fall of
feeling rather than the control of the will. "By love shall He be gotten
and holden, by thought never."

Next, consider for a moment the way in which the foreconscious does and
must present its apprehensions to consciousness. Its cognitions of the
spiritual are in the nature of pure immediacy, of uncriticized contacts:
and the best and greatest of them seem to elude altogether that
machinery of speech and image which has been developed through the life
of sense. The well-known language of spiritual writers about the divine
darkness or ignorance is an acknowledgment of this. God is "known
darkly." Our experience of Eternity is "that of which nothing can be
said." It is "beyond feeling" and "beyond knowledge," a certitude known
in the ground of the soul, and so forth. It is indeed true that the
spiritual world is for the human mind a transcendent world, does differ
utterly in kind from the best that the world of succession is able to
give us; as we know once for all when we establish a contact with it,
however fleeting. But constantly the foreconscious--which, as we shall
do well to remember, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of the
poem, and the creative phantasy--works up its transcendent intuitions in
symbolic form. For this purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of
speech, sometimes that of image. As our ordinary reveries constantly
proceed by way of an interior conversation or narrative, so the content
of spiritual contemplation is often expressed in dialogue, in which
memory and belief are fused with the fruit of perception. The "Dialogue
of St. Catherine of Siena," the "Life of Suso," and the "Imitation of
Christ," all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed
illustrations of it might be found in every school and period of
religious literature.

Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spontaneous forms of autistic
thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their
consciousness of direct communion with God. I need not point out how
easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and
Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their
characteristic experience. "Blessed is that soul," says a Kempis, "that
heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of
consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and
take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the
Cross has reminded us