ng itself an
attention to God; and thus drain our best workers of their energies, and
leave them no leisure for taking in Fresh supplies. Often they are
wearied and confused by the multiplicity in which they must struggle;
and they are not taught and encouraged to seek the healing experience of
unity. Hence even our noblest teachers often show painful signs of
spiritual exhaustion, and tend to relapse into the formal repetition of
a message which was once a burning fire.

The continued force of any regenerative movement depends above all else
on continued vivid contact with the Divine order, for the problems of
the reformer are only really understood and seen in true proportion in
its light. Such contact is not always easy: it is a form of work. After
a time the weary and discouraged will need the support of discipline if
they are to do it. Therefore definite role of silence and
withdrawal--perhaps an extension of that system of periodical retreats
which is one of the most hopeful features of contemporary religious
life--is essential to any group-scheme for the general and social
furtherance of the spiritual life. It is not to be denied for a moment,
that countless good men and women who love the world in the divine and
not in the self-regarding sense, are busy all their lives long in
forwarding the purposes of the Spirit: which is acting through them, as
truly as through the conscious prophets and regenerators of the race.
But, to return for a moment to psychological language, whilst the Divine
impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is not doing all that
it could for us nor we all that we could do for it; for we are not
completely unified. We can by appropriate education bring up that
imperative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, and wittingly
dedicate to its uses our heart, mind and will; and such realization in
its most perfect form appears to be the psychological equivalent of the
state which is described by spiritual writers, in their own special
language, as "union with God."

I have been at some pains to avoid the use of this special language of
the mystics; but now perhaps we may remind ourselves that, by the
declaration of all who have achieved it, the mature spiritual life is
such a condition of completed harmony--such a theopathetic state.
Therefore here to-day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble,
no less that in the Indian forest or the mediaeval cloister, man's really
religi