y with their averted eyes, as if the shadow of a woman
falling on them were pollution, and long ago, Paul, and Peter also,
and Moses, and many others, showed surprising weakness of
intolerance and harsh judgment against Woman!

Where was Wisdom in all this? Surely it was Folly flaunting and
laughing and dressing herself cunningly to deceive, for did none of
these men, from Adam downwards--did they never come to know
themselves well enough to see that their danger lay not in the
Woman, but in _their own inclination to sin!_

Oh, the righteousness of the greatest saint was, and is, but as dust
and ashes before the righteousness of Jesus! and I came to wonder if
there ever was or could be a saint, save one--Jesus.

But this Richard Rolle, this person so discourteous to some
fellow-beings, could all the same be very tender and loving towards God:
he, too, held in his heart the Pearl without Price. He, too, knew that
marvellous incense of the heart to God--that song of the soul, and
called it by the same name as I; but how could it be called by any
other name? for every soul that knows it, it must ever be the same.
Oh, how intimately I knew those two people of centuries ago, and
how intimately they knew me! A strange trio we made--he, the little
wizened English hermit; she, the Italian woman in her nun's habit;
and I in my modern Bond Street clothes: outwardly we were indeed
incongruous, we had no links, but inwardly we were bound together
by bonds of the purest gold.

Of whether my friend sent me another book or not I cannot be sure;
but my interest was becoming altogether removed from the past,
because Christ was pressing me more and more to the present and
the living.

V

God says to the aspiring soul: Come, taste of paradise and taste of
heaven, and then return thou to the earth and wait, but not in
idleness, and suffer many things till thou become perfect.

So I found that in the earlier stages, in order to show me the heights
to which I might by perseverance attain, He turned His Power and
Glamour on to me, and I became a creature transfixed and held by
love. I had one desire--God; I had one thought--God; I had one
consciousness--God. There was no effort needed on my part: it was
Pure Grace and the result of _past_ efforts. Having climbed and
endured and endeavoured up to a certain degree, it was necessary for
further advance that there should be more knowledge, and a more
complete ineffaceable assurance. He