When all is said and done, the long line of saints and spiritual writers who insist on ‘experience’, who speak of sanctity in terms of ever-deepening ‘experience’, who maintain that to have none of it is to be spiritually dead, are absolutely right provided we understand ‘experience’ in the proper sense, not as a transient emotional impact but as living wisdom, living involvement. All the truths of faith there in our minds will be translated into practical terms, all we believe becoming principles of action. Thus spiritual ‘experience’ is as necessary a mark of a loving soul, of a holy person, as medical ‘experience’ is of a doctor. So often, however, what the less instructed seek is mere emotion. They are not concerned with the slow demanding generosity of genuine experience.