with blunt candour that such persons are for the
most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such
a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate
presence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the
contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as
it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude
thrown open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have
already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.

Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the
experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather
than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the
material. Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it
is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in
those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of
those experiences. But many minds are, as it were, their own religious
artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to
their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes
be for them that--to revert again to our original simile--the self turns
from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the
time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the
room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this
happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious
day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout
people who tend to visualization have probably known. When the break
with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in
which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.
The Bible is full of examples of this. Good historic instances are the
visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first
contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and
emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the
visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this
type.[97]

I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme
types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is
with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may
live it. But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within
limits represent a perfectly g