enly apprehended solution of a
problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing
her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity
of the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of
shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of
her own desires, of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at
her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely-guided whole. She
read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with
the invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all
strength, returning to it after she had been called away, and reading
till the sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an
imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the
deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire
devotedness; and, in the ardour of first discovery, renunciation
seemed to her the entrance into that satisfaction which she had so
long been craving in vain. She had not perceived--how could she until
she had lived longer?--the inmost truth of the old monk's outpourings,
that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she
had found the key to it. She knew nothing of doctrines and systems--of
mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off Middle Ages
was the direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience,
and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.

5. I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for
which you need pay only sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to
this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive
sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were
before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart's
prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle,
trust, and triumph--not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance
to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it
remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human
consolations--the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered
and renounced in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured
head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech
different from ours, but under the same silent far-off heavens, and
with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same
f