Circle of Christhood

"The foremost religious races, notably the Hebrews and the Greeks, were great adepts in the cultivation of the imagination of their children.  Imagination is a mental capacity of the first importance for every aspect of life, but peculiarly so for religion.  The power to see, to forecast, to anticipate, to discover, and to value what is implicated or involved in the normal experiences of life is an essential spiritual capacity.  It is what the New Testament means by faith, what George Santayana calls "the soul's invincible surmise."  It is fully as important as that power to apprehend and describe facts, which we have learned how to train with such success.  But matter of fact people as we incline to be, we are apt to be afraid of imagination. 

We assume that it has to do with "what isn't there," with the world of illusion, with exaggeration and untruth.  It is, however, a gift of major rank - this faculty of vision, this capacity to feel realities which elude the senses, but which are there for seeing souls and for those who have "the single eye." 

It is as necessary for religion as the power to see perspective is for drawing, and it is no more difficult to cultivate than is the latter.  But we have not done it, and we do not do it.  We train children to see and to dodge passing automobiles, a skill which is essential to survival, be we neglect the cultivation of the capacity to see the invisible, which is essential to art, to poetry, and to religion.  I am advocating no slackening of attention to the automobile, but only more attention to the subtler realities which form and build the dimensions of the soul."   

 Rufus Jones New Studies in Mystical Religion Chapter 'Mysticism and Religious Education'