They are literally true now, or can be if we choose.

They do not involve any peculiar training, or unnatural effort.

A sliding scale goes from the simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to that complete self-loss and complete self-finding, which is called the transforming union of the saint; and somewhere in this series, every human soul can find a place.
If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to receive what St.
Augustine called the food of the full-grown, to find and feel the Eternal, we must give time and place to it in our lives.

I emphasize this, because its realization seems to me to be a desperate modern need; a need exhibited supremely in our languid and ineffectual spirituality, but also felt in the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of the artist, the reformer and the teacher.

St.John of the Cross says in one of his letters: "What is wanting is not writing or talking--there is more than enough of that--but, silence and action.