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Once this harmony has been achieved, it is for one 

 thing so precious in itself that it will be sought for 

 again ; the knowledge that we have once reached 

 the stage at which difficulties and doubts are resolved 

 in what the philosophers would perhaps call a higher 

 unity, but which I should prefer to call an organic 

 harmony, is always there to fall back upon in times 

 of discouragement ; and finally the harmony is 

 actually woven into the tissue of our mind, just as 

 the amazing physical harmony revealed by physiology 

 has, in the course of evolution, been woven into the 

 structure and working of living bodies ; and it can 

 remain there as the dominant idea to which the rest 

 of our ideas, and consequently our actions, are brought 

 into subordinate relation. In other words, it becomes 

 the dominant sublimating principle. Once more, 

 however, the subordination is not forced, but free — 

 we find that what we once thought obstacles are 

 aids, what once seemed sin is now the willing and 

 efficient handmaid of good. That is the fundamental 

 fact in all genuine and valuable religious experience as 

 such — the resolution of conflict and the losing, or en- 

 larging as you will, of the private personality, the mere 

 ' self.' You will find this set out more fully, though 

 in different terminology, in Miss Underbill's books on 

 mysticism, or in William James's Varieties of Religious 

 Experience^ or in Thouless's Psychology of Religion. 



One side-issue. Such experience, if not absolute 

 in the philosophical sense, is absolute for us. If I 



