praying, a
hidden channel of life to the whole of that Body of which she is a
member, an intercessor for the whole of that Society of which she is one
unit? There in silence, then, she sits at Jesus' feet and listens to the
Voice which is _as the sound of many waters_; in the whiteness of her
cell watches Him Whose _Face is as a Flame of Fire_, and in austerity
and fasting _tastes and finds that the Lord is gracious._

Of course this is but madness and folly to those who know God only in
His Creation, who imagine Him merely as the Soul of the World and the
Vitality of Created Life. To such as these earth is His highest Heaven
and the beauty of the world the noblest vision that can be conceived.
Yet to that soul that is Catholic, who understands that the Eternal
Throne is indeed above the stars and that the Transcendence of God is as
fully a truth as His Immanence--that God in Himself, apart from all
that He has made, is all-fair and all-sufficient in His own Beauty--to
such a soul as this, if called to such a life, there is no need that the
Church should declare explicitly that the Contemplative Life is the
highest. She knows it already.

(ii) The _First Great Commandment_ of the Law, then, is inevitably
followed by the Second, and the Catholic interpretation of the Second is
thought by the world, which understands neither, to be as extravagant as
her interpretation of the First.

For this Divine Church that knows God is also a Human Society that
dwells among men, and since she in herself unites Divinity and Humanity,
she cannot rest until she has united them everywhere else.

For, as she turns her eyes from God to men, she sees there immortal
souls, made in the image of God and made for Him and Him alone, seeking
to satisfy themselves with Creation instead of with the Creator. She
hears how the world preaches the sanctity of the temperament, and the
holiness of the individual point of view, as if there were no
Transcendent God at all and no objective external Revelation ever made
by Him. She sees how men, instead of seeking to conform themselves to
God's Revelation of Himself, attempt rather to conform such fragments of
that Revelation as have reached them to their own points of view; she
listens to talk about "aspects of truth" and "schools of thought" and
the "values of experience" as if God had never spoken either in the
thunders of Sinai or the still voice of Galilee.

Is it any wonder, then, that her Prosely