This love is the outflowing response to another inflowing love, and this prayer the appropriation of a transcendental energy and grace.

As the "German Theology" reminds us, "I cannot do the work without God, and God may not or will not without me."[141] And by these acts alone, faithfully carried through, all their costly demands fulfilled, all their gifts and applications accepted without resistance and applied to each aspect of life, human nature can grow up to its full stature, and obtain access to all its sources of power.
Yet this personal inward life of love and prayer shall not be too solitary.

As it needs links with cultus and so with the lives of its fellows, it also needs links with history and so with the living past.
These links are chiefly made by the individual through his reading; and such reading--such access to humanity's hoarded culture and experience--has always been declared alike by Christian and non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper helps of the spiritual life.

Though Hoeffding perhaps exaggerates when he reminds us that mediaeval art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in their books, and suggests that such brooding study directly induces contemplative states,[142] yet it is true that the soul gains greatly from such communion with, and meek learning from, its cultural background.

Ever more and more as it advances, it will discover within that background the records of those very experiences which it must now so poignantly relive; and which seem to it, as his own experience seems to every lover, unique.