It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the exaggerations to which it has led.

Both extremes are richly represented in the literature of mysticism.

But we should remember that Christianity is not alone in thus requiring place to be made for such a conception of God as shall give body to all the most precious and fruitful experiences of the heart, providing simple human sense and human feeling with something on which to lay hold.

In India, there is the existence, within and alongside the austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of the ardent personal Vaishnavite devotion to the heart's Lord, known as Bhakti Marga.

In Islam, there is the impassioned 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.