sin is a
fact, though a fact which we do not understand; and now it appears and
must evermore remain an offence against love, hostile to this intense
new attraction, and marring the self's willed tendency towards it.

The next strand we may perhaps call that of Recollection: for the
recognizing and the cure of imperfection depends on the compensating
search for the Perfect and its enthronement as the supreme object of our
thought and love. The self, then, soon begins to feel a strong impulsion
to some type of inward withdrawal and concentration, some kind of
prayer; though it may not use this name or recognize the character of
its mood. As it yields to this strange new drawing, such recollection
grows easier. It finds that there is a veritable inner world, not merely
of phantasy, but of profound heart-searching experience; where the soul
is in touch with another order of realities and knows itself to be an
inheritor of Eternal Life. Here unique things happen. A power is at
work, and new apprehensions are born. And now for the first time the
self discovers itself to be striking a balance between this inner and
the outer life, and in its own small way--but still, most
fruitfully--enriching action with the fruits of contemplation. If it
will give to the learning of this new art--to the disciplining and
refining of this affective thought--even a fraction of the diligence
which it gives to the learning of a new game, it will find itself repaid
by a progressive purity of vision, a progressive sense of assurance, an
ever-increasing delicacy of moral discrimination and demand.
Psychologists, as we have seen, divide men into introverts and
extroverts; but as a matter of fact we must regard both these extreme
types as defective. A whole man should be supple in his reactions both
to the inner and to the outer world.

The third strand in the life of the Spirit, for this normal self which
we are considering; must be the disposition of complete Surrender. More
and more advancing in this inner life, it will feel the imperative
attraction of Reality, of God; and it must respond to this attraction
with all the courage and generosity of which it is capable. I am trying
to use the simplest and the most general language, and to avoid
emotional imagery: though it is here, in telling of this perpetually
renewed act of self-giving and dedication, that spiritual writers most
often have recourse to the language of the heart. It is indeed in a