serves, and new
understanding of prayer must result. By its means powers of perception
and response ordinarily latent are roused to action; and thus the whole
life is enriched. That faculty in us which corresponds, not with the
busy life of succession but with the eternal sources of power, gets its
chance. "Though the soul," says Von Huegel, "cannot abidingly abstract
itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself
in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of direct
preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and simplification
to the soul."[93]

True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet surrender to reality, "is
rest to the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body;
nourishment and refreshment."[94] Psychology endorses the constant
statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one need hope to live
a spiritual life who cannot find a little time each day for this retreat
from the window, this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen "with
the forces of the soul," as Ruysbroeck puts it, "gathered into unity of
the Spirit."[95] Under these conditions, and these only, the intuitive,
creative, artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the highest
ends: and in these powers rather than the rational our best chance of
apprehending eternal values abides, "Taste and _see_ that the Lord is
sweet." "Be still! be still! and _know_ that I am God!"

Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activities are of such
paramount interest to the spiritual life, we may before we go on glance
at one or two of its characteristics. And first we notice that the fact
that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge in the mental and
contemplative type of prayer explains why it is that even the most
devout persons are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst
engaged in it. Very often, they are utterly unable to keep their
attention fixed; and the reason of this is, that conscious attention and
thought are not the faculties primarily involved. What is involved, is
reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to depart from its assigned
end and drift into mere day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or
some intruding image starts a new train of associations. The religious
mind is distressed by this constant failure to look steadily at that
which alone it wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that
the machinery used is affective, and obedient to the rise and