“Though inland far we be Our souls have sight of that immortal sea That brought us hither.”
We may ignorantly stop at some mid-way good and miss the homeward path, but our real search, our master passion, is for that divine Other to whom we belong. So at last Plato poetizes.
We have discovered through other lips, what he could not tell us, that the search is a double search. We have learned that the Divine Other whom we seek is also seeking us. The myth, told at the beginning, is more suggestive than it seemed. It may perhaps do for a parable of the finite and the Infinite, the soul and its Father. May they not once have been in union? May not our birth in time be a drawing away into individuality from the Divine whole? And then may not the goal of the entire drama of personal life be the restoration of that union on a higher spiritual level? May it not be, that we are never again to fuse the skirts of self and merge into a union of oblivion, but rather that we are to rise to a love-union in which His will becomes our will--a union of conscious co-operation? So at any rate I believe. But this little book is not a book of speculation. It is not written to urge some fond belief.
We have learned, I say, that life reveals a double search. Man’s search for God is as plain a fact as his search for food. He has, beyond question, blundered at it and frequently missed the trail, but that man in all lands and in all times has maintained some kind of search for an invisible Companion is a momentous fact.
The other half of the story is, I think, still more momentous. It is full of pathos and tragedy, but laden with the prophecy of final triumph. I have tried to tell again this story, surely an old, old story, but always needing to be retold in the current language and the prevailing conceptions of the time. The main feature of this book is its insistence on the facts of experience. Its terms are not those of theology, but those of life, or if I have used theological words I have endeavored to re-vitalize them. I shall assume that my readers are familiar with the idea of the _conjunct life_ which I have expounded at length in a former book.[1] It is now well known that “isolated” personality is impossible. He who is to enjoy the rights and privileges of personality must be conjunct with others. He must be an organic member in a social group, and share himself with his fellows, while at the same time he receives contributions from them. This principle of the conjunct life reaches beyond the finite social fellowship in which a man forms and expresses his personality. God and man are conjunct. The ground for this position will not be gone over here. It has been sufficiently presented elsewhere.