Master,
declare that such love of God requires all that they have, not only of
feeling, but also of intellect and of power; since He is to be loved
with heart and mind and strength. Thought and action on highest levels
are involved in it, for it means, not religious emotionalism, but the
unflickering orientation of the whole self towards Him, ever seeking and
finding the Eternal; the linking up of all behaviour on that string, so
that the apparently hard and always heroic choices which are demanded,
are made at last because they are inevitable. It is true that this
dominant interest will give to our lives a special emotional colour and
a special kind of happiness; but in this, as in the best, deepest,
richest human love, such feeling-tone and such happiness--though in some
natures of great beauty and intensity--are only to be looked upon as
secondary characters, and never to be aimed at.

When St. Teresa said that the real object of the spiritual marriage was
"the incessant production of work, work,"[137] I have no doubt that many
of her nuns were disconcerted; especially the type of ease-loving
conservatives whom she and her intimates were accustomed to refer to as
the pussy-cats. But in this direct application to religious experience
of St. Thomas' doctrine of love, she set up an ideal of the spiritual
life which is as valid at the present day in the entanglements of our
social order, as it was in the enclosed convents of sixteenth-century
Spain. Love, we said, is the cause of action. It urges and directs our
behaviour, conscious and involuntary, towards an end. The mother is
irresistibly impelled to act towards her child's welfare, the ambitious
man towards success, the artist towards expression of his vision. All
these are examples of behaviour, love-driven towards ends. And religious
experience discloses to us a greater more inclusive end, and this vital
power of love as capable of being used on the highest levels,
regenerated, directed to eternal interests; subordinating behaviour,
inspiring suffering, unifying the whole self and its activities,
mobilizing them for this transcendental achievement. This generous love,
to go back to the quotation from Baron von Huegel which opened our
inquiry, will indeed cause the behaviour it controls to exhibit both
rightful contact with and renunciation of the particular and fleeting;
because in and through this series of linked deeds it is uniting with
itself all human activit