lse towards action, its often strongly felt
accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and
dynamic interpretation of that life. Indeed, if the first moment in the
life of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal Life, the second
moment--without which the first has little worth for him--consists of
his response to that transcendent Reality. Perception of it lays on him
the obligation of living in its atmosphere, fulfilling its meaning, if
he can: and this will involve for him a measure of inward
transformation, a difficult growth and change. Thus the ideas of new
birth and regeneration have always been, and I think must ever be,
closely associated with man's discovery of God: and the soul's true path
seems to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral effort, and
thence to charity.

Even so did the Oxford Methodists, who began by trying only to worship
God and _be_ good by adhering to a strict devotional rule, soon find
themselves impelled to try to _do_ good by active social work.[22] And
at his highest development, and in so far as he has appropriated the
full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should
find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and
contemplation. Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss
in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich
and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a
fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent
love, and its felt possession of and duty towards immanent love--a paradox
which only some form of incarnational philosophy can solve. It is said
of Abu Said, the great S[=u]fi, at the full term of his development,
that he "did all normal things while ever thinking of God."[23] Here, I
believe, we find the norm of the spiritual life, in such a complete
response both to the temporal and to the eternal revelations and demands
of the Divine nature: on the one hand, the highest and most costing
calls made on us by that world of succession in which we find ourselves;
on the other, an unmoved abiding in the bosom of eternity, "where was
never heard quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to
turne."[24]

There have been many schools and periods in which one half of this dual
life of man has been unduly emphasized to the detriment of the other.
Often in the East--and often too in the first, pre-Benedictine ph