Page:What Constitutes Spiritual Living.djvu/55

 on his death-bed, and unable to speak, he wrote on a piece of paper, "My life has been a failure." How shall we live so that, in that solemn hour, we may hear, not the voice of condemnation, but the voice which says, "Thou hast been faithful"?

In order to cultivate the inner or spiritual life directly, we need, first of all, a conviction, and, if possible, a rational conviction, of its reality. The means of forming such a conviction are, we believe, in the world to-day. We may know that man is a spiritual being; that human life, being essentially different from that of animals, requires another and higher plane or degree of mentality, which, according to a Bible illustration, we may