There it can find, without any betrayal of its secret, the wholesome assurance of its own normality; standards of comparison; companionship, alike in its hours of penitence, of light, and of deprivation.

Yet such fruitful communion with the past is not the privilege of an aristocratic culture.

It is seen in its perfection in many simple Christians who have found in the Bible all the spiritual food they need.

The great literature of the Spirit tells its secrets to those alone who thus meet it on its own ground.

Not only the works of Thomas a Kempis, of Ruysbroeck, or of St.Teresa, but also the Biblical writers--and especially, perhaps, the Psalms and the Gospels--are read wholly anew by us at each stage of our advance.