ated, gathered together, recollected,
and really endowed with new power of dealing with circumstance--we have
not begun to live the life of the Spirit, or grasped the practical
connection between such a daily discipline and the power of doing our
best work, whatever it may be.

I will illustrate this from a living example: that of the Sadhu Sundar
Singh. No one, I suppose, who came into personal contact with the Sadhu,
doubted that they were in the presence of a person who was living, in
the full sense, the spiritual life. Even those who could not accept the
symbols in which he described his experience and asked others to share
it, acknowledged that there had been worked in him a great
transformation; that the sense of the abiding and eternal went with him
everywhere, and flowed out from him, to calm and to correct our feverish
lives. He fully satisfies in his own person the demands of Baron von
Huegel's definition: both contact with and renunciation of the Particular
and Fleeting, seeking and finding of the Eternal, incarnating within his
own experience that transcendent Otherness. Now the Sadhu has discovered
for himself and practises as the condition of his extraordinary
activity, power and endurance, just that balance of life which St.
Benedict's rule ordained. He is a wandering missionary, constantly
undertaking great journeys, enduring hardship and danger, and practising
the absolute poverty of St. Francis. He is perfectly healthy, strong,
extraordinarily attractive, full of power. But this power he is careful
to nourish. His irreducible minimum is two hours spent in meditation and
wordless communication with God at the beginning of each day. He prefers
three or four hours when work permits; and a long period of prayer and
meditation always precedes his public address. If forced to curtail or
hurry these hours of prayer, he feels restless and unhappy, and his
efficiency is reduced. "Prayer," he says, "is as important as breathing;
and we never say we have no time to breathe."[140]

All this has been explained away by critics of the muscular Christian
sort, who say that the Sadhu's Christianity is of a typically Eastern
kind. But this is simply not true. It were much better to acknowledge
that we, more and more, are tending to develop a typically Western kind
of Christianity, marked by the Western emphasis on doing and Western
contempt for being; and that if we go sufficiently far on this path we
shall find oursel