nterest. These readjustments were helped by the deliberate
acceptance of the useful suggestions of religion, the education of the
foreconscious, the formation of habits of charity and prayer.

The greatest and most real of living writers on this subject, Baron von
Huegel, has given us another definition of the personal spiritual life
which may fruitfully be compared with this. It must and shall, he says,
exhibit rightful contact with and renunciation of the Particular and
Fleeting; and with this ever seeks and finds the Eternal--deepening and
incarnating within its own experience this "transcendent
Otherness."[129] Nothing which we are likely to achieve can go beyond
this profound saying. We see how many rich elements are contained in it:
effort and growth, a temper both social and ascetic, a demand for and a
receiving of power. True, to some extent it restates the position at
which we arrived in the first chapter: but we now wish to examine more
thoroughly into that position and discover its practical applications.
Let us then begin by unpacking it, and examining its chief characters
one by one.

If we do this, we find that it demands of us:--(1) Rightful contact with
the Particular and Fleeting. That is, a willing acceptance of all
this-world tasks, obligations, relations, and joys; in fact, the Active
Life of Becoming in its completeness.

(2) But also, a certain renunciation of that Particular and Fleeting. A
refusal to get everything out of it that we can for ourselves, to be
possessive, or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a sense of
detachment or asceticism; of further destiny and obligation for the soul
than complete earthly happiness or here-and-now success.

(3) And with this ever--not merely in hours of devotion--to seek and
find the Eternal; penetrating our wholesome this-world action through
and through with the very spirit of contemplation.

(4) Thus deepening and incarnating--bringing in, giving body to, and in
some sense exhibiting by means of our own growing and changing
experience--that transcendent Otherness, the fact of the Life of the
Spirit in the here-and-now.

The full life of the Spirit, then, is once more declared to be active,
contemplative, ascetic and apostolic; though nowadays we express these
abiding human dispositions in other and less formidable terms. If we
translate them as work, prayer, self-discipline and social service they
do not look quite so bad. But even so, wh