"Blessed is that soul," says a Kempis, "that heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of consolation.

Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St.John of the Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate presence of Spirit.

Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude thrown open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.
Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the material.

Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of those experiences.

But many minds are, as it were, their own religious artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to their intuitive apprehensions.