is heart to the Purifier, and his will to the
Sovereign Will of the Universe.'[134] But there is a speech in the
third canto of the _Paradiso_ of Dante, spoken by a certain
Piccarda, which is a rare gem. I will only quote this one line:

_In la sua volontade e nostra pace._[135]

The words are few and simple, and yet they appear to me to have an
inexpressible majesty of truth about them, to be almost as if they
were spoken from the very mouth of God. It so happened that (unless
my memory much deceives me) I first read that speech on a morning
early in the year 1836, which was one of trial. I was profoundly
impressed and powerfully sustained, almost absorbed, by these
words. They cannot be too deeply graven upon the heart. In short,
what we all want is that they should not come to us as an
admonition from without, but as an instinct from within. They
should not be adopted by effort or upon a process of proof, but
they should be simply the translation into speech of the habitual
tone to which all tempers, affections, emotions, are set. In the
Christian mood, which ought never to be intermitted, the sense of
this conviction should recur spontaneously; it should be the
foundation of all mental thoughts and acts, and the measure to
which the whole experience of life, inward and outward, is
referred. The final state which we are to contemplate with hope,
and to seek by discipline, is that in which our will shall be _one_
with the will of God; not merely shall submit to it, not merely
shall follow after it, but shall live and move with it, even as the
pulse of the blood in the extremities acts with the central
movement of the heart. And this is to be obtained through a double
process; the first, that of checking, repressing, quelling the
inclination of the will to act with reference to self as a centre;
this is to mortify it. The second, to cherish, exercise, and expand
its new and heavenly power of acting according to the will of God,
first, perhaps, by painful effort in great feebleness and with many
inconsistencies, but with continually augmenting regularity and
force, until obedience become a necessity of second nature....

Resignation is too often conceived to be merely a submission not
unattended with complaint to what we have no power to avoid.