ned longing of the S[=u]fis
for the Beloved, who is "the Rose of all Reason and all Truth."

"Without Thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest;
Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon.
Tho' every hair on my body becomes a tongue
A thousandth part of the thanks due to Thee I cannot tell."[26]

There is the sudden note of rapture which startles us in the
Neoplatonists, as when Plotinus speaks of "the name of love for what is
there to know--the passion of the lover testing on the 'bosom of his
love."[27] Surely we may accept all these, as the instinctive responses
of a diversity of spirits to the one eternal Spirit of life and love:
and recognize that without such personal response, such a discovery of
imperishable love, a fully lived spiritual life is no more possible than
is a fully lived physical life from which love has been left out.

When we descend from experience to interpretation, the paradoxical
character of such a personal sense of intimacy is eased for us, if we
remember that the religious man's awareness of the indwelling Spirit, or
of a Divine companionship--whatever name he gives it--is just his
limited realization, achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of a
universal and not a particular truth. To this realization he brings all
his human--more, his sub-human--feelings and experiences: not only those
which are vaguely called his spiritual intuitions, but the full weight
of his impulsive and emotional life. His experience and its
interpretation are, then, inevitably conditioned by this apperceiving
mass. And here I think the intellect should show mercy, and not probe
without remorse into those tender places where the heart and the spirit
are at one. Let us then be content to note, that when we consult the
works of those who have best and most fully interpreted their religion
in a universal sense, we find how careful they are to provide a category
for this experience of a personally known and loved indwelling
Divinity--man's Father, Lover, Saviour, ever-present Companion--which
shall avoid its identification with the mere spirit of Nature, whilst
safeguarding its immanence no less than its transcendent quality. Thus,
Julian of Norwich heard in her meditations the voice of God saying to
her, "See! I am in all things! See! I lift never mine hand from off my
works, nor ever shall!"[28] Is it possible to state more plainly the
indivisible identity of the Spirit of Life? "See! I am in _all_ things!