Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this type.[97] I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth.

Our concern is with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may live it.

But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our neighbour may live and save his soul.

The symbolic world of traditional piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy.

We may be sure that both are more characteristic of the image-making and structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate and for us unknowable reality of things.