t of the game of
life--as you have found in the first stage of contemplation. There you
may hear its melody and discern its form. And further, that It is
"transcendent"; in essence exceeding and including the sum of
those glimpses and contacts which we obtain by self-mergence in
life, and in Its simplest manifestations above and beyond
anything to which reason can attain--"the Nameless Being, of
Whom nought can be said." This you discovered to be true in the
second stage. But in addition to this, they say also, that this
all-pervasive, all-changing, and yet changeless One, Whose melody
is heard in all movement, and within Whose Being "the worlds
are being told like beads," calls the human spirit to an immediate
intercourse, a _unity_, a fruition, a divine give-and-take, for
which the contradictory symbols of feeding, of touching, of
marriage, of immersion, are all too poor; and which evokes in the
fully conscious soul a passionate and a humble love. "He devours
us and He feeds us!" exclaims Ruysbroeck. "Here," says St.
Thomas Aquinas, "the soul in a wonderful and unspeakable
manner both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is herself
devoured, embraces and is violently embraced: and by the knot of
love she unites herself with God, and is with Him as the Alone
with the Alone."

The marvellous love-poetry of mysticism, the rhapsodies which
extol the spirit's Lover, Friend, Companion, Bridegroom; which
describe the "deliberate speed, majestic instancy" of the Hound of
Heaven chasing the separated soul, the onslaughts, demands, and
caresses of this "stormy, generous, and unfathomable love"--all
this is an attempt, often of course oblique and symbolic in
method, to express and impart this transcendent secret, to
describe that intense yet elusive state in which alone union with
the living heart of Reality is possible. "How delicately Thou
teachest love tome!" cries St. John of the Cross; and here indeed
we find all the ardours of all earthly lovers justified by an
imperishable Objective, which reveals Itself in all things that we
truly love, and beyond all these things both seeks us and compels
us, "giving more than we can take and asking more than we can
pay."

You do not, you never will know, _what_ this Objective is: for as
Dionysius teaches, "if any one saw God and understood what he
saw, then it was not God that he saw, but something that belongs
to Him." But you do know now that it exists, with an intensity
whic