spenses
with--the active keeping of the will in an active state of practical
obedience, submission, humble uncomplaining endurance through
every kind of test. What will these perhaps too much dreaded tests
be that He will put us through? He will make use of the difficulties,
opportunities, temptations, and events of everyday life in the world
(which difficulties we should have to pass through whether we
become regenerated or not) down to the smallest act, the most secret
thought, the most hidden intention and desire. But through it all it is
the Great Physician Himself who cures, and we are no more able to
perform these changes of regeneration in heart and mind than we are
able to perform a critical operation on our own body. So He takes
our vanities and, one by one, strews them among the winds, and we
raise no protest; takes our prides and breaks them in pieces, and we
submit; takes our self-gratifications and reduces them to dust, and
we stand stripped but patient; takes the natural lusts of the creature
and transfigures them to Holy Love. And in all this pain of transition,
what is the Divine Anaesthetic that He gives us? His Grace.

Having submitted to all that Christ esteems necessary for our
regeneration, what does He set us to? Service. Glad, happy service
to all who may need it. He has wonderful ways of making us
acquainted with His especial friends, and it pleases Him to make us
the means of answering the prayers of His poor for help, to their
great wonder and joy and to the increase of their faith in Him. Also
He uses us as a human spark, to ignite the fires of another man's
heart: when He uses us in this way, it will seem to one like the
opening of a window--to another a magnetism. One will see it as a
light flashed on dark places, another receives it as the finding of a
track where before was no track. But however many times we may
be used in this way, the working remains a mystery to us.

What is our reward whilst still in this world for our patient
obediences and renunciations? This--that all becomes well with us
the moment the process is brought to the stage where the aim of our
life ceases to be the enjoyment of worldly life and becomes fixed
upon the Invisible and upon God: and all this by and because of love,
for it is love alone which can make us genuinely glad to give up our
own will and which can keep us from sinning.

We commence by qualifying through our human love, meagre and
fluctuating as i