The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life.

But the crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in from those visions and contacts, that intercourse?
Is transcendental feeling involved in them?
"What fruits dost thou bring back from this thy vision ?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of contemplation.

In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought.

In the second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and actualizing of our deepest intuition of God.

In it, a great region of the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully performed.