In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive.

This sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual experience, wherever found.

It chimes well with the definition of Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly spiritual man, though he may not be any better morally than his non-religious neighbour, "has a confidence in the universe and an inner joy which the other does not know--is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men."[29] If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and symbols of poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love.

Such a divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic incarnation, though not limited by it: and it is continued into history by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.
The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.
Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as a genuine and abiding human fact--a form of life--independent of the dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed.

I now wish to go on to a second point: this--that it follows that any complete description of human life as we know it, must find room for the spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it finds expression.