though humility and acknowledgement of one's real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does not nourish our souls a bit - merely in fact upsets the spiritual tummy.

For the most part, of course, the presence of the great spiritual universe surrounding us is no more noticed by us than the pressure of air on our bodies, or the action of light. Our field of attention is not wide enough for that; our spiritual senses are not sufficiently alert. Most people work so hard at developing their correspondence with the visible world, that their power of correspondence with the invisible is left in a rudimentary state.

The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore more truly personal it will become.

God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.

The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.

Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.

The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.