ar overpass it: and this conclusion has been reached
again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians
we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of
finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a
prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and
emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to
God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is
significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of
rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus
we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox
Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing--

"I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself
suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself
at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in
choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no
turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique
moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious,
sovereign and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens
out the way of the Lord."[9]

Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: "If," he says, "this Absolute
Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our
life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new
life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite
infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is
only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it
associations too human and too limited adequately to express this
profound God-consciousness."[10]

Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those
moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic
activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.
We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their
philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the
self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so
to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Ho