Eliotic Piety

"To rest content with the evanescent, unearned, mystical experience is to lapse again into the spiritual sloth. For most men, 'right action'

is the aim
Never here to be realised;

but this must not prevent continued effort, although the knowledge of effort may be the only reward--we are

only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
(The Dry Salvages: Four Quartets, p. 33)"

[D.E.S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, (1952), 160].