Those who are inclined either to fear or to resent the application to this experience of those laws which--as we are now gradually discovering--govern the rest of our psychic life, or who are offended by the resulting demonstrations of continuity between our most homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to themselves the plain words of Thomas a Kempis: "Thou art a man and not God, thou art flesh and no angel." Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity but the normal life of the Spirit, as it may be and is lived in the here-and-now, I have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in the ordinary terms of present day thought, and with little or no use of the technical language of mysticism.

For the same reason, no attention has been given to those abnormal experiences and states of consciousness, which, too often regarded as specially "mystical," are now recognized by all competent students as representing the unfortunate accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirituality.

Readers of these pages will find nothing about trances, Ecstasies and other rare psychic phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and sometimes only disease.

For information on these matters they must go to larger and more technical works.

My aim here is the more general one, of indicating first the characteristic experiences--discoverable within all great religions--which justify or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and the way in which these experiences may be accommodated to the world-view of the modern man: and next, the nature of that spiritual life as it appears in human history.