rofound human need of spirituality. We saw there the often sharp and
sky-piercing intensity of the individual aptitude for Reality enveloped,
tempered and made wholesome by the social influences of the cultus and
the group: made too, available for the community by the symbolisms that
cultus had preserved. So that gradually the life of the Spirit emerged
for us as something most actual, not archaic: a perennial possibility of
newness, of regeneration, a widening of our span of pain and joy. A
human fact, completing and most closely linked with those other human
facts, the vocation to service, to beauty, to truth. A fact, then,
which must control our view of personal self-discipline, of education,
and of social effort: since it refers to the abiding Reality which alone
gives all these their meaning and worth, and which man, consciously or
unconsciously, must pursue.

And last, if we ask as a summing up of the whole matter: _Why_ man is
thus to seek the Eternal, through, behind and within the ever-fleeting?
The answer is that he cannot, as a matter of fact, help doing it sooner
or later: for his heart is never at rest, till it finds itself there.
But he often wastes a great deal of time before he realizes this. And
perhaps we may find the reason why man--each man--is thus pressed
towards some measure of union with Reality, in the fact that his
conscious will thus only becomes an agent of the veritable purposes of
life: of that Power which, in and through mankind, conserves and slowly
presses towards realization the noblest aspirations of each soul. This
power and push we may call if we like in the language of realism the
tendency of our space-time universe towards deity; or in the language of
religion, the working of the Holy Spirit. And since, so far as we know,
it is only in man that life becomes self-conscious, and ever more and
more self-conscious, with the deepening and widening of his love and his
thought; so it is only in man that it can dedicate the will and desire
which are life's central qualities to the furtherance of this Divine
creative aim.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 149: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. 7.]

[Footnote 150: A good general discussion in Tansley: "The New Psychology
and its Relation to Life," Caps. 19, 20.]

[Footnote 151: Aug. Conf., Bk. X, Cap. 27.]

[Footnote 152: Blake; "Jerusalem."]

[Footnote 153: "Social Psychology," Cap. i.]

[Footnote 154: "The Interior Castle": Sleuth Habi