulae, or enjoy a "moving type of devotion"
which makes no intellectual demand. On the other, to accept without
critici