ABSTRACT
The greatest attraction of spiritual life lies in its promise. Spiritual life embraces and yet transcends moral and aesthetic life; it exhibits life in its fullness. Moral enthusiasm and æstheticism are of the fine fabric of our being, but spiritual experience has in it something which is unique, and which is its own. Holiness and aesthetic joyousness are invaluable possessions that should find place in spiritual life, but to identify such life with them is to miss its significance. Spiritual life has in it something which is not probed by fine aesthetic feelings or dignified moral virility. Spiritual life presupposes all these, since it is the fullest unfolding of life; and, where it has its finest expressions, there the chords of life sound in finest harmony. It touches the very core of our being and therefore transcends all else. Its essence lies in numinous experience. It is neither intellectual nor emotional. It includes these qualities, but it transcends them.
