And in the good old human way, referring their own feelings to the universe, they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds of matter and of spirit, of nature and of grace.

But those who have most deeply reflected, have perceived that the change effected is not a change of worlds.

It is rather such a change of temper and attitude as will disclose within our one world, here and now, the one Spirit in the diversity of His gifts; the one Love, in homeliest incidents as well as noblest vision, laying its obligations on the soul; and so the true nature and full possibilities of this our present life.
Although it is true that we must register our profound sense of the transcendental character of this spirit-life, its otherness from mere nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language of convulsion.

The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it.
And whatever its special, language and personal colour be--for all our news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual men, and arrives tinctured by their feelings and beliefs--in the end it does this by disclosing us to ourselves as spirits growing up, though unevenly and hampered by our past, through the physical order into completeness of response to a universe that is itself a spiritual fact.
"Heaven," said Jacob Boehme, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the Eternal One, wherein all worketh and willeth in quiet love."[38] Such a manifestation of Spirit must clearly be made through humanity, at least so far as our own order is concerned: by our redirection and full use of that spirit of life which energizes us, and which, emerging from the more primitive levels of organic creation, is ours to carry on and up--either to new self-satisfactions, or to new consecrations.
It is hardly worth while to insist that the need for such a redirection has never been more strongly felt than at the present day.

There is indeed no period in which history exhibits mankind as at once more active, more feverishly self-conscious, and more distracted, than is our own bewildered generation; nor any which stood in greater need of Blake's exhortation: "Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem."[39] How many people do each of us know who work and will in quiet love, and thus participate in eternal life?
Consider the weight of each of these words.