The Place of Will, Intellect and Feeling in…

The psychology of religious experience, as yet so little understood, has few more important problems proposed to it than that which concerns the true place and right use of will, intellect, and feeling in prayer. This question, which to some may appear merely academic, really involves the whole problem of the method and proportion in which the various powers and activities of our being may best be used, when they turn from the natural world of concrete things to attend to the so-called "supernatural" world of Spirit -- in fact, to God, Who is the source and sum of the reality of that world. That problem must be of practical interest to every Christian -- more, to every one who believes in the spiritual possibilities of man -- for it concerns itself with all those responses which are made by human personality to the impact of Infinite Life. It deals, in Maeterlinck's words, with "the harshest and most uninhabitable headlands of the Divine ‘know thyself," and includes in its span the whole region "where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God."

In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely just this: that part of our active and conscious life which is deliberately orientated towards, and exclusively responds to, spiritual reality. The Being of God, Who is that spiritual reality, we believe to be immanent in all things: "He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being. " In fact, as Christians we must believe this. Therefore in attending to those visible and concrete things, we are in a way attending to that immanent God; and in this sense all honest work is indeed, as the old proverb says, a sort of prayer. But when we speak of prayer as a separate act or activity of the self, we mean more than this. We mean, in fact, as a rule the other aspect of spiritual experience and communion; in the language of theology, attention to transcendent rather than to immanent Reality. Prayer, says Walter Hilton, in terms of which the origin goes back to the Neoplatonists, "is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God, by withdrawing it from all earthly thoughts" -- an ascent, says Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law defines it as "the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity. " It entails, then, a going up or out from our ordinary circle of earthly interests; a cutting off, so far as we may, of "the torrent of use and wont," that we may attend to the changeless Reality which that flux too often hides. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of things; but rather to that "Eternal truth, true Love, and loved Eternity" wherein the world is felt to be enshrined; and in this act it brings to full circle the activities of the human soul -- that