ithin which it was held. "I marvelled," she
said, "how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have
fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my
understanding: _It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it_.
And so All-thing hath the being by the love of God." To this
same apprehension of Reality, this linking up of each finite
expression with its Origin, this search for the inner significance
of every fragment of life, one of the greatest and most balanced
contemplatives of the nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale,
reached out when she exclaimed in an hour of self-examination,
"I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my
cats."

Yet it is not the self-tormenting strife of introspective and
self-conscious aspiration, but rather an unrelaxed, diligent intention,
a steady acquiescence, a simple and loyal surrender to the great
currents of life, a holding on to results achieved in your best
moments, that shall do it for you: a surrender not limp but
deliberate, a trustful self-donation, a "living faith." "A pleasing
stirring of love," says _The Cloud of Unknowing_, not a
desperate anxious struggle for more light. True contemplation
can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations:
quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other.
Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything to
gain. Though the way may be long, the material of your mind
intractable, to the eager lover of Reality ultimate success is
assured. The strong tide of Transcendent Life will inevitably
invade, clarify, uplift the consciousness which is open to receive
it; a movement from without--subtle yet actual--answering each
willed movement from within. "Your opening and His entering,"
says Eckhart, "are but one moment." When, therefore, you put
aside your preconceived ideas, your self-centred scale of values,
and let intuition have its way with you, you open up by this act
new levels of the world. Such an opening-up is the most practical
of all activities; for then and then only will your diurnal
existence, and the natural scene in which that existence is set,
begin to give up to you its richness and meaning. Its paradoxes
and inequalities will be disclosed as true constituents of its
beauty, an inconceivable splendour will be shaken out from its
dingiest folds. Then, and only then, escaping the single vision of
the selfish, you will begin to guess all that your senses were
mean