ss of a living Reality and your relation with
it, which came to you in contemplation, will necessarily be a
constant or a governable feature of your experience. Even under
the most favourable circumstances, you shall and must move
easily and frequently between that spiritual fruition and active
work in the world of men. Often enough it will slip from you
utterly; often your most diligent effort will fail to recapture it, and
only its fragrance will remain. The more intense those contacts
have been, the more terrible will be your hunger and desolation
when they are thus withdrawn: for increase of susceptibility
means more pain as well as more pleasure, as every artist knows.
But you will find in all that happens to you, all that opposes and
grieves you--even in those inevitable hours of darkness when the
doors of true perception seem to close, and the cruel tangles of
the world are all that you can discern--an inward sense of security
which will never cease. All the waves that buffet you about,
shaking sometimes the strongest faith and hope, are yet parts and
aspects of one Ocean. Did they wreck you utterly, that Ocean
would receive you; and there you would find, overwhelming and
transfusing you, the unfathomable Substance of all life and
joy. Whether you realise it in its personal or impersonal
manifestation, the universe is now friendly to you; and as he is a
suspicious and unworthy lover who asks every day for renewed
demonstrations of love, so you do not demand from it perpetual
reassurances. It is enough, that once it showed you its heart. A
link of love now binds you to it for evermore: in spite of
derelictions, in spite of darkness and suffering, your will is
harmonised with the Will that informs the Whole.

We said, at the beginning of this discussion, that mysticism was
the art of union with Reality: that it was, above all else, a Science
of Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and
towards which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching
out, is a condition of _being_, not of _seeing_. As the bodily
senses have been produced under pressure of man's physical
environment, and their true aim is not the enhancement of his
pleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment to
those aspects of the natural world which concern him--so the use
and meaning of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too.
These, when developed by a suitable training, reveal to man a
certain measure o