THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL In the last three chapters we have been concerned, almost exclusively, with those facts of psychic life and growth, those instruments and mechanizations, which bear upon or condition our spiritual life.

But these wanderings in the soul's workshops, and these analyses of the forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life.

I wish now to come out of the workshop, and try to see this spiritual life as the individual man may and should achieve it, from another angle of approach.
What are we to regard as the heart of spirituality?
When we have eliminated the accidental characters with which varying traditions have endowed it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its possessor from the best, most moral citizen or devoted altruist?
Why do the Christian saint, Indian _rishi,_ Buddhist _arhat,_ Moslem _S[=u]fi,_ all seem to us at bottom men of one race, living under different sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact?
This life, which they show in its various perfections, includes it is true the ethical life, but cannot be equated with it.

Wherein do its differentia consist?
We are dealing with the most subtle of realities and have only the help of crude words, developed for other purposes than this.

But surely we come near to the truth, as history and experience show it to us, when we say again that the spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life that means God in all His richness, immanent and transcendent: the whole response to the Eternal and Abiding of which any one man is capable, expressed in and through his this-world life.