ut directed your activities. You did
things, sought things, learned things, even suffered things,
because at bottom you wanted to. Will has done the work to
which love spurred it: thought has assimilated the results of their
activities and made for them pictures, analyses, "explanations" of
the world with which they had to deal. But now your purified
love discerns and desires, your will is set towards, something
which thought cannot really assimilate--still less explain.
"Contemplation," says Ruysbroeck, "is a knowing that is in no
wise . . . therein all the workings of the reason fail." That
reason has been trained to deal with the stuff of temporal existence.
It will only make mincemeat of your experience of Eternity if
you give it a chance; trimming, transforming, rationalising
that ineffable vision, trying to force it into a symbolic
system with which the intellect can cope. This is why the great
contemplatives utter again and again their solemn warning against
the deceptiveness of thought when it ventures to deal with the
spiritual intuitions of man; crying with the author of _The Cloud
of Unknowing_, "Look that _nothing_ live in thy working mind
but a naked intent stretching"--the voluntary tension of your
ever-growing, ever-moving personality pushing out towards the Real.
"Love, and _do_ what you like," said the wise Augustine: so little
does mere surface activity count, against the deep motive that
begets it.

The dynamic power of love and will, the fact that the heart's
desire--if it be intense and industrious--is a better earnest of
possible fulfilment than the most elegant theories of the spiritual
world; this is the perpetual theme of all the Christian mystics. By
such love, they think, the worlds themselves were made. By an
eager outstretching towards Reality, they tell us, we tend to move
towards Reality, to enter into its rhythm: by a humble and
unquestioning surrender to it we permit its entrance into our
souls. This twofold act, in which we find the double character of
all true love--which both gives and takes, yields and demands--is
assured, if we be patient and single-hearted, of ultimate
success. At last our ignorance shall be done away; and we shall
"apprehend" the real and the eternal, as we apprehend the
sunshine when the sky is free from cloud. Therefore "Smite upon
that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love"--
and suddenly it shall part, and disclose the blue.

"Smite,"