"This indwelling Love," says Plotinus, "is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several nature.

It implants the characteristic desire; the particular soul, strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Love, the guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its being."[135] Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at whatever level it be experienced, the psychic craving, the urgent spirit within us pressing out to life, is always _one;_ and that the sublimation of this vital craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regeneration?
There, in our instinctive nature--which, as we know, makes us the kind of animal we are--abides that power of loving which is, really, the power of living; the cause of our actions, the controlling factor in our perceptions, the force pressing us into any given type of experience, turning aside for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater vigour.

Each level of the universe makes solicitations to this power: the worlds of sense, of thought, of beauty, and of action.

According to the degree of our development, the trend of the conscious will, is our response; and according to that response will be our life.

"The world to which a man turns himself," says Boehme, "and in which he produces fruit, the same is lord in him, and this world becomes manifest in him."[136] From all this it becomes clear what the love of God is; and what St.
Augustine meant when he said that all virtue--and virtue after all means power not goodness--lay in the right ordering of love, the conscious orientation of desire.