and lift it high into a place
of safety and repose.

When for some time we have learnt to go in and out of this garden,
with God's tender help we make ourself a dear place--a nest under
God's wing, and yet mysteriously even nearer than this, it is so near
to God. To this place we learn to fly to and fro in a second of time:
so that, sitting weary and harassed in the counting-house, in an
instant a man can be away in his soul's nest; and so very great is the
refreshment of it and the strength of it that he comes back to his
work a new man, and so silently and quickly done that no one else in
the room would ever know he had been there: it is a secret between
his Lord and himself.

But the person who learns to do this does not remain the same raw
uncivilised creature that once he or she was: but slowly must
become quite changed; all tastes must alter, (all capacities will
increase in an extraordinary manner), and all thoughts of heart and
mind must become acceptable and pleasant to God.

The man who has not yet begun to seek God--that is to say, has not
even commenced to try and learn how to live spiritually, but lives
absorbed entirely in the things of the flesh--is a spiritual savage. To
watch such a man and his ways and his tastes is to the spiritual man
the same thing as when a European watches an African in his native
haunts, notes his beads, his frightful tastes in decorations, foods,
amusements, habits, and habitations, and, comparing them with his
own ways, says instantly that man is a savage. This proud European
does not pause to consider that he himself may be inwardly what the
savage is--quite dark; that to God's eyes his own ways and tastes are
as frightful as those of the African are to himself. What raises a man
above a savage is not the size of his dining-room, the cut of his coat,
the luxuries of his house, the learned books that adorn his
bookshelves, but that he should have begun to learn how to live
spiritually: this is the only true civilising of the human animal. Until
it is commenced, his manners and his ways are nothing but a veneer
covering the raw instincts of the natural man--instincts satisfied
more carefully, more hiddenly, than those of the African, but always
the same. There is little variety in the lusts of the flesh; they are all
after one pattern, each of its kind, follow one another in a circle, and
are very limited.

It is not the clay of our bodies fashioned by God which makes some