ves cut off from our source. The Sadhu's Christianity
is fully Christian; that is to say, it is whole and complete. The power
in which he does his works is that in which St. Paul carried through his
heroic missionary career, St. Benedict formed a spiritual family that
transformed European culture, Wesley made the world his parish,
Elizabeth Fry faced the Newgate criminals. It is idle to talk of the
revival of a personal spiritual life among ourselves, or of a spiritual
regeneration of society--for this can only come through the individual
remaking of each of its members--unless we are willing, at the sacrifice
of some personal convenience, to make a place and time for these acts of
recollection; this willing and loving--and even more fruitful, the more
willing and loving--communion with, response to Reality, to God. It is
true that a fully lived spiritual life involves far more than this. But
this is the only condition on which it will exist at all.

Love then, which is a willed tendency to God; prayer, which is willed
communion with and experience of Him; are the two prime essentials in
the personal life of the Spirit. They represent, of course, only our
side of it and our obligation. This love is the outflowing response to
another inflowing love, and this prayer the appropriation of a
transcendental energy and grace. As the "German Theology" reminds us, "I
cannot do the work without God, and God may not or will not without
me."[141] And by these acts alone, faithfully carried through, all their
costly demands fulfilled, all their gifts and applications accepted
without resistance and applied to each aspect of life, human nature can
grow up to its full stature, and obtain access to all its sources of
power.

Yet this personal inward life of love and prayer shall not be too
solitary. As it needs links with cultus and so with the lives of its
fellows, it also needs links with history and so with the living past.
These links are chiefly made by the individual through his reading; and
such reading--such access to humanity's hoarded culture and
experience--has always been declared alike by Christian and
non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper helps of the spiritual
life. Though Hoeffding perhaps exaggerates when he reminds us that
mediaeval art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in their
books, and suggests that such brooding study directly induces
contemplative states,[142] yet it is true that the soul