'If you are one of those who persist in thinking that the old questions about the meaning of life, however badly framed they were, had something important behind them, then the answer offered here is that there is indeed such a thing as the religious life, that it has a variety of different possible shapes or courses, and that there is something important to be learnt from a consideration of the map of life as a whole.THere is not just one linear track running through three or four stations, as used to be thought in the past, but there are at any rate a large number of stations and a web of lines connecting them. I have set them out (in a necessarily simplified form) in a diagram on the cover and after the Contents page as a kind of Metro map of the spirit. The idea is that after the book has explained the map, you may be able to find on it the life-route you have yourself followed so far.'