ase of
Christian monasticism--there has been an unbalanced cultivation of the
contemplative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imperfectly
vitalized a-social type of spirituality. On the other hand, in our own
day the tendency to action usually obliterates the contemplative side of
experience altogether: and the result is the feverishness, exhaustion
and uncertainty of aim characteristic of the over-driven and the
underfed. But no one can be said to live in its fulness the life of the
Spirit who does not observe a due balance between the two: both
receiving and giving, both apprehending and expressing, and thus
achieving that state of which Ruysbroeck said "Then only is our life a
whole, when work and contemplation dwell in us side by side, and we are
perfectly in both of them at once."[25] All Christian writers on the
life of the Spirit point to the perfect achievement of this two-fold
ideal in Christ; the pattern of that completed humanity towards which
the indwelling Spirit is pressing the race. His deeds of power and
mercy, His richly various responses to every level of human existence,
His gift to others of new faith and life, were directly dependent on the
nights spent on the mountain in prayer. When St. Paul entreats us to
grow up into the fulness of His stature, this is the ideal that is
implied.

In the intermediate term of the religious experience, that felt
communion with a Person which is the _clou_ of the devotional life, we
get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of
transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of
contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that
religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual
growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity
has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the
exaggerations to which it has led. Both extremes are richly represented
in the literature of mysticism. But we should remember that Christianity
is not alone in thus requiring place to be made for such a conception of
God as shall give body to all the most precious and fruitful experiences
of the heart, providing simple human sense and human feeling with
something on which to lay hold. In India, there is the existence, within
and alongside the austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of the
ardent personal Vaishnavite devotion to the heart's Lord, known as
Bhakti Marga. In Islam, there is the impassio