Thomas R. Kelly Essays

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The Light Within by Thomas R. Kelly “Meister Eckhart wrote, "As thou art in church or cell, that same frame of mind carry out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness." Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continually return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within that illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the human face. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all. You who read these words already know this inner Life and Light. For by this very Light within you is your recognition given. In this humanistic age we suppose we are the initiators and God is the responder. But the Living Christ within us is the initiator, and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. "Behold I stand at the door and knock." And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us. The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening. The secret places of the heart cease to be our noisy workshop. They become a holy sanctuary of adoration and of self-oblation, where we are kept in perfect peace, if our minds be stayed on Him who has found us in the inward springs of our life. And in brief intervals of overpowering visitation we are able to carry the sanctuary frame of mind out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness, and in a hyperesthesia of the soul, we see all humankind tinged with deeper shadows and touched with Galilean glories. Powerfully are the springs of our will moved to

an abandon of singing love toward God; powerfully are we moved to a new and over coming love toward time-blinded human beings and all creation. In this Center of Creation all things are ours, and we are Christ's and Christ is God's. We are owned beings, ready to run and not be weary and to walk and not faint. But the light fades, the will weakens, the humdrum returns. Can we stay this fading? No; nor should we try, for we must learn the disciplines of His will. The Inner Light, the Inward Christ, is no mere doctrine, belonging peculiarly to a small religious fellowship, to be accepted or rejected as a mere belief. It is the living Center of Reference for all Christian souls and Christian groups - yes, and of non-Christian groups as well - who seriously mean to dwell in the secret place of the Most High. He is the center and source of action, not the endpoint of thought. He is the locus of commitment, not a problem for debate. Practice comes first in religion, not theory or dogma. And Christian practice is not exhausted in outward deeds. These are the fruits, not the roots. A practicing Christian must above all be one who practices the perpetual return of the soul into the inner sanctuary, who brings the world into its Light and rejudges it, who brings the Light into the world with all its turmoil and its fitfulness and re-creates it (after the pattern seen on the Mount). To the reverent exploration of this practice we now address ourselves.

II There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings. The secular world of today values and cultivates only the first level, assured that there is where the real business of humankind is done, and scorns or smiles in tolerant amusement at the cultivation of the second level - a luxury enterprise, a vestige of superstition, an occupation for special temperaments. But in a deeply religious culture people know that the deep level of prayer and of divine attendance is the most important thing in the world. It is at this deep level that the real business of life is determined. The secular mind is an abbreviated, fragmentary mind, building only upon a part of human nature and neglecting a part - the most glorious part - of a human being's nature, powers, and resources. The religious mind involves the whole person, embraces his or her relations with time within their true ground and setting in the Eternal Lover. It ever keeps close to the fountains of divine creativity. In lowliness it knows joys and stabilities, peace and assurances, that are utterly incomprehensible to the secular mind. It lives in resources and powers that make individuals radiant and triumphant, groups tolerant and bonded together in mutual concern, and is bestirred to an outward life of unremitting labor. Between the two levels is fruitful interplay, but ever the accent must be upon the deeper level, where the soul ever dwells in the presence of the Holy One. For the religious person is forever bringing all affairs of the first level down into the Light, holding them there in the Presence, reseeing them and the whole of the world of people and things in a new and overturning way, and responding to them in spontaneous, incisive, and simple ways of love and faith. Facts remain facts when brought into the

Presence in the deeper level, but their value, their significance, is wholly realigned. Much apparent wheat becomes utter chaff, and some chaff becomes wheat. Imposing powers? They are out of the Life, and must crumble. Lost causes? If God be for them, who can be against them? Rationally plausible futures? They are weakened or certified in the dynamic Life and Light. Tragic suffering? Already He is there, and we actively move, in His tenderness, toward the sufferers. Hopeless debauchees? These are children of God, His concern and ours. Inexorable laws of nature? The dependable framework for divine reconstruction. The fall of a sparrow? The Father's love. For faith and hope and love for all things are engendered in the soul, as we practice their submission and our own to the Light Within, as we humbly see all things, even darkly and as through a glass, yet through the eye of God. How, then, shall we lay hold of that Life and Power, and live the life of prayer without ceasing? By quiet, persistent practice in turning of all our being, day and night, in prayer and inward worship and surrender, toward Him who calls in the deeps of our souls. Mental habits of inward orientation must be established. The first days and weeks and months are awkward and painful, but enormously rewarding. Awkward, because it takes constant vigilance and effort and reassertions of the will at the first level. Painful, because our lapses are so frequent, the intervals when we forget Him so long. Rewarding, because we have begun to live. At first the practice of inward prayer is a process of alternation of attention between outer things and the Inner Light. Preoccupation with either brings the loss of the other. Yet what is sought is not alternation, but simultaneity, worship undergirding every moment, living prayer, the continuous current and background of all moments of life. For sole preoccupation with the world is sleep, but immersion in Him is life. We cease trying to make ourselves the dictators and God the listener, and become the joyful listeners to Him, the Master who does all

things well. There is then no need for fret when faithfully turning to Him if He leads us but slowly into His secret chambers. If He gives us increasing steadiness in the deeper sense of His Presence, we can only quietly thank Him. If He holds us in the stage of alternation, we can thank Him for His loving wisdom and wait upon His guidance through the stages for which we are prepared. For we cannot take Him by storm. The strong adult must become the little child, not understanding but trusting the Father. But to some at least He gives an amazing stayedness in Him, a well-nigh unbroken life of humble, quiet adoration in His Presence, in the depths of our being. Day and night, winter and summer, sunshine and shadow, He is here, the great Champion. And we are with Him, held in His Tenderness, quickened into quietness and peace, children in Paradise before the Fall, walking with Him in the garden in the heat as well as the cool of the day. Here is not ecstasy but serenity, unshakableness, firmness of life-orientation. We may suppose these depths of prayer are our achievement, the precipitate of our own habits at the surface level settled into subconscious regions. But this humanistic account misses the autonomy of the life of prayer. It misses the fact that this inner level has a life of its own, invigorated not by us but by a divine Source. There come times when prayer pours forth in volumes and originality such as we cannot create. It rolls through us like a mighty tide. Our prayers are mingled with a vaster Word, a Word that at one time was made flesh. We pray, and yet it is not we who pray, but a Greater who prays in us. Something of our punctiform selfhood is weakened, but never lost. All we can say is, Prayer is taking place, and I am given to be in the orbit. In holy hush we bow in Eternity, and know the Divine Concern tenderly enwrapping us and all things within His persuading love. Here all human initiative has passed into acquiescence, and He works and prays and seeks His own through us, in exquisite,

energizing life. Here the autonomy of the inner life becomes complete and we are joyfully prayed through, by a Seeking Life that flows through us into the world of human beings. III Worshiping in the light we become new creatures, making wholly new and astonishing responses to the entire outer setting of life. These responses are not reasoned out. They are, in large measure, spontaneous reactions of felt incompatibility between "the world's" judgments of value and the Supreme Value we adore deep in the Center. There is a total Instruction as well as specific instructions from the Light within. The dynamic illumination from the deeper level is shed upon the judgments of the surface level, and lo, the "former things are passed away, behold, they are become new." ”

Holy Obedience Delivered at Arch Street Meeting House Philadelphia by Thomas R. Kelly Haverford College William Penn Lecture 1939 HOLY OBEDIENCE Out in front of us is the drama of men and of nations, seething, struggling, laboring, dying. Upon this tragic drama in these days our eyes are all set in anxious watchfulness and in prayer. But within the silences of the souls of men an eternal drama is ever being enacted, in these days as well as in others. And on the outcome of this inner drama rests, ultimately, the outer pageant of history. It is the drama of the Hound of Heaven baying relentlessly upon the track of man. It is the drama of the lost sheep wandering in the wilderness, restless and lonely, feebly searching, while over the hills comes the wiser Shepherd. For His is a shepherdʼs heart, and restless until He holds His sheep in His arms. It is the drama of the Eternal Father drawing the prodigal home unto Himself, where there is bread enough and to spare. It is the drama of the Double Search, as Rufus Jones calls it. And always its chief actor is—the Eternal God of Love. It is to one strand in this inner drama, one scene, where the Shepherd has found His sheep, that I would direct you. It is the life of absolute and complete and holy obedience to the voice of the Shepherd. But ever throughout the account the accent will be laid upon God, God the initiator, God the aggressor, God the seeker, God the stirrer into life, God the

ground of our obedience, God the giver of the power to become children of God.

I. THE NATURE OF HOLY OBEDIENCE Meister Eckhart wrote: “There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.” It is just this astonishing life which is willing to follow Him the other half, sincerely to disown itself, this life which intends complete obedience, without my reservations, that I would propose to you in all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness. I mean this literally, utterly, completely, and I mean it for you and for me—commit your lives in unreserved obedience to Him. If you donʼt realize the revolutionary explosiveness of this proposal you donʼt understand what I mean. Only now and then comes a man or a woman who, like John Woolman or Francis of Assisi, is willing to be utterly obedient, to go the other half, to follow Godʼs faintest whisper. But when such a commitment comes in a human life, God breaks through, miracles are wrought, world-renewing divine forces are released, history changes. There is nothing more important now than to have the human race endowed with just such committed lives. Now is no time to say, “Lo, here. Lo, there.” Now is the time to say, “Thou art the man.” To this extraordinary life I call you—or He calls you through me—not as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to be lived here and now, in industrial America, by you and by me. This is something wholly different from mild, conventional religion which, with respectable skirts held back by dainty fingers, anxiously tries to fish the world out of the mudhole of its own selfishness. Our churches, our meeting houses are full of such respectable and amiable

people. We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the first half of the way. Many of us have become as mildly and as conventionally religious as were the church folk of three centuries ago, against whose mildness and mediocrity and passionlessness George Fox and his followers flung themselves with all the passion of a glorious and a new discovery and with all the energy of dedicated lives. In some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that for which Christ lived and died. There is a degree of holy and complete obedience and of joyful self-renunciation and of sensitive listening that is breathtaking. Difference of degree passes over into utter difference of kind, when one tries to follow Him the second half. Jesus put this pointedly when he said, “Ye must be born again” (John 3:3), and Paul knew it: “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17). George Fox as a youth was religious enough to meet all earthly standards and was even proposed as a student for the ministry. But the insatiable God-hunger in him drove him from such mediocrity into a passionate quest for the real whole-wheat Bread of Life. Sensible relatives told him to settle down and get married. Thinking him crazy, they took him to a doctor to have his blood let—the equivalent of being taken to a psychiatrist in these days, as are modern conscientious objectors to war in Belgium and France. Parents, if some of your children are seized with this imperative God-hunger, donʼt tell them to snap out of it and get a job, but carry them patiently in your love, or at least keep hands off and let the holy work of God proceed in their souls. Young people, you who have in you the stirrings of perfection, the sweet, sweet rapture of God Himself within you, be faithful to Him until the last lingering bit of self is surrendered and you are wholly God-possessed. The life that intends to be wholly obedient, wholly submissive, wholly listening, is astonishing in its completeness. Its joys are ravishing, its peace profound, its humility the deepest, its power world-shaking, its love

enveloping, its simplicity that of a trusting child. It is the life and power in which the prophets and apostles lived. It is the life and power of Jesus of Nazareth, who knew that “when thine eye is single thy whole body is full of light” (Luke 11: 34). It is the life and power of the apostle Paul, who resolved not to know anything among men save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It is the life and power of Saint Francis, that little poor man of God who came nearer to reliving the life of Jesus than has any other man on earth. It is the life and power of George Fox and of Isaac and Mary Penington. It is the life and power and utter obedience of John Woolman who decided, he says, “to place my whole trust in God,” to “act on an inner Principle of Virtue, and pursue worldly business no farther than as Truth opened my way therein.” It is the life and power of myriads of unknown saints through the ages. It is the life and power of some people now in this room who smile knowingly as I speak. And it is a life and power that can break forth in this tottering Western culture and return the Church to its rightful life as a fellowship of creative, heaven-led souls. II. GATEWAYS INTO HOLY OBEDIENCE In considering one gateway into this life of holy obedience, let us dare to venture together into the inner sanctuary of the soul, where God meets man in awful immediacy. There is an indelicacy in too-ready speech. Paul felt it unlawful to speak of the things of the third heaven. But there is also a false reticence, as if these things were oneʼs own work and oneʼs own possession, about which we should modestly keep quiet, whereas they are wholly Godʼs amazing work and we are nothing, mere passive receivers. “The lion hath roared, who can but tremble? The voice of Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:23) Some men come into holy obedience through the gateway of profound mystical experience. It is an overwhelming experience to fall into the hands of the living God, to be invaded to the depths of oneʼs being by His presence, to be, without warning, wholly uprooted from all earth-born securities and assurances, and to be

blown by a tempest of unbelievable power which leaves oneʼs old proud self utterly, utterly defenseless, until one cries, “All Thy waves and thy billows are gone over me” (Ps. 42: 7). Then is the soul swept into a Loving Center of ineffable sweetness, where calm and unspeakable peace and ravishing joy steal over one. And one knows now why Pascal wrote, in the center of his greatest moment, the single word, “Fire.” There stands the world of struggling, sinful, earth-blinded men and nations, of plants and animals and wheeling stars of heaven, all new, all lapped in the tender, persuading Love at the Center. There stand the saints of the ages, their hearts open to view, and lo, their hearts are our heart and their hearts are the heart of the Eternal One. In awful solemnity the Holy One is over all and in all, exquisitely loving, infinitely patient, tenderly smiling. Marks of glory are upon all things, and the marks are cruciform and blood-stained. And one sighs, like the convinced Thomas of old, “My Lord and my God” (John 20: 28). Dare one lift oneʼs eyes and look? Nay, whither can one look and not see Him? For field and stream and teeming streets are full of Him. Yet as Moses knew, no man can look on God and live—live as his old self. Death comes, blessed death, death of oneʼs alienating will. And one knows what Paul meant when he wrote, “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God” (Gal. 220). One emerges from such soul-shaking, Love-invaded times into more normal states of consciousness. But one knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world, the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life must henceforth be forever determined by that Real. Like Saint Augustine one asks not for greater certainty of God but only for more steadfastness in Him. There, beyond, in Him is the true Center, and we are reduced, as it were, to nothing, for He is all. Is religion subjective? Nay, its soul is in objectivity, in an Other whose Life is our true life, whose Love is our love, whose Joy is our joy, whose Peace is our peace, whose

burdens are our burdens, whose Will is our will. Self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it. In glad, amazed humility we cast on Him our little lives in trusting obedience, in erect, serene, and smiling joy. And we say, with a writer of Psalms, “Lo, I come: in the book of the law it is written of me, I delight to do Thy will, O my God” (Ps. 40:7-8). For nothing else in all of heaven or earth counts so much as His will, His slightest wish, His faintest breathing. And holy obedience sets in, sensitive as a shadow, obedient as a shadow, selfless as a shadow. Not reluctantly but with ardor one longs to follow Him the second half. Gladly, urgently, promptly one leaps to do His bidding, ready to run and not be weary and to walk and not faint. Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a Godsubdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a Godintoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will. But the first step to the obedience of the second half is the flaming vision of the wonder of such a life, a vision which comes occasionally to us all, through biographies of the saints, through the journals of Fox and early Friends, through a life lived before our eyes, through a haunting verse of the Psalms—“Whom have I in heaven but Thee?

And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee” (Ps. 73: 25)—through meditation upon the amazing life and death of Jesus, through a flash of illumination or, in Foxʼs language, a great opening. But whatever the earthly history of this moment of charm, this vision of an absolutely holy life is, I am convinced, the invading, urging, inviting, persuading work of the Eternal One. It is curious that modern psychology cannot account wholly for flashes of insight of any kind, sacred or secular. It is as if a fountain of creative Mind were welling up, bubbling to expression within prepared spirits. There is an infinite fountain of lifting power, pressing within us, luring us by dazzling visions, and we can only say, The creative God comes into our souls. An increment of infinity is about us. Holy is imagination, the gateway of Reality into our hearts. The Hound of Heaven is on our track, the God of Love is wooing us to His Holy Life. Once having the vision, the second step to holy obedience is this: Begin where you are. Obey now. Use what little obedience you are capable of, even if it be like a grain of mustard seed. Begin where you are. Live this present moment, this present hour as you now sit in your seats, in utter, utter submission and openness toward Him. Listen outwardly to these words, but within, behind the scenes, in the deeper levels of your lives where you are all alone with God the Loving Eternal One, keep up a silent prayer, “Open Thou my life. Guide my thoughts where I dare not let them go. But Thou darest. Thy will be done.” Walk on the streets and chat with your friends. But every moment behind the scenes be in prayer, offering yourselves in continuous obedience. I find this internal continuous prayer life absolutely essential. It can be carried on day and night, in the thick of business, in home and school. Such prayer of submission can be so simple. It is well to use a single sentence, repeated over and over and over again, such as this: “Be Thou my will. Be Thou my will,” or “I open all before Thee. I open all before Thee,” or “See earth through heaven, See earth

through heaven.” This hidden prayer life can pass, in time, beyond words and phrases into mere ejaculations, “My God, my God, my Holy One, my Love,” or into the adoration of the Upanishad, “O Wonderful, O Wonderful, O Wonderful.” Words may cease and one stands and walks and sits and lies in wordless attitudes of adoration and submission and rejoicing and exultation and glory. And the third step in holy obedience, or a counsel, is this: If you slip and stumble and forget God for an hour, and assert your old proud self, and rely upon your own clever wisdom, donʼt spend too much time in anguished regrets and self-accusations but begin again, just where you are. Yet a fourth consideration in holy obedience is this: Donʼt grit your teeth and clench your fists and say, “I will! I will!” Relax. Take hands off. Submit yourself to God. Learn to live in the passive voice—a hard saying for Americans— and let life be willed through you. For “I will” spells not obedience. III. HUMILITY AND HOLINESS The fruits of holy obedience are many. But two are so closely linked together that they can scarcely be treated separately. They are the passion for personal holiness and the sense of utter humility. God inflames the soul with a craving for absolute purity. But He, in His glorious otherness, empties us of ourselves in order that He may become all. Humility does not rest, in final count, upon bafflement and discouragement and self-disgust at our shabby lives, a brow-beaten, dog-slinking attitude. It rests upon the disclosure of the consummate wonder of God, upon finding that only God counts, that all our own self-originated intentions are works of straw. And so in lowly humility we must stick close to the Root and count our own powers as nothing except as they are enslaved in His power. But O how slick and weasel-like is self-pride! Our learnedness creeps into our sermons with a clever quotation which adds nothing to Godʼs glory, but a bit to our own. Our cleverness in business competition earns as much selfflattery

as does the possession of the money itself. Our desire to be known and approved by others, to have heads nod approvingly about us behind our backs, and flattering murmurs which we can occasionally overhear, confirm the discernment in Alfred Adlerʼs elevation of the superiority motive. Our status as “weighty Friends” gives us secret pleasures which we scarcely own to ourselves, yet thrive upon. Yes, even pride in our own humility is one of the devilʼs own tricks. But humility rests upon a holy blindedness, like the blindedness of him who looks steadily into the sun. For wherever he turns his eyes on earth, there he sees only the sun. The God-blinded soul sees naught of self, naught of personal degradation or of personal eminence, but only the Holy Will working impersonally through him, through others, as one objective Life and Power. But what trinkets we have sought after in life, the pursuit of what petty trifles has wasted our years as we have ministered to the enhancement of our own little selves! And what needless anguishes we have suffered because our little selves were defeated, were not flattered, were not cozened and petted! But the blinding God blots out this self and gives humility and true self-hood as wholly full of Him. For as He gives obedience so He graciously gives to us what measure of humility we will accept. Even that is not our own, but His who also gives us obedience. But the humility of the Godblinded soul endures only so long as we look steadily at the Sun. Growth in humility is a measure of our growth in the habit of the Godward-directed mind. And he only is near to God who is exceedingly humble. The last depths of holy and voluntary poverty are not in financial poverty, important as that is; they are in poverty of spirit, in meekness and lowliness of soul. Explore the depths of humility, not with your intellects but with your lives, lived in prayer of humble obedience. And there you will find that humility is not merely a human virtue. For there is a humility that is in God Himself. Be ye

humble as God is humble. For love and humility walk hand in hand, in God as well as in man. But there is something about deepest humility which makes men bold. For utter obedience is self-forgetful obedience. No longer do we hesitate and shuffle and apologize because, say we, we are weak, lowly creatures and the world is a pack of snarling wolves among whom we are sent as sheep by the Shepherd (Matt. 10:16). I must confess that, on human judgment, the world tasks we face are appalling— well-nigh hopeless. Only the inner vision of God, only the God-blindedness of unreservedly dedicated souls, only the utterly humble ones can bow and break the raging pride of a power-mad world. But self-renunciation means God-possession, the being possessed by God. Out of utter humility and selfforgetfulness comes the thunder of the prophets, “Thus saith the Lord.” High station and low are leveled before Him. Be not fooled by the worldʼs power. Imposing institutions of war and imperialism and greed are wholly vulnerable for they, and we, are forever in the hands of a conquering God. These are not cheap and hasty words. The high and noble adventures of faith can in our truest moments be seen as no adventures at all, but certainties. And if we live in complete humility in God we can smile in patient assurance as we work. Will you be wise enough and humble enough to be little fools of God? For who can finally stay His power? Who can resist His persuading love? Truly says Saint Augustine, “There is something in humility which raiseth the heart upward.” And John Woolman says, “Now I find that in the pure obedience the mind learns contentment, in appearing weak and foolish to the wisdom which is of the World; and in these lowly labors, they who stand in a low place, rightly exercised under the Cross, will find nourishment.” But God inflames the soul with a burning craving for absolute purity. One burns for complete innocency and holiness of personal life. No man can look on God and live, live in his own faults, live in the shadow of the least selfdeceit,

live in harm toward His least creatures, whether man or bird or beast or creeping thing. The blinding purity of God in Christ, how captivating, how alluring, how compelling it is! The pure in heart shall see God? More, they who see God shall cry out to become pure in heart, even as He is pure, with all the energy of their souls. This has been an astonishing and unexpected element for me. In this day of concern for social righteousness it sounds like a throwback to medieval ideals of saintliness and soul-combing. Our religious heroes of these social gospel days sit before a battery of telephones, with full office equipment, with telegraph lines to Washington and London and Tokyo and Berlin. And this is needed, desperately needed. Yet there is in the experience of God this insistent, imperative, glorious yearning—the craving for complete spotlessness of the inner self before Him. No average goodness will do, no measuring of our lives by our fellows, but only a relentless, inexorable divine standard. No relatives suffice; only absolutes satisfy the soul committed to holy obedience. Absolute honesty, absolute gentleness, absolute self-control, unwearied patience and thoughtfulness in the midst of the raveling friction of home and office and school and shop. It is said that the ermine can be trapped by surrounding it with a circle of filth. It will die before it will sully its snowy coat. Have we been led astray by our fears, by the fear of saccharine sweetness and light? By the dangers of fanatical scrupulousness and self-inspection and halo-hunting? By the ideal of a back-slapping recommendation of religion by showing we were good fellows after all? By the fear of quietism and of that monastic retreat from the world of menʼs needs which we associate with medieval passion for holiness of life? Nay, tread not so far from the chasm that you fall into the ditch on the other side. Boldly must we risk the dangers which lie along the margins of excess, if we would live the life of the second half. For the life of obedience is a holy life, a separated life, a renounced life, cut off from worldly compromises, distinct, heaven-dedicated in the midst of men,

stainless as the snows upon the mountain tops. He who walks in obedience, following God the second half, living the life of inner prayer of submission and exultation, on him Godʼs holiness takes hold as a mastering passion of life. Yet ever he cries out in abysmal sincerity, “I am the blackest of all the sinners of the earth. I am a man of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of Hosts.” For humility and holiness are twins in the astonishing birth of obedience in the heart of men. So God draws unworthy us, in loving tenderness, up into fellowship with His glorious self. IV. ENTRANCE INTO SUFFERING Another fruit of holy obedience is entrance into suffering. I would not magnify joy and rapture, although they are unspeakably great in the committed life. For joy and rapture need no advocates. But we shrink from suffering and can easily call all suffering an evil thing. Yet we live in an epoch of tragic sorrows, when man is adding to the crueler forces of nature such blasphemous horrors as drag soul as well as body into hell. And holy obedience must walk in this world, not aloof and preoccupied, but stained with sorrowʼs travail. Nor is the God-blinded soul given blissful oblivion but, rather, excruciatingly sensitive eyesight toward the world of men. The sources of suffering for the tendered soul are infinitely multiplied, well-nigh beyond all endurance. Ponder this paradox in religious experience: “Nothing matters; everything matters.” I recently had an unforgettable hour with a Hindu monk. He knew the secret of this paradox which we discussed together: “Nothing matters; everything matters.” It is a key of entrance into suffering. He who knows only one-half of the paradox can never enter that door of mystery and survive. There is a lusty, adolescent way of thought among us which oversimplifies the question of suffering. It merely says, “Let us remove it.” And some suffering can, through more suffering, be removed. But there is an inexorable residue which confronts you and me and the blighted souls of Europe

and China and the Near East and India, awful, unremovable in a lifetime, withering all souls not genuinely rooted in Eternity itself. The Germans call it Schicksal or Destiny. Under this word they gather all the vast forces of nature and disease and the convulsive upheavals of social life which sweep them along, as individuals, like debris in a raging flood, into an unknown end. Those who are not prepared by the inner certitude of Job, “I know that my Avenger liveth” (Job 19: 25), must perish in the flood. One returns from Europe with the sound of weeping in oneʼs ears, in order to say, “Donʼt be deceived. You must face Destiny. Preparation is only possible now. Donʼt be fooled by your sunny skies. When the rains descend and the floods come and the winds blow and beat upon your house, your private dwelling, your own family, your own fair hopes, your own strong muscles, your own body, your own soul itself, then it is well-nigh too late to build a house. You can only go inside what house you have and pray that it is founded upon the Rock. Be not deceived by distance in time or space, or the false security of a bank account and an automobile and good health and willing hands to work. Thousands, perhaps millions as good as you have had all these things and are perishing in body and, worse still, in soul today.” An awful solemnity is upon the earth, for the last vestige of earthly security is gone. It has always been gone, and religion has always said so, but we havenʼt believed it. And some of us Quakers are not yet undeceived, and childishly expect our little cushions for our little bodies, in a world inflamed with untold ulcers. Be not fooled by the pleasantness of the Main Line life, and the niceness of Germantown existence, and the quiet coolness of your wellfurnished homes. For the plagues of Egypt are upon the world, entering hovel and palace, and there is no escape for you or for me. There is an inexorable amount of suffering in all life, blind, aching, unremovable, not new but only terribly intensified in these days. One comes back from Europe aghast at having seen

how lives as graciously cultured as ours, but rooted only in time and property and reputation, and self-deluded by a mild veneer of religious respectability but unprepared by the amazing life of commitment to the Eternal in holy obedience, are now doomed to hopeless, hopeless despair. For if you will accept as normal life only what you can understand, then you will try only to expel the dull, dead weight of Destiny, of inevitable suffering which is a part of normal life, and never come to terms with it or fit your soul to the collar and bear the burden of your suffering which must be borne by you, or enter into the divine education and drastic discipline of sorrow, or rise radiant in the sacrament of pain. One comes back from Europe to plead with you, you here in these seats, you my pleasant but often easy-living friends, to open your lives to such a baptism of Eternity now as turns this world of tumbling change into a wilderness in your eyes and fortifies you with an unshakable peace that passes all understanding and endures all earthly shocks without soul-destroying rebelliousness. Then and then only can we, weaned from earth, and committed wholly to God alone, hope to become voices crying in this wilderness of Philadelphia and London, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in this desert a highway for our God” (Isa. 40:3). These are old truths. But now is no time for enticing novelties but for a return to the everlasting truths of life and suffering and Eternity and unreserved commitment to Him who is over all. The heart is stretched through suffering, and enlarged. But O the agony of this enlarging of the heart, that one may be prepared to enter into the anguish of others! Yet the way of holy obedience leads out from the heart of God and extends through the Valley of the Shadow. But there is also removable suffering, yet such as yields only to years of toil and fatigue and unconquerable faith and perchance only to death itself. The Cross as dogma is painless speculation; the Cross as lived suffering is anguish and glory. Yet God, out of the pattern of His own heart, has

planted the Cross along the road of holy obedience. And He enacts in the hearts of those He loves the miracle of willingness to welcome suffering and to know it for what it is—the final seal of His gracious love. I dare not urge you to your Cross. But He, more powerfully, speaks within you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments, and disquiets us with the worldʼs needs. By inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, Godʼs burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us. And He gives us the royal blindness of faith, and the seeing eye of the sensitized soul, and the grace of unflinching obedience. Then we see that nothing matters, and that everything matters, and that this my task matters for me and for my fellow men and for Eternity. And if we be utterly humble we may be given strength to be obedient even unto death, yea the death of the Cross. In my deepest heart I know that some of us have to face our comfortable, self-oriented lives all over again. The times are too tragic, Godʼs sorrow is too great, manʼs night is too dark, the Cross is too glorious for us to live as we have lived, in anything short of holy obedience. It may or it may not mean change in geography, in profession, in wealth, in earthly security. It does mean this: Some of us will have to enter upon a vow of renunciation and of dedication to the “Eternal Internal” which is as complete and as irrevocable as was the vow of the monk of the Middle Ages. Little groups of such utterly dedicated souls, knowing one another in Divine Fellowship, must take an irrevocable vow to live in this world yet not of this world, Franciscans of the Third Order, and if it be His will, kindle again the embers of faith in the midst of a secular world. Our meetings were meant to be such groups, but now too many of them are dulled and cooled and flooded by the secular. But within our meetings such inner bands of men and women, internally set apart, living by a vow of perpetual obedience to the Inner Voice, in the world yet not of the world, ready to go the second half, obedient as a shadow, sensitive as a shadow, selfless as a shadow—such bands of humble prophets can

recreate the Society of Friends and the Christian church and shake the countryside for ten miles around.

V. SIMPLICITY The last fruit of holy obedience is the simplicity of the trusting child, the simplicity of the children of God. It is the simplicity which lies beyond complexity. It is the naiveté which is the yonder side of sophistication. It is the beginning of spiritual maturity, which comes after the awkward age of religious busy-ness for the Kingdom of God—yet how many are caught, and arrested in development, within this adolescent development of the soulʼs growth! The mark of this simplified life is radiant joy. It lives in the Fellowship of the Transfigured Face. Knowing sorrow to the depths it does not agonize and fret and strain, but in serene, unhurried calm it walks in time with the joy and assurance of Eternity. Knowing fully the complexity of menʼs problems it cuts through to the Love of God and ever cleaves to Him. Like the mercy of Shakespeare, “ʼtis mightiest in the mightiest.” But it binds all obedient souls together in the fellowship of humility and simple adoration of Him who is all in all. I have in mind something deeper than the simplification of our external programs, our absurdly crowded calendars of appointments through which so many pantingly and frantically gasp. These do become simplified in holy obedience, and the poise and peace we have been missing can really be found. But there is a deeper, an internal simplification of the whole of oneʼs personality, stilled, tranquil, in childlike trust listening ever to Eternityʼs whisper, walking with a smile into the dark. This amazing simplification comes when we “center down,” when life is lived with singleness of eye, from a holy Center where the breath and stillness of Eternity are heavy upon us and we are wholly yielded to Him. Some of you know this holy, recreating Center of eternal peace and joy

and live in it day and night. Some of you may see it over the margin and wistfully long to slip into that amazing Center where the soul is at home with God. Be very faithful to that wistful longing. It is the Eternal Goodness calling you to return Home, to feed upon green pastures and walk beside still waters and live in the peace of the Shepherdʼs presence. It is the life beyond fevered strain. We are called beyond strain, to peace and power and joy and love and thorough abandonment of self. We are called to put our hands trustingly in His hand and walk the holy way, in no anxiety assuredly resting in Him. Douglas Steere wisely says that true religion often appears to be the enemy of the moralist. For religion cuts across the fine distinctions between the several virtues and gathers all virtues into the one supreme quality of love. The wholly obedient life is mastered and unified and simplified and gathered up into the love of God and it lives and walks among men in the perpetual flame of that radiant love. For the simplified man loves God with all his heart and mind and soul and strength and abides trustingly in that love. Then indeed do we love our neighbors. And the Fellowship of the Horny Hands is identical with the Fellowship of the Transfigured Face, in this Mary-Martha life. In this day when the burdens of humanity press so heavily upon us I would begin not first with techniques of service but with the most “Serious Call to a Devout Life,” a life of such humble obedience to the Inner Voice as we have scarcely dared to dream. Hasten unto Him who calls you in the silences of your heart. The Hound of Heaven is ever near us, the voice of the Shepherd is calling us home. Too long have we lingered in double-minded obedience and dared not the certainties of His love. For Him do ye seek, all ye pearl merchants. He is “the food of grown men.” Hasten unto Him who is the chief actor of the drama of time and Eternity. It is not too late to love Him utterly and obey Him implicitly and be baptized with the power of the apostolic life. Hear the words of Saint Augustine, as he rued his delay

of commitment to Him. “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst and shoutedst, and burstedst my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scattered my blindness. Thou breathedst odors, and I drew in breath and pant for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me and I burned for Thy peace. When I shall with my whole soul cleave to Thee, I shall nowhere have sorrow or labor, and my life shall live as wholly full of Thee.”

Reality Of The Spiritual World Thomas R. Kelly ABOUT THE AUTHOR Throughout his years at Haverford College Thomas R. Kelly entered generously into the life of Pendle Hill. To Haverford-Pendle Hill students he gave both instruction and inspiration. He was lecturer in the summer term of 1936, and he visited us at many other times as a member of the American Friends Service Committee and of various other groups conferring here. He was always a warm friend of Pendle Hill and its purposes. The second Sunday in January, 1941, he spent at Pendle Hill, leading a conference of the Meeting workers on cultivation of the spiritual life. On many who heard him that day, at the height of his power and effectiveness, he made an unforgettable impression which was intensified by the news of his sudden death five days later. For these and for reasons of personal friendship, it seems fitting that some word of his be included in the Pendle Hill pamphlet series. It is with gratitude that the Publication Committee has received from Lael Kelly the present series of four addresses, given during the winter of 1940-41, which is here published as Pamphlet Twenty-One. Thomas R. Kellyʼs manuscript has been altered only in such verbal details as make it more suitable for print than for the spoken word. Some of the material is similar to that in other of his writings; some is different, while some offers a fresh interpretation of the same truths. Taken as a whole, these essays are a refreshing demonstration of the careful scholarship, the warm humanity, and the valid mystical experience which made so many of those who loved Thomas Kelly as a friend hearken to him as a prophet. THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 3

God How can we be sure that God is real, and not just a creation of our wishes? We have disquieting desires for a God, for a real God. There come to us times of loneliness when we seem to have a premonition of a deep vastness in ourselves, when the universe about us, gigantic as it is in all its starry depths, seems cramped and narrow for our souls, and something makes us long for an abiding Home. We have times of fatigue, of confusion, of exhaustion, of utter discouragement, when we long for a serene and everlasting Bosom on which to lay our heads and be at peace. But how can we be sure that what we call God is not a product of our wishful thinking, a self-delusion we create, a giant shadow of our longings flung up against the sky and asserted to be real? We have moments when we long, not for freedom and yet more freedom, but for self-surrender, self-dedication, self-abandonment in utter loyalty to an Overself. If I could find an Object worthy of my utmost allegiance, if I could find a Mark worthy to be the aim of the bow of my life, I should gladly pull the arrow back to its head and let all fly upon a single shot. I should be integrated, freed from internal conflicts, those confusions and tangles within which make me ineffective, indecisive, wavering, half-hearted, unhappy. I should gladly be a slave of such a Being, and know that I am truly free when I am His utter slave. But I see men and women, my brothers and sisters in Germany and Italy and Russia, who joyfully commit their all to the State, to an earthly state, to a state which to them seems noble, glorious, and ideal. They seem to get integration and joy in enslavement similar to that which my religious friends get from commitment to an invisible, spiritual world. Maybe the values all lie on the subjective side, on the integration of self and the dedication of will to any object which is conceived as worthy. Maybe the object doesnʼt have to be THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 4

real but just to be thought to be real with a vigorous, fanatical intensity. I know that false ideas and misplaced enthusiasms have had as real effects upon men and upon history as have well-grounded beliefs and ideals. Maybe the whole conviction of a Spiritual Reality shadowing over us all is such a hoax, a useful hoax as long as we believe it intensely, a hoax that stabilizes men and society and one that ought to be preserved and nourished and fostered for its useful social effect. Such is the almost universal argument in the mind of educated man. But there is an inner integrity in us all which rejects all programs of As If. We cannot merely act as if there were a God, while we secretly keep our fingers crossed. This inner integrity demands the real; we cannot long tolerate complex ways of kidding ourselves, nor forever whistle to keep our courage up. It is an old maxim, with a double meaning: “Let the truth be known, though the heavens fall.” We are such creatures as demand to build upon the Truth. And if the Truth is that there are no heavens, but only earth, no real God, but only human cravings for a God, then we want to know that, and adjust our lonely lives to that awful fact. First Argument: Analogy Caught in this difficulty, that we long for a Real God, no, demand a Real God, yet can be sure of only our subjective longings, not of Godʼs objective existence, we ask a devout friend, “Are you sure that God is real?” And he replies, “Yes, I am absolutely sure.” We then continue, “But why are you so sure there is a Reality, an actually existent reality corresponding to your religious cravings?” He replies, “I find myself in a world which furnishes real objects to answer all my central cravings. In me, subjectively, there is a craving for food. And I find, out there, in the world, that the Universe furnishes me real food. In me I find a profound craving for companionship. And out in the world there are real men and women who give their fellowship in answer to my THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 5

craving. In me is an insistent craving for sex. And I find myself set in a universe that furnishes real beings of the opposite sex. I find in myself a craving for beauty, and out there I find beautiful objects that satisfy my soul. And when I find in myself a profound craving for God, for an absolute resting place for my soulʼs devotion, an Object for my last loyalty, I believe that here, too, there is an answering Object. The same structural situation — subjective craving, satisfying Object — is to be expected.” “But,” we answer, “you are arguing from analogy. And analogies are notoriously treacherous. You argue that the fact of food-hunger, with its answering object of real food, gives you the right to say, ʻFrom the fact of God-hunger I am sure there is a real Bread of Life.ʼ But analogies break down. If analogies were always perfect, they would cease to be analogies and become identities. No, the time comes when similar situations part company, and are different. Perhaps the matter of Godʼs real existence is just such a case. One canʼt be sure. And I want to be sure. At best your argument from analogy only indicates the possibility that there is an objectively real God, corresponding to my hunger for Him. Perhaps it even indicates probability. But I want deeper grounds than that.” Second Argument: Authority Disappointed in this first argument for the reality of a Spiritual Being wherein we may cradle our life, we turn in a second direction and ask a devout Protestant: “Do you believe that God is utterly real?” He replies, “Yes,” and you ask, “Why?” to which he answers, “The Bible tells me God is real, that in Him we live and move and have our being.” “But why do you believe the Bible?” To this he replies, “Because the Scriptures are inspired.” You reply, “Yes, I strongly agree with you. But I suspect you and I may mean different things. Why do you say Scripture is inspired? Is it because you find in it the record of men who were drinking THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 6

from the same fountains of life that well up in you, so that you; too, could write inspired words that would feed other hungry souls?” “Oh, no, no,” he might hastily reply, “I am no such great soul. God chose special men to write the Scriptures, and Iʼm not one of them.” To this you may reply, “I disagree, and am bold enough to believe that the fountains of inspiration are not stopped. There is no one age of inspiration, no one special class of inspired. Either divine inspiration is renewed in every age and in all peoples, or it never flowed at all. Now tell me, why do you believe the Bible is inspired so that you can rely upon its testimony to the reality of God?” He answers, “The Bible is inspired because it is written, ʻAll Scripture is given of God.ʼ ” “But wait. Do you mean to prove the Bible by the Bible? That is the crudest circle in argument. By the same argument the Book of Mormon is inspired, for it says it is, and therefore you must believe all Mormon teachings.” Then he retreats and says, “But the Bible is an ancient and revered authority, tested by time, canonized by Councils, and believed by multitudes.” You answer, “So are the Buddhist scriptures, such as the Dhammapada and The Lotus of the Wonderful Law. Your argument only amounts to this, ʻForty million Frenchmen canʼt be wrong.ʼ You only argue, ʻForty million or forty billion Christians canʼt be wrong in trusting the Bible.ʼ But if you ask forty million Asiatics youʼll get a different answer. Youʼll have to surrender the authority of the Bible if it is based upon the circular argument, ʻThe Bible is authoritative because it says authoritatively that it is authoritative.ʼ After which you canʼt retreat into the argument, ʻThe Bible is a good and reliable authority because masses of people believe in it,ʼ imposing as that fact is, Mass agreement, even upon the existence of God, is not enough to prove that God exists. Maybe the whole of mankind is deluded on the matter. Thatʼs just my problem. And you donʼt settle it for me by appealing to the authority of a revered THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 7

Book, if that authority is guaranteed only by mass acceptance.” The authoritarian evidence for the reality of God as given by many Protestants, who make the Book the supreme authority, reappears in different form if an average Roman Catholic is approached. His final defense of the authority of the Bible might be that Holy Church guaranteed the reliability of the Bible, and of the widespread conviction that there is a really existent God. For did not the Church Fathers and the Councils and the Bible agree in this matter, that there is a God in heaven, brooding over the world in love? But long ago Abelard startled the Roman Church by printing a little book with each page in two columns, in which, without comment, he set side by side contradictory statements of the Fathers of the Church. Evidently authorities disagree. And when authorities disagree, who shall be the authority to choose between authorities? Roman Catholics would reply, “The Pope is infallible when he officially makes a decision.” But you ask, “Who guarantees the infallibility of the Pope?” Answer: “The Vatican Council in 1870 pronounced the Pope infallible.” But are Church Councils infallible, so that they can infallibly guarantee the infallibility of the Pope? No, only the Pope is infallible. And there you are with authoritarian guarantees of the reality of God fallen to the ground. Third Argument: Causation I shall take time to state only one more effort to prove the objective reality of the spiritual world. For, honestly, all these arguments leave me cold. Even if they were sound — and none of them is watertight — they would only quiet my intellectual questionings. They would never motivate me to absolute dedication to Him for whom I yearn. But religious men are dedicated men, joyously enslaved men, bondservants of God and of his Christ, given in will to God. Arguments are devised subsequent to our deep conviction, THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 8 not preceding our conviction. They bolster faith; they do

not create it. The third argument is this: Here is a world, amazingly complex, astonishingly interknit. Here are flowers, depending upon bees for pollination, and bees dependent upon flowers for food. Yonder are the starry heavens, adjusted, maintained, wheeling their way through staggering spaces in perfect rhythm and order. Whence comes it all, if not from God? And here am I, a complex being, of amazing detail of body and astounding reaches of mind. Yet my parents didnʼt make me ; they are as incapable of being my true cause as I am incapable of being the true cause of my children. This whole spectacle is too vast, too well articulated to be caused by any single thing in the world. There must be a cause outside and beneath the whole, which I call God, who creates, maintains, and preserves the whole world order. Such an argument seems imposing and appealing to us all. But it is not absolutely watertight. For notice, this is not a perfect world, as we all know only too well from observation and experience. There are imperfections and flaws in it, notes that jar as well as notes that blend. The argument rests upon only half the evidence, the good in the world, not the evil and dislocation. There are maladjustments as well as adjustments. We may marvel at the human eye. But the great physicist Helmholtz said that if an optical workman made for him an apparatus as imperfect and inefficient as a human eye, he would dismiss him. Here is the point: You canʼt argue from an imperfect effect, the world, to a perfect cause, God. An imperfect effect can only legitimately imply an imperfect cause, not a perfect one. If a World Cause made this world, He was not omniscient, but had a streak of stupidity in Him, to have allowed flaws to creep in. Or else, if He was omniscient, He was not omnipotent, for, knowing what would be a world without flaws, He couldnʼt produce it. Again, if He was omniscient and omnipotent, but still made an imperfect world, then he THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 9

was not omni-benevolent but malicious, and delighted in torturing his creation by creating men with dreams of perfection, yet tantalizingly setting them in a world that grinds out the dreams of their hearts. And David Hume, knowing all this, added the suggestion, maybe the world is the result of a superhuman but not divine creator who used trial and error and bungled many worlds before he succeeded in making this one. Look at a modern ocean liner, amazingly compact and interdependent, seeming to imply a master mind behind it. And then be introduced to the ship-builder, who may be a very mediocre person, just a man like ourselves. He merely inherited the experience of repeated ship-builders over the centuries, each of whom was no master mind but just found out a little detail and added it to the heritage. Maybe the World-Creator is stupid and bungling, but given sufficiently repeated trials and errors He may turn out a fairly decent world. Other Arguments Indicated I shall not complete the list nor state the ontological argument, which argues from the notion of a perfect being involving its existence. Nor shall I state the moral argument, which argues that moral experience requires a God for its final validation. Nor shall I state the argument from the agreement of the race, from the universality of religion among all tribes of men, for I have referred to it already in pointing out that mass agreement cannot back up any belief in an authority. But there is a wholly different way of being sure that God is real. It is not an intellectual proof, a reasoned sequence of thoughts. It is the fact that men experience the presence of God. Into our lives come times when, all unexpectedly, He shadows over us, steals into the inner recesses of our souls, and lifts us up in a wonderful joy and peace. The curtains of heaven are raised and we find THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 10

ourselves in heavenly peace in Christ Jesus. Sometimes these moments of visitation come to us in strange surroundings — on lonely country roads, in a class room, at the kitchen sink. Sometimes they come in the hour of worship, when we are gathered into one Holy Presence who stands in our midst and welds us together in breathless hush, and wraps us all in sweet comfortableness into His arms of love. In such times of direct experience of Presence, we know that God is utterly real. We need no argument. When we are gazing into the sun we need no argument, no proof that the sun is shining. This evidence for the reality of God is the one the Quakers primarily appeal to. It is the evidence upon which the mystics of all times rest their testimony. Quakerism is essentially empirical; it relies upon direct and immediate experience. We keep insisting: It isnʼt enough to believe in the love of God, as a doctrine; you must experience the love of God. It isnʼt enough to believe that Christ was born in Bethlehem, you must experience a Bethlehem, a birth of Christ in your hearts. To be able to defend a creed intellectually isnʼt enough; you must experience as reality first of all what the creed asserts. And unless the experience is there, behind it, the mere belief is not enough. We must therefore examine this evidence from experience of God with some care, to see if it is sound, for it is crucial. First, let us notice that this experience which seems so clearly to be an experience of God energizes us enormously, in a way far different from arguments. Arguments that convince our intellect alone leave us merely with questions answered, but they do not bring us to our knees in humble, joyful submission into His hands of all that we are. They do not bring the unutterable joy that makes Paul and Silas sing hymns at midnight in prison. Even though moments of the experience of Presence may dawn upon us, and then fade, we are thereafter new men and women, plowed through THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World

11 to our depths, ready to run and not be weary, and to walk and not faint. We love God with a new and joyous love, wholly and completely. It is no commanded love, it is the joyful answer of our whole being to His revealed love. Our will becomes dedicated, our self-offering to God is vitalized by deep emotional reinforcement. Such experiences of God make men and women who are the dynamic, creative, untiring workers of a group, for they are energized at the base of their being by a Divine Energizing. I believe the real vitality of religion rests upon the fact that religious experience is universally taking place. It isnʼt creeds that keep churches going, it is the dynamic of Godʼs life, given in sublime and intimate moments to men and women and boys and girls. Second, let us notice that the experience seems to come from beyond us. It doesnʼt seem to be a little subjective patch in our consciousness. It carries a sense of objectivity in its very heart, as if it arose from beyond us and came in as a revelation of a reality out there. If I may use a philosophic term, it is realistic. Just as my experience of that wall out there doesnʼt seem to be a subjective state of my mind, but a disclosure of a real wall out there beyond me, so the experience of God has in its inner nature a testimony that an Object is being disclosed to us. We do not make it, we receive it. There is a passivity on our part, and an independence of our own intention to experience God that is universally testified to. God seems to be the active one, we the receptive ones. And in glad discovery we know that God is dynamically at work in the world, and at work in us, pressing in upon us, knocking at the door of our minds and doing things to us which arise in His own initiative. Third, let us notice that, for the person who experiences these apparent invasions, there is set up a state of certainty about God which is utterly satisfying and convincing to himself. It is not the certainty that follows upon a sound argument. It is different, a kind of self-guaranteeing certainty. It cannot be transferred to anyone else, but it is a THOMAS R. KELLY

Reality Of The Spiritual World 12 certainty which is enough to convince oneself completely. St. Augustine says that after such experiences he was certain of God, but in a new way. Intellectual convincement of the reality of God is utterly different from the felt reality of God. One may have been intellectually convinced of Godʼs existence, but the experience of God brings a new kind of meaning to the reality of God. He is real with a vividness and an indubitableness that is powerfully overwhelming to the individual. That inner certainty cannot be conveyed to another; it may only be caught by a contagion, as others see our lives and gain some intimation of the very springs of our being. Now that we have given recognition to the testimony of experience, let us become more critical and intellectual. From a critical, intellectual point of view I believe that the testimony of mystic experience is not absolutely logically free from flaws. Just as all logical proofs for Godʼs existence can be questioned, so the experiential evidence is not intellectually watertight, and we may as well face it, and be aware of it, as intellects. Yet I do not find my faith in the reality of the experience of God shaken by the fact that I can find intellectual holes in the testimony, any more than I find my faith shaken by discovering that all logical proofs for Godʼs existence are defective. Such defects do not prove that God does not exist. They only drive us back to the old, old truth: we walk by faith and not by sight. Let us then be bold enough to face and acknowledge such criticism of the testimony of religious experience. First, mere internal pressure of certainty does not prove certainty. Intense inner assurance that something is so does not make it so. The insane hospitals are full of people who have intense internal certainties that they are Jesus Christ, or Napoleon, or an angel from heaven. Shall we reject the internal pressure of certainty of the insane and keep the internal certainties of the sane? Medieval monks were internally certain that Satan whispered in their ear. If we

THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 13 accept some internal certainties, we should accept all, or else find some way of distinguishing between internal certainties. Not all can be true, or the world is a madhouse of contradictory certainties. I am persuaded that my experience of the presence of God is real, utterly real, that it originates in the invading love of God. But I must admit that, intellectually, my feeling of convincement is no more real and intense and, on this basis, no more reliable than the convincement of many people with whom I wholly disagree. Second, if we retreat from this ground of assurance, we take refuge in a second assurance that our experience of God is grounded in a real God. This second assurance comes from the fact that lives that have experienced God as vividly real are new lives, transformed lives, stabilized lives, integrated lives, souls newly sensitive to moral needs of men, newly dynamic in transforming city slums and eradicating war. By their fruits we know that they have been touched, not by vague fancies, by subjective, diaphanous visions, but by a real, living Power. The consequences of the experience are so real that they must have been released by a real cause, a real God, a real Spiritual Power energizing them. This pragmatic test, this pointing to the fruits of religious experience, is the most frequent defense of its validity. Not only Rufus Jones but all other writers on the subject make use of it. And it is very convincing. But there is a logical defect in this pragmatic test. Be patient with me while I turn logician for a moment. The argument runs: If God has really visited us, He has transformed our lives. Our lives are transformed. Therefore He has visited us. There is a patent logical fallacy in this argument, which is named the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent. A valid

THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 14 form would be that of Affirming the Antecedent, and would go like this: If God has really visited us, He has transformed our lives. He has visited us. Therefore He has transformed our lives. But this form is of no use to us, for the minor premise, “He has really visited us,” is just the question, and cannot appear as a premise, but should appear in the conclusion. The only valid form in which “He has really visited us” can appear in the conclusion is in the negative form: If God has really visited us, He has transformed our lives. Our lives are not transformed. Therefore He has not really visited us. But this valid argument does not prove what we were after, namely that God is really present when lives are transformed. It only proves the very important negative, He is not really present where lives are still shabby and unchanged. Professor Hocking among others many years ago pointed out the superiority of the negative pragmatic argument. But, if religious experience cannot be proved to be entirely reliable by the pragmatic argument, is religion alone in this respect? Far from it. I would remind you that the whole of experimental science which we revere today rests upon such argument, and faces the same predicament. Every scientific theory that is supported by experimental evidence rests upon the fallacy of affirming the consequent. The outcome is that the whole of scientific theory is probable only, not absolutely certain. But this fact has not paralyzed science, which proceeds all undisturbed by the logical defect, and, with open mind, lets down its faith upon its findings. For science rests upon faith, not upon certainty. THOMAS R. KELLY

Reality Of The Spiritual World 15 And this is the ground of religion. It rests upon a trust and a faith that for the religious man have become his deepest certainty, the certainty of faith, not the certainty of logic. The certainties of faith call out our whole selves in wholehearted and unreserved dedication. The certainties of logic leave our wills untouched and unenslaved. Be not disturbed by the intellectual criticism of subjectivity and of mystic experience which I have given. I am persuaded that God is greater than logic, although not contrary to logic, and our mere inability to catch Him in the little net of our human reason is no proof of His non-existence, but only of our need that our little reason shall be supplemented by His tender visitations, and that He may lead and guide us to the end of the road in ways superior to any that our intellects can plan. This is the blindness of trust, which walks with Him, unafraid, into the dark. The Spiritual World It may seem as if I have been kicking over a great deal of religious furniture, offering criticisms not only of the traditional proofs for Godʼs existence but also of the validity of the mystical experience of the Presence of God. But I was only doing what the great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, said he must do — destroy reason in order to make room for faith. James Bissett Pratt, of Williams College, traces religious development through three stages. The first stage, Primitive Credulity, is found in children and in primitive peoples. The second is the stage of Doubt and Criticism, and is found in the years of adolescence and in sophisticated brainworshippers. The third, the Stage of Faith, is reached by those who have left behind their childish belief in a Big, Kind Man in the Sky, have passed safely through the tangles of expanded intellectual vision which science, history, psychology, and philosophy give us, and have found a serene THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World

16 and childlike faith that stands firm in the midst of changing intellectual views. This third stage is strikingly akin to the first. It is the childlike simplicity of the truly great souls; of such, not of complicated professors, is the kingdom of heaven. It is a simplicity which is not naive, but enriched by a background of complex knowledge, not burdened or blinded by that complexity, but aware of it and sitting atop it. If it has been given to you to attain this third, mature stage of faith, you can voyage at will into arguments and discussions that are blasting at the second stage, and be untouched by them, for your life is down deep upon a Rock that is not founded upon argument and criticism and dispute. At this stage one can differ radically with another person intellectually, yet love him because he too is basically devoted to feeding upon the Bread of Life, not primarily devoted to chemical analysis of that Bread. But turning to the whole subject, the Reality of the Spiritual World, we may ask by whom is the spiritual world peopled? Up to this time I have been speaking only of God. And, after all, only God matters. When men, the world over, reach up to that which is Highest above them, it is for God that they yearn, no matter how He may be conceived, whether He be Allah, or Brahma, or the Tao, or Ahura Mazda, or the Father in Heaven of the Christian. But men have variously peopled the spiritual world with more than God; some have added angels, whole fluttering multitudes of angels; some have added devils or The Devil, Satan; some have added the souls of the departed. Some have made two spiritual worlds, a Heaven and a Hell, with presiding divinities over each. Some have split the Christian deity into a Trinity of persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Some, like Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, the greatest mystics of the West, have asserted an Urgrund, a Godhead, a more basic view of Reality underlying all the variety of THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World

17 divine forms that are conceivable. And, again, how does the spiritual world behave toward us? Some say it is aloof, self-contained, not noticing this world, like the gods of Epicurus and Lucretius, who, being perfect — by definition — could not want anything, and would be wholly unconcerned for us, not caring for our prayers, not desiring adoration, not insulted or grieved by our sins. Others say that God and all His angels bend over us in loving solicitude, tenderly calling us back toward our true Home, that God knocks on the doors of our hearts and whispers sweet promptings toward Himself, that He assigns guardian angels to each of us, and that He came to earth and died on Calvary on our behalf. In the midst of this welter of views about the spiritual world, how shall we find our way? They cannot all be true insights, for some of them are mutually inconsistent. What criterion can we use for rejecting some and accepting others? Let us try one criterion — reason. Can some of these views be discarded because they are contrary to reason, and others retained because reason guarantees them? In the preceding criticism it was pointed out that reason alone, using intellectual processes, could not establish with certainty the existence of any God at all, no matter how conceived. And if reason fails even to establish the basic condition, that there is a spiritual world, it can hardly succeed in deciding the dependent question, what is in the spiritual world. Reason may establish plausibility, that is rational possibility for the existence of such a world, but reason cannot establish that it exists. Logical possibility does not establish actuality. When reason, out of her own inner resources, tries to argue for Godʼs existence, we get such a questionable argument as Duns Scotus produced in the Middle Ages: “Godʼs actual existence is possible. If God does not exist, His existence cannot be logically possible. But Godʼs non-existence cannot THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World

18 be both possible and impossible at the same time. Therefore God exists!” I need not analyze this argument to show its falsity. Several criteria for selecting among such conflicting views may be tried: (a) reason, (b) the judgment of those spiritually discerning souls whom we respect most, (c) the position taken by those writers of the Bible whom we appreciate most (essentially the same as the preceding test), (d) our own inner experience with God, whereby some of these views become vivid and precious for us, while others leave us cold. No one of these tests is completely adequate or sure; each needs to be supplemented by the others. But of them all, we are members of a current which puts the greatest emphasis upon the last test, the vividness and vitality which some of these views develop in ourselves by an inner experience. This was George Foxʼs final discovery. He tried all outward helps — preachers, reputedly great religious men — until at last, when all outward helps had failed, he turned within and found an inward teacher, the inner, living Spirit of Christ, who led him into Truth. This inward Teacher of Truth is the Inner Light, the Seed of God, through whose germination within we are led into Truth. Thus, if I experience the love of God, feeling it bathing me, brooding over me, opening up to me deep responses, and sending me out into the world of men with a new and vital love for God and man, then I can say that I know experientially that God is a loving being. If, on the other hand, I have no experience of the Holy Trinity, if I have no direct opening whereby I know how God the Father begets the Son, and how the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, I let the whole Trinitarian view alone, as something not grounded in my experience. But this test, because of its very privacy and uniqueness, would allow each individualʼs insights to be final, if taken alone. A religious anarchy of private opinion THOMAS R. KELLY

Reality Of The Spiritual World 19 would result, each man being the final measurer of truth. This would be the religious analogue of the Sophists of ancient Greece, and the same sophistry is widely current today, for we find plenty of people who say, “What is true and right for me is true and right for me, and what is true and right for you is true and right for you.” The public, universal character of truth would disappear. All religious groups, like the Quakers, which put the final authority not on an outer standard, like the Bible or the Church decisions, but on an inner authority, the guidance of the Inner Teacher, must face this difficulty. But, you may reply, if God, or the heavenly order, is the originator of my inner persuasions, if all men are taught, within themselves, by the same light and source and teacher, all men ought to agree. Maybe the wide variation in sincere inner convictions indicates that there is no objective content to religion, only subjective wishes, various in various men. I would answer in this way: All knowing arises in a relation between two things, the object out there, and the knowing subject, the knowing person here. Our knowledge of the object is conditioned, in part, by the actual nature of the object. But it is also conditioned, in part, by the expectations, the convictions, the already settled persuasions of the knower. Experience does not deliver to us a finished, unmodified account of the object. When a criminal is fleeing and in hiding, he hears a creaking board as the footstep of a pursuer. When three people testify as to what they saw in an automobile accident, the mechanic will report one thing, the housewife another, and the young man in the throes of his first love yet another. And all three are honest. When a good Catholic like Joan of Arc has a mystical opening, she reports that St. Catherine is speaking to her. But when a Mahayana Buddhist reports a heavenly visitation, he says that Kwan Yin or Manjusri has visited him. The already accepted and dominant system of ideas in the background of the mind of the experiencer is an active

THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 20 modifier of the report. It is well-nigh impossible to get experience in the raw. Whatever it is in the raw, it is instantly caught up into a scheme of interpretation already pervading the mind of the experiencer. I have never heard of authentic accounts of a Buddhist who had not read a word of Catholic theology being visited by St. Catherine, or of a Catholic who had never read a word about Mahayana Buddhism being visited by Manjusri. The vast cultural background in which each of us is immersed sets a broad pattern of expectation, and furnishes the material for interpretation, into the texture of which whatever we might call raw experience is instantly and unconsciously woven. And the special circles of ideas in which we move do the same thing. A Quaker immersed in Quaker literature, Quaker silence, Quaker service, will reflect these things in his reports of his inner experience. On a humbler scale, anyone who reads medical books describing the symptoms of a variety of diseases is likely to find the symptoms of bubonic plague, gout, manic-depressive insanity, and tuberculosis in himself. Rufus Jones points out that mystical experience, indeed religious experience in general, is peculiarly open to suggestion. In this he is reiterating the same fact. Suggestion that there is something to hear if one listens for echoes and messages and intuitions arising from another world will put us into a state of expectation and of listening which I believe is greatly needed, and which is facilitated by repose, silence, and the quieting of the senses. What one hears, in this inward listening, will be clothed in the system of ideas already current in the mind. But, you may ask, does not inner experience bring surprises, as Joan of Arc was surprised that St. Catherine should visit her, a humble peasant girl of Domremy, and lay on her the burden of freeing France and crowning the French king? Yes, I reply, there are surprises of this sort, and a certain specific crystallizing of infinite possibilities

around one solution that I do not fully understand. THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 21 Take the case of Paul on the Damascus road, struck down by the vision. When he cries out, “Who are thou, Lord?” do you think that was a genuine inquiry? By no means. He evidently had been accumulating annoying misgivings about the Christians ever since he held the menʼs coats at the stoning of Stephen. These misgivings, these promptings had led him to feel that maybe the living God was in these Christfollowers whom he persecuted with such zealous cruelty. They had been thrust out of the focus of his conscious life, yet remained as a submerged system of possible interpretation. Finally, in pent-up pressure, comes this moment of disclosure of the ever-present, loving Deity, and the man knows who is visiting him. The question, “Who are thou, Lord?” is purely rhetorical. It seems clear to me that some of the surprise elements in inner experience can be interpreted in terms of repressions which are released and do genuinely seem surprising to the individual who had supposed that his daily round of conscious life and beliefs was the whole of him. But there is another kind of surprise. One may have said all oneʼs life, God is love. But there is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions? God experienced is a vast surprise. Godʼs providence experienced is a vast surprise, Godʼs guidance experienced is a vast, soul-shaking surprise. Godʼs peace, Godʼs power, — the old words flame with meaning, or are discarded as trite, and one gropes for new, more glorious ways of communicating the reality. Then the subjective moulds of expectation are broken down, discarded, made utterly inadequate, as the Object, God,

invades the subject, man, and opens to him new and undreamed truths. For I believe there is an extension of our THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 22 knowledge of God given in inner experience which goes far beyond the limits that the subjective factors of expectation and suggestibility can account for. The new wine must be put into new wineskins, lest all be lost. We become new creatures, new in intellectual moulds, new in behavior patterns, new in friendships and conversations and tastes, as the experience of God breaks down the old, inadequate, half-hearted life-moulds of religion and of conduct. Then we find an answering test in the group, which fortifies our inner experience. We find that some other people, perhaps the saints of the meeting whom we had scorned a little, as overpious or overzealous, know the same thing that has come to us. We find that some quiet, unnoticed members know this. They hadnʼt attracted our attention before, for we had formerly had a pattern of importance in terms of peopleʼs executive ability, or shrewdness in business, or soundness and sanity in worldly judgments. But now we find that we have a new alignment of recognition of important souls, and a powerful drawing toward those who have tasted and handled the Word of Life. This is the Fellowship and Communion of the Saints, the Blessed Community. We find a group answer in the Scriptures. For now we know, from within, some of the Gospel writers, and the prophets, and the singers of songs, or Psalms. For they are now seen to be singing our song, or we can sing their song, or the same song of the Eternal Love is sung through us all, and out into the world. In mad joy we reread the Scriptures, for they have become new. They are a social check upon our individual experience, not as a law book, but as a disclosure of kindred souls who have known a like visitation of God. After this consideration of the checks we need in examining our inner intuitions and experiences, we come back to the question, who people the unseen world?

Let us first accept, without further discussion, God as the prime inhabitant. I would not add a second god, the Devil, to the world of THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 23 spiritual reality. I have never experienced the Devil as a spiritual being, but that doesnʼt decide it. Others have; Martin Luther even threw an ink-bottle at him. But I still donʼt believe in the Devil as a second, black god. I have even seen his hoof-mark on a stone wall in Nuremberg, in Germany, but I still donʼt believe in the Devil. I read in the Bible about the Devil, yet Iʼm unconvinced. George Fox talks freely about the Devil, but I am not impressed. I believe the Devil was devised to account for the evil and maladjustment in our world. An early effort to explain our world led men to divide the worldʼs double aspect of good and evil into two parts, and assign each to a separate ruler. That seemed to save God from responsibility for evil, a problem that is acute if you have only one God. But I cannot think that God and the Devil could work together in such close cooperation as would be required of them if they made the world jointly, God doing the good part, the Devil doing the bad part. On Godʼs side, God would have had to be defective if He did it in this way. He was not very powerful if He could not stop the Devil from putting his fingers into the creation process. Or He was not very good, or He would not have made so many concessions to the Devil in the process. And, on the Devilʼs side, the Devil would lose his real badness, and his hostility to God, if he cooperated so nicely with the Good as would be required. He ceases to be a bad devil, and becomes a benevolent, docile, cooperative spirit, really good at heart, and not too bad to have around the house. Anyway, the history of the devil idea as it appears in the Bible and in the medieval Church is fairly clear. It came from Persia, from the Zoroastrian faith, and seeped across into Asia Minor, and crept into Christian tradition as an alien element from the outside, not an indigenous development.

I would not add to the unseen world an array of angels, a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men who are of good will.” I know that the Bible reports such a THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 24 population in heaven, with occasional visits to earth on some celestial commission. But the Bible reports that demons went out of the Gadarene demoniac and entered into a drove of pigs and made them run into the lake and cause extensive property damage to the owner. Antiquated medical views of Palestine regarding the nature of insanity need not be binding upon us, any more than Egyptian modes of dream interpretation, reported in Genesis or Daniel, are binding upon us. And I find no greater necessity to accept a multitude of good spirits than of bad demons. I know, too, that many people report experiencing the angels, in inner intuition and in visions. But I have always felt sure that God Himself could deal directly with my soul, without sending any intermediaries. In fact, one of my joys as a Quaker is in the removal of all the earthly apparatus of mediation between me and God, and I should find small comfort in discovering that, on the other side of this world, the whole array of intermediaries is duplicated. No matter how benevolent such beings might be, I long for God, not for them. To my mind, angels represent the vestigial remains of polytheism, and a multitude of gods, softened by the idea of a monarchy. The time was when all the multitude of functions of God was accounted for by setting up a separate deity for each function. By and by, as the world grew older and more ripe, the unity of Godʼs nature brought all these separate strands, formerly thought to be separate beings, into the coverage of the one Being, God. The system of angels represents an intermediate stage in this growth from true polytheism to complete monotheism. The actual luxuriant growth of angels in the medieval Church has a definite historical route of entry. They, too, came originally from

Persia, from Zoroastrian dualism of God and Devil, with a lot of intermediate, competing spirits organized into two armies and competing on earth for the souls of men. A neoPlatonic writer of the Fifth Century A. D. came under this influence, wrote a book called The Celestial Hierarchies, THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 25 which was translated into Latin about 850 by an Irish monk named John Scotus Erigena, and the whole Pandoraʼs box of angels got root in an age that was intellectually and religiously credulous. I have spoken of angels as vestigial remains of polytheism, when the process of movement toward monotheism was arrested at a monarchical stage. But whenever men come into a stage of belief that God is exceedingly lofty, high, transcendent, utterly removed from this low and degraded world, then they insert an array of intermediaries to bridge the gap. This was peculiarly the case in the centuries beginning with the days of Jesus. Godʼs transcendence was emphasized, His immanence minimized. The Gnostic menace to the Early Church involved the insertion between God and man of some thirty stages or aeons, in descending degrees of glory, from God toward man. They put in the God of the Old Testament as one of these intermediaries, and Jesus as another, down near the bottom of the scale. I do not mean that everyone now who believes in angels emphasizes the transcendence of God at the expense of His immanence. But the creative epochs of angelology came in days of belief in excessive transcendence. And the whole layout of subangels and super angels doing the heavenly bidding is present in our literature, furnishing a pattern of suggestion for sincere mystics. Suggestion and expectation, along with the element of surprise which I have already discussed, seem to me adequate to account for the sincere, but as I see it not reliable, reports of angel visitation. As to the departed spirits of men, now inhabiting the unseen world, there are two problems, first the problem of

their existence, and, second, of their efforts to take part in this earthly life which they have left behind. The bare existence of life after death is a giant problem, needing a whole series of lectures. I shall only say that on strict, rational grounds, such as we used above, there is no inescapable, waterproof demonstration that there is a life THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 26 after death, any more than there is a strict, watertight demonstration that God exists. It seems to me plausible to believe there is a life after death. For, as William James puts it, when I reach the time for dying, I am just beginning to learn how to live. And as Robert Browning says in “Abt Vogler”: All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by. There would be a moral absurdity in a universe that built up with such care beings who, through toil and tribulation and victory, achieved a degree of value and of promise, only to strike them on the head at the end of three score years and ten. The second question, of the activity of such departed spirits and of efforts on their part to get through to us with messages, I can touch only by a personal statement of

attitude. I suppose the logic of the situation makes people think it plausible. If a dear one, very much concerned with you, dies, and if he retains his personal traits after death, he would still be concerned with you, and would try to continue the life-sharing with you that he knew on earth. This provides a logical ground for expecting the dead to THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 27 communicate with us. The other consideration which spiritualism offers is the report that some people actually experience visits and get messages from the dead. My own attitude is that of rejecting, lock, stock, and barrel, the whole array of experiences of séances and mediumship as evidences of the existence and activity of the dead breaking in on the world of the living. I believe that there are amazing psychological phenomena, not yet brought under the order of any known laws, which may some time be more systematically ordered and controlled, as science. But I should expect, at best, only additions to psychology to come from it, not to theology, and certainly not to religion. But I must confess to a passionate devotion to God, as the spiritual reality par excellence. If He be real, and if He be concerned for me, I ask no more. I believe He cares, and that He continues our lives after death, in a fellowship of which we have a foretaste here. And I believe that the Eternal Christ, who is this same God, viewed as active and creative, is ever in the world, seeking, knocking, persuading, counseling men to return to their rightful Home. Prayer We have been trying to say that the springs and sources of dynamic, creative living lie not in environmental drives and thrusts outside us but deep within us. Within us is a meeting place with God, who strengthens and invigorates our whole personality, and makes us new creatures, with new values and estimates of the world about us, seen through the eyes of direct and spontaneous love. A leveling of earthly eminences and of earthly obscurities takes place.

The tempests and inner strains of self-seeking, self-oriented living grow still. We learn to be worked through; serenity takes the place of anxiety; fretful cares are replaced by a deep and certain assurance. Something of the cosmic patience of God Himself becomes ours, and we walk in quiet THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 28 assurance and boldness; for He is with us, His rod and His staff they comfort us. How then does one enter upon the internal life of prayer? Dynamic living is not imparted to us by one heavy visitation of God, but comes from continuous inner mental habits pursued through years. Inside of us there ought to go on a steady, daily, hourly process of relating ourselves to the Divine Goodness, of opening our lives to His warmth and love, of steadfast surrender to Him, and of sweet whisperings with Him such as we can tell no one about at all. Some of you who read this may be well advanced in this inner practice and able to go far beyond my simple and imperfect experience. Some of you may have seen it from afar; some of you may have lapsed from it after a short time, accepting the secular habits of mind of our secular age, which sees only time, but not time bathed in Eternity and regenerated by Eternity. I do not have in mind those more formal times of private devotion when we turn our backs upon the family and shut the door of our room and read some devotional book and pause in meditation and in quiet prayer. Those times are important, and need to be cultivated. But the internal prayer life is something still more basic. It is carried on after one has left the quiet room, has opened the door and gone back into the noisy hubbub of the family group. It is carried on as one dashes for a trolley, as one lunches in a cafeteria, as one puts the children to bed. There is a way of living in prayer at the same time that one is busy with the outward affairs of daily living. This practice of continuous prayer in the presence of

God involves developing the habit of carrying on the mental life at two levels. At one level we are immersed in this world of time, of daily affairs. At the same time, but at a deeper level of our minds, we are in active relation with the Eternal Life. I do not think this is a psychological impossibility, or an abnormal thing. One sees a mild analogy in the very THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 29 human experience of being in love. The newly accepted lover has an internal life of joy, of bounding heart, of outgoing aspiration toward his beloved. Yet he goes to work, earns his living, eats his meals, pays his bills. But all the time, deep within, there is a level of awareness of an object very dear to him. This awareness is private; he shows it to no one; yet it spills across and changes his outer life, colors his behavior, and gives new zest and glory to the daily round. Oh yes, we know what a mooning calf he may be at first, what a lovable fool about outward affairs. But when the lover gets things in focus again, and husband and wife settle down to the long pull of the years, the deep love-relation underlies all the raveling frictions of home life, and recreates them in the light of the deeper currents of love. The two levels are there, the surface and the deeper, in fruitful interplay, with the creative values coming from the deeper into the daily affairs of life. So it is sometimes when one becomes a lover of God. Oneʼs first experience of the Heavenly Splendour plows through oneʼs whole being, makes one dance and sing inwardly, enthralls one in unspeakable love. Then the world, at first, is all out of focus; we scorn it, we are abstracted, we are drunken with Eternity. We have not yet learned how to live in both worlds at once, how to integrate our life in time fruitfully with Eternity. Yet we are beings whose home is both here and Yonder, and we must learn the secret of being at home in both, all the time, A new level of our being has been opened to us, and lo, it is Immanuel, God with us. The experience of the Presence of God is not something plastered

on to our nature; it is the fulfillment of ourselves. The last deeps of humanity go down into the life of God. The stabilizing of our lives, so that we live in God and in time, in fruitful interplay, is the task of maturing religious life. How do you begin this double mental life, this life at two levels? You begin now, wherever you are. Listen to these words outwardly. But, within, deep within you, continue in THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 30 steady prayer, offering yourself and all that you are to Him in simple, joyful, serene, unstrained dedication. Practice it steadily. Make it your conscious intention. Keep it up for days and weeks and years. You will be swept away by rapt attention to the exciting things going on around you. Then catch yourself and bring yourself back. You will forget God for whole hours. But do not waste any time in bitter regrets or self-recriminations. Just begin again. The first weeks and months of such practice are pretty patchy, badly botched. But say inwardly to yourself and to God, “This is the kind of bungling person I am when I am not wholly Thine. But take this imperfect devotion of these months and transmute it with Thy love.” Then begin again. And gradually, in months or in three or four years, the habit of heavenly orientation becomes easier, more established. The times of your wandering become shorter, less frequent. The stability of your deeper level becomes greater, God becomes a more steady background of all your reactions in the time-world. Down in this center you have a Holy Place, a Shekinah, where you and God hold sweet converse. Your outer behavior will be revised and your personal angularities will be melted down, and you will approach the outer world of men with something more like an out-going divine love, directed toward them. You begin to love men, because you live in love toward God. Or the divine love flows out toward men through you and you become His pliant instrument of loving concern. This life is not an introverted life. It is just the opposite of the timid, inturned, self-inspecting life. It is an extravert

life. You become turned downward or upward toward God, away from yourself, in joyful self-surrender. You become turned outward toward men, in joyful love of them, with new eyes which only love can give; new eyes for suffering, new eyes for hope. Self-consciousness tends to slip away; timidities tend to disappear. You become released from false modesties, for in some degree you have become unimportant, for you have become filled with God. It is amazing how deep THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 31 humility becomes balanced with boldness, and you become a released, poised, fully normal self. I like the Flemish mysticʼs name for it, “the established man.” But let us examine more closely this life of inner prayer. First, there is what I can only call the prayer of oblation, the prayer of pouring yourself out before God. You pray inwardly, “Take all of me, take all of me.” Back behind the scenes of daily occupation you offer yourself steadily to God, you pour out all your life and will and love before Him, and try to keep nothing back. Pour out your triumphs before Him. But pour out also the rags and tatters of your mistakes before Him. If you make a slip and get angry, pour out that bit of anger before Him and say, “That too is Thine.” If an evil thought flashes through your mind, pour that out before Him and say, “I know that looks pretty shabby, when it is brought into the sanctuary of Thy holiness. But thatʼs what I am, except Thou aidest me.” When you meet a friend, outwardly you chat with him about trivial things. But inwardly offer him to God. Say within yourself, “Here is my friend. Break in upon him. Melt him down. Help him to shake off the scales from his eyes and see Thee. Take him.” Shall I go on and say how far I would carry the prayer of oblation? Some cases may sound strange and silly. Do you stumble on a cinder? Offer it to God, as a part of the world that belongs to Him. Do you pass a tree? That too is His; give it to Him as His own. Do you read the newspaper

and see the vast panorama of humanity struggling in blindness, in selfish, deficient living? Offer humanity, in all its shabbiness and in all its grandeur, and hold it up into the heart of Love within you. At first you make these prayers in words, in little sentences, and say them over and over again. “Here is my life, here is my life.” In the morning you say, “This is Thy day, this is Thy Day.” In the evening you say of the day, “Receive it. Accept it. It is Thine.” But in the course of the THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 32 months you find yourself passing beyond words, and merely living in attitudes of oblation to which the words used to give expression. A gesture of the soul toward God is a prayer; a more or less steady lifting of everything you touch, a lifting of it high before Him, to be transmuted in His love. If you grow careless in such unworded gestures and attitudes, you can always return to the practice of worded prayers of oblation, to fix your inner attention and retrain your habit of prayer. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.” Then there is the prayer of inward song. Phrases run through the background of your mind. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name.” “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.” Inner exultation, inner glorification of the wonders of God fill the deeper level of mind. Sometimes this is a background of deep-running joy and peace; sometimes it is a dancing, singing torrent of happiness, which you must take measures to hide from the world lest men think you are like the apostles at Pentecost, filled with new wine. Pentecost ought to be here; it can be here, in this very place, in wartime. Christians who donʼt know an inner Pentecostal joy are living contradictions of Christianity. Outward sobriety is dictated by a fine sense of the fittingness of things. But inward fires should burn in the God-kindled soul, fires shining outward in a radiant and released

personality. Inwardly, there are hours of joy in God, and the songs of the soul are ever rising. Sometimes the singer and the song seem to be merged together as a single offering to the God of Joy. Sometimes He who puts the new song into our mouths seems merged with the song and the singer, and it is not we alone who sing, but the Eternal Lover who sings through us and out into the world where songs have died on many lips. In such moods I find the Book of Psalms wonderfully helpful. There we come into contact with souls who have THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 33 risen above debate and argument and problem-discussion, and have become singers of the Song of Eternal Love. We read the Psalms hungrily. They say in words what we try to express, Our private joy in God becomes changed into a fellowship of singing souls. The writers of the Psalms teach us new songs of the heart. They give us great phrases that go rolling through our minds all the day long. They channel our prayer of song. Religious reading ought not to be confined to heady, brainy, argumentative discussion, important as that is. Every profoundly religious soul ought to rise to the level of inward psalm-singing; he ought to read devotional literature that is psalm-like in character and spirit. The little book of prayers, A Chain of Prayers across the Ages, is excellent. And Thomas à Kempisʼ Imitation of Christ often gives voice to the song of the soul. Then there is the prayer of inward listening. Perhaps this is not a separate type of prayer, but an element that interlaces the whole of the internal prayer-life. For prayer is a two-way process. It is not just human souls whispering to God. It passes over into communion, with God active in us, as well as we active toward God. A specific state of expectancy, of openness of soul is laid bare and receptive before the Eternal Goodness. In quietness we wait, inwardly, in unformulated expectation. Perhaps this is best done in retirement. Our church services ought to be times when

bands of expectant souls gather and wait before Him. But too often, for myself, the external show of the ritual keeps my expectations chained to earth, to this room, to see what the choir will sing, to hear how the minister handles his theme. Much of Protestant worship seems to me to keep expectation at the earthly level of watchfulness for helpful external stimuli, external words, external suggestions. Perhaps because I am a Quaker I find the prayer of expectation and of listening easiest to carry on in the silence of solitary and of group meditation. Creative, Spirit-filled lives do not arise until God is THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 34 attended to, till His internal teaching, in warm immediacy, becomes a real experience. He has many things to say to us, but we cannot hear Him now, because we have not been wholly weaned away from outward helps, valuable as these often are. The living Christ teaches the listening soul, and guides him into new truth. Sad is it if our church program is so filled with noise, even beautiful sound, that it distracts us from the listening life, the expectation directed toward God. A living silence is often more creative, more recreative, than verbalized prayers, worded in gracious phrases. We need also times of silent waiting, alone, when the busy intellect is not leaping from problem to problem, and from puzzle to puzzle. If we learn the secret of carrying a living silence in the center of our being we can listen on the run. The listening silence can become intertwined with all our inward prayers. A few moments of relaxed silence, alone, every day, are desperately important. When distracting noises come, donʼt fight against them, do not elbow them out, but accept them and weave them by prayer into the silence. Does the wind rattle the window? Then pray, “So let the wind of the Spirit shake the Christian church into life,” and absorb it into the silent listening. Does a child cry in the street outside? Then pray, “So cries my infant soul, which does not know the breadth of Thy heart,” and absorb it into

the silent listening prayer. The last reaches of religious education are not attained by carefully planned and externally applied lessons, taught to people through the outward ears. The fundamental religious education of the soul is conducted by the Holy Spirit, the living voice of God within us. He is the last and greatest teacher of the soul. All else is but pointings to the inward Teacher, the Spirit of the indwelling Christ. Until life is lived in the presence of this Teacher, we are apt to confuse knowledge of Church history and Biblical backgrounds with the true education of the soul that takes place in the listening life of prayer. THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 35 A fourth form of inner prayer is what I call the prayer of carrying. This I shall not try to develop now, but shall discuss later in connection with the experience of group fellowship among those who are deep in the life and love of God. But it consists essentially in a well-nigh continuous support, in prayer, of some particular souls who are near to you in the things of the inner life. I must, however, speak more at length of a fifth aspect of internal prayer. The Catholic books call it infused prayer. There come times, to some people at least, when oneʼs prayer is given to one, as it were from beyond oneself. Most of the time we ourselves seem to pick the theme of our prayer. We seem to be the conscious initiators. We decide what prayers we shall lift before the Throne. But there come amazing times, in the practice of prayer, when our theme of prayer is laid upon us, as if initiated by God Himself. This is an astonishing experience. It is as if we were being prayed through by a living Spirit. How can it be that the indwelling Christ prompts us to breathe back to God a prayer that originates in Himself? Is there a giant circle of prayer, such that prayer may originate in God and swing down into us and back up unto Himself? I can only say that it seems to be that way. And it seems to be an instance of the giant

circle in religious dedication, whereby we seek because we have already been found by Him. Our seeking is already His finding. Our return to the Father is but the completion of His going out to us. In the experience of infused prayer there seems to be some blurring of the distinctions between the one who prays, the prayer that is prayed, and the One to whom the prayer is prayed. Do we pray, or does God pray through us? I know not. All I can say is, prayer is taking place, and we are graciously permitted to be within the orbit. We emerge from such experiences of infused prayer shaken and deepened and humbled before the Majesty on High. And we somehow know that we have been given some glimpse of that Life, THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 36 that Center of Wonder, before Whom every knee should bow and every tongue that knows the language of its Homeland should confess the adorable mercy of God. I have tried, in these words, to keep very close to the spirit and practice of my three dearest spiritual friends and patterns, outside of Jesus of Nazareth. They are Brother Lawrence, and St. Francis of Assisi, and John Woolman. Of these, Brother Lawrence, who lived in Lorraine three hundred years ago, is the simplest. He spent his life in the practice of the presence of God, and a priceless little book of counsels, by that name, has come down to us. John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker of two hundred years ago, really so ordered his external life as to attend above all to the Inner Teacher and never lose touch with Him. But greatest of all is Francis of Assisi, whose direct and simple and joyous dedication of soul led him close to men and to God till he reproduced in amazing degree the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It is said of St. Francis not merely that he prayed, but that he became a prayer. Such lives must be reborn today, if the life of the Eternal Love is to break through the heavy encrustations of our conventional church life, and apostolic life and love and power be restored to the church

of God. He can break through any time we are really willing. Fellowship When our souls are utterly swept through and overturned by Godʼs invading love, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a wholly new relationship with some of our fellow-men. We find ourselves enmeshed with some people in amazing bonds of love and nearness and togetherness of soul, such as we never knew before. In glad amazement we ask ourselves: What is this startling new bondedness in love which I feel with those who are down in the same center of life? Can this amazing experience of togetherness in love be what men have called fellowship? THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 37 Can this be the love which bound together the Early Church, and made their meals together into a sacrament of love? Is this internal impulse which I feel, to share life with those who are down in the same center of love, the reason that the Early Church members shared their outward goods as a symbol of the experienced internal sharing of the life and the love of Christ? Can this new bondedness in love be the meaning of being in the Kingdom of God? But not all our acquaintances are caught within these new and special bonds of love. A rearrangement takes place. Some people whom we had only slightly known before suddenly become electrically illuminated. Now we know them, for lo, they have been down in the center a long time, and we never knew their secret before. Now we are bound together with them in a special bond of nearness, far exceeding the nearness we feel toward many we have known for years. For we know where they live, and they know where we live, and we understand one another and are powerfully drawn to one another. We hunger for their fellowship; their lives are knitted with our life in this amazing bondedness of divine love. Others of our acquaintance recede in importance. We may have known them for years, we may have thought we

were close together. But now we know they are not down in the center in Christ, where our dearest loves and hopes of life and death are focused. And we know we can never share life at its depth until they, too, find their way down into this burning center of shared love. Especially does a new alignment of our church relationship take place. Now we know, from within, the secret of the perseverance and fidelity of some, a secret we could not have guessed when we were outside them. Now we see, suddenly, that some of the active leaders are not so far down into the center of peace and love as we had supposed. We had always respected and admired them for their energy, but now we know they have never been brought into the THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 38 depths, nor do they know the secret of being rooted and grounded with others in love. Now we suddenly see that some quiet, obscure persons, whose voices count for little in the councils of the church, are princes and saints in Israel. Why had we not noticed them before? The whole graded scale by which we had arranged the people in our church according to importance is shaken and revised. Some of the leaders are greater even than we had guessed, others are thin and anxious souls, not knowing the peace at the center. Some that stood low are really high in the new range of values. Into this fellowship of souls at the center we simply emerge. No one is chosen to the fellowship. When we discover God we discover the fellowship. When we find ourselves in Christ we find we are also amazingly united with those others who are also in Christ. When we were outside of it we never knew that it existed, or only dimly guessed the existence of bonds of love among those who were dedicated slaves of Christ. There are many who are members of our churches who do not know what I am speaking of. But there are others of you who will say, “Surely I know exactly what you are talking about. Iʼm glad youʼve found your way in.”

But, sad to say, there are many who know the word “fellowship” but think it applies only to church sociability. Such people organize church suppers and call them fellowship suppers. What a horrible prostitution of a sacred bond! Our church suppers and church programs which aim at mere sociability are not down at the bottom, You canʼt build a church that is Christʼs church on mere sociability, important and normal as that is. Churches that are rooted and grounded in Christ are built upon this inner, amazing fellowship of souls who know a shared devotion to God. If fellowship, in this rich, warm sense, has vanished from a church, there may be enough endowments to keep the institution going, but the life is gone. Churches can go on for years on endowment incomes and tributes levied upon THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 39 personal pride. But they are only sounding brass or tinkling cymbals, if love and fellowship and group interknittedness in the joyous bonds of Christ are gone. But where this bondedness of souls in a common enslavement is present, though you meet in a barn, you have a church. In the fellowship, barriers are surprisingly leveled. Cultural differences do not count in the love of God. Educational differences do not count, in the fellowship. The carpenter and the banker exchange experiences in their practice of communion with God, and each listens respectfully, attentively to the other. For God, in His inner working, does not respect these class lines which we so carefully erect. In real fellowship, theological differences are forgotten, and liberals and conservatives eagerly exchange experiences concerning the wonders of the life of devotion. Among souls in the fellowship, conversation naturally gravitates to Him who is the uniting bond. Most of us are reticent about speaking our deepest thoughts, or exposing our inner tenderness to public gaze. And much of this reticence is right. But there ought to be some times when, and there ought to be some people with whom, we open up

our hearts on the deep things of the spirit. Normal religious development cannot take place in a vacuum occupied solely by you and God. We need friends of the soul. Fellowship is not an accidental addition to religion. It is the matrix within which we bear one anotherʼs aspirations. Do you have people with whom you feel it right to open your heart? If you have not, if you are stilted and stiff and embarrassed, and have no one to whom to confess, not your sins, but your joys, you are indeed an unfortunate soul. George Fox has a counsel which I prize very much: “Know one another in that which is eternal.” Churches ought to be places where men may know one another in that which is eternal. But in many a church the gulf between individuals on the deep things of God is an impassable gulf, and souls are starving and dying of inner loneliness. Would that we could break through our THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 40 crust of stilted, conventional reserve, and make our churches centers of a living communion of the saints. The last depths of conversation in the fellowship go beyond spoken words. People who know one another in God do not need to talk much. They know one another already. In the last depths of understanding, words cease and we sit in silence together, yet in perfect touch with one another, more bound into the common life by the silence than we ever were by words. Some time ago I was in Germany, visiting isolated Friends throughout that country. One man I met was a factory worker. He spoke ungrammatical German. His teeth were discolored, his shoulders were stooped. He spoke the Swabian dialect. But he was a radiant soul, a quiet, reticent saint of God. He knew the inner secrets of the life that is clothed in God. We were drawn together by invisible currents. We knew each other immediately, more deeply than if we had been neighbors for twenty years. I called at his simple home near Stuttgart. He motioned me to escape from the rest of the visitors and come into the bedroom. There, leaning

on the window sills, we talked together. Immediately we gravitated to the wonders of prayer and of Godʼs dealing with the soul. I told him of some new insights that had recently come to me. He listened and nodded confirmation, for he already knew those secrets. He understood and could tell me of things of the Spirit of which I had only begun to guess. I feel sure that I knew more history and mathematics and literature and philosophy than did he. And the social gulf in Germany between a professor and a factory man is infinitely wide. But that afternoon I was taught by him, and nourished by him, and we looked at each other eye to eye, and knew a common love of Christ. Then as the afternoon shadows fell and dissolved with twilight, our words became less frequent, until they ceased altogether. And we mingled our lives in the silence, for we needed no words to convey our thoughts. I have only had one letter from him in the THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 41 year, but we are as near to each other now, every day, as we were that afternoon. And now I must speak of the internal prayer of carrying, which I mentioned above. Within the fellowship there is an experience of relatedness with one another, a relation of upholding one another by internal bonds of prayer, that I can only call the prayer of carrying. Between those of the fellowship there is not merely a sense of unity when we are together physically; with some this awareness of being bonded through a common life continues almost as vividly when separated as when together. This awareness of our life as in their lives, and their lives as in our life, is a strange experience. It is as if the barriers of individuality were let down, and we shared a common life and love. A subterranean, internal relation of supporting those who are near to us in the fellowship takes place. We know that they, too, hold us up by the strength of their bondedness. Have you had the experience of being carried and upheld and supported? I do not mean the sense that God is

upholding you, alone. It is the sense that some people you know are lifting you, and offering you, and upholding you in your inner life. And do you carry some small group of acquaintances toward whom you feel a peculiar nearness, people who rest upon your hearts not as obligations but as fellow-travelers? Through the day you quietly hold them high before God in inward prayer, giving them to Him, vicariously offering your life and strength to become their life and strength. This is very different from conventional prayer lists. These are not a chance group of people. They are your special burden and your special privilege. No two people have the same group to whom they are bound in this special nearness. Each person is the center of radiating bonds of spiritual togetherness. If everyone who names the name of Jesus were faithful in this inner spiritual obligation of carrying, the intersections would form a network of bondedness whereby THOMAS R. KELLY Reality Of The Spiritual World 42 the members of the whole living church would be carrying one another in outgoing bonds of love and prayer and support. At the time of the ceremony of the sacrament of Communion, this bondedness is experienced: separate selves are swept together and welded into one life. There is a way of continuing this communion through daily life. No outward bread and wine need be present, but inwardly we feed with our fellows from the Holy Grail, and meet one another in spirit. This mystical unity, this group togetherness of soul, lies at the heart of the living church. I have tried to emphasize the Inner Teacher. In us all is a Life upspringing. It is the Holy Spirit. He speaks within. He teaches us things we can never learn in books. He makes vivid and dynamic what were formerly dead phrases. He integrates us and leads us into new truths. He lays on us new burdens. He sensitizes us in new areas, toward God and toward men.

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