en at its highest, dearest, and most intimate, is
not to be for you an end in itself. It shall only be truly
yours when it impels you to action: when the double movement of
Transcendent Love, drawing inwards to unity and fruition, and
rushing out again to creative acts, is realised in you. You are to
be a living, ardent tool with which the Supreme Artist works: one
of the instruments of His self-manifestation, the perpetual process
by which His Reality is brought into concrete expression.

Now the expression of vision, of reality, of beauty, at an artist's
hands--the creation of new life in all forms--has two factors: the
living moulding creative spirit, and the material in which it
works. Between these two there is inevitably a difference of
tension. The material is at best inert, and merely patient of the
informing idea; at worst, directly recalcitrant to it. Hence,
according to the balance of these two factors, the amount of
resistance offered by stuff to tool, a greater or less energy must
be expended, greater or less perfection of result will be achieved.
You, accepting the wide deep universe of the mystic, and the
responsibilities that go with it, have by this act taken sides once
for all with creative spirit: with the higher tension, the unrelaxed
effort, the passion for a better, intenser, and more significant life.
The adoration to which you are vowed is not an affair of
red hassocks and authorised hymn books; but a burning and
consuming fire. You will find, then, that the world, going its own
gait, busily occupied with its own system of correspondences--
yielding to every gust of passion, intent on the satisfaction of
greed, the struggle for comfort or for power--will oppose your
new eagerness; perhaps with violence, but more probably with
the exasperating calmness of a heavy animal which refuses to get
up. If your new life is worth anything, it will flame to sharper
power when it strikes against this dogged inertness of things: for
you need resistances on which to act. "The road to a Yea lies
through a Nay," and righteous warfare is the only way to a living
and a lasting peace.

Further, you will observe more and more clearly, that the stuff of
your external world, the method and machinery of the common
life, is not merely passively but actively inconsistent with your
sharp interior vision of truth. The heavy animal is diseased as
well as indolent. All man's perverse ways of seeing his universe,
all the p