and heart and
mind in the return from the blissful and perfect calm which
surrounds even the lowest degree of the contemplation of God to the
turmoil of the world. For to have been lifted into this new condition
of living, this glamour, this crystal joy, to know such heights, such
immensities, and to descend from God's blisses to live the everyday
life of this world and accept its pettiness is a great pain, in which
pain we are of necessity not understood by fellow-creatures;
therefore the more and the more we become pressed into that great
loneliness which is the inevitable portion of the true lover, and
experience the pain of those prolonged spiritual conflicts in which
the soul learns to bend and submit to the petty sordidness of life in a
world which has forgotten God. It is the lack of courage and
endurance to perpetually weather these dreadful storms which
causes us to turn to seclusion--the cloister. To refrain from doing
this and to remain in the world though not of it is the sacrifice of the
loving soul--she has but the one to make--to leave the delights of
God, and for the sake of being a useful servant to Jesus to pick up
the daily life in the world; which sacrifice is in direct contrariety to
the sacrifice of the creature, which counts its sacrifices as a giving
up of the things of the world. So by opposites they may come to one
similarity--perfection. How to conduct itself in all these difficult
ways so foreign to its own earthly nature is a hard problem for the
creature, belonging so intimately to this world which it can touch
and see: and yet which it is asked by God bravely to climb out of
into the unknown and the unseen. Bewildered by the enormous
demands of the soul which can never rest in any happiness without
she is contemplating God, adoring Him, conversing with Him,
blessing and worshipping Him, the poor creature is often bewildered
to know how to conduct the ordinary affairs and duties of life under
such pressures. Of its emotions, of the tears that it sheds, of the falls
that it takes, a library of books might be written. In the splendour,
the grandeur, the great magnitudes and expanses of spirit life as
made known to it by the soul, the creature feels like some poor
beggar child, ill-mannered, ill-clothed, which by strange fortune
finds itself invited to the house of a mighty king, and, dumb with
humility and admiration, is at a loss to understand the condescension
of this mighty lord. In this s