We can see around us an increasing number of men of good will who cut themselves off from Christ precisely through love, because they need and hope to love better and more fully.
We find, in the best minds our race is producing, this fear that Christianity is no longer fine enough to satisfy the desires that mean most to them.
There can be doubt that we are conscious of carrying within us something greater and more indispensable than ourselves: something that existed before we did and could have continued to exist without us: something in which we live, and that we cannot exhaust: something that serves us but of which we are not masters: something that will gather us up when, through death, we slip away from ourselves and our whole being seems to be evaporating.
Souls are legion. But if we ask what lies between souls and holds them together, what they have in common that makes them into a single living mass, then we meet a great mystery; it is one that we are blind to, because our attention is always turned in the direction in which human beings appear to be isolated from one another and to wander restlessly like incomprehensible monads.
Since all time, the poets—the true poets—have felt the presence of the soul of the world, in the solitude of the deserts, in nature’s fruitful breath, in the fathomless swell of the human heart. Everywhere it asserted itself as a living thing, and yet nowhere could they grasp it; and their loftiest inspiration was but the distress they suffered from its elusive presence.
A Divinity is being born among us. A new (and age-old) star is rising in the consciousness of man, and nothing can escape its magnetic force.
It is that soul hidden beneath the countless multitudes of created beings that envelops us in a living network charged with grace and spirituality.
God does not give himself to the soul as some superadded good, some outside supplement. He does more, and better. He comes to us through the inner road of the world; he comes down into us through that zone in which our incomplete being is mingled with the universal substance.
The time has now come to consider, in a spirit of religious research, the relations that unite God to the elements of this world, and to the values of the universe.
Who can say what we might find, in the light God sheds for us, if we enquired more often into those mysterious regions where the universe—the natural experiential face of God—is linked with the Infinite—if, above all, we looked with love.