f escape, a
great joy, and a garland of love.

The world thinks of joyousness as being laughter, cackling, and
much silly noise; and to such I do not speak. But the Christ's
joyousness is of a high, still, marvellous, and ineffable
completeness--beyond all words; and _wholly satisfying_ to heart
and soul and body and mind.

It is written, "They shall love silver, and not be satisfied with it"--for
why? Only those are _satisfied_ who know the gold of Christ.

All of which is not to say that by following Him we shall escape
from happenings and inconveniences and sorrows and illnesses
common to life; but that when these come we are raised out of our
distress into His ineffable peace.

When the heart is sad, use this sadness in a comprehension of the
deeper pain of Jesus, who was in the self-same exile as we ourselves.
The more the soul is truly awakened and touched, the more she feels
herself to be in exile; and this is her cross.

But the remedy for her sadness is that she should courageously pass
out of her woes of exile and go up to meet her lover with smiles.
Now, He cannot resist this smiling courage and love of the soul, and
very quickly He must send her His sweetness, and her sadness is
gone.

* * *

When I say that if we will take a few steps alone towards Christ--which
is to say, if we will make some strenuous efforts to cleanse
ourselves and change our minds and ways--He will take us all the
rest of the way, I speak from experience. For amongst many things
this happened to me: at a certain stage, after my third conversion on
the hill, He caused my former thoughts, desires, and follies to go
away from me! It was as though He had sent a veil between me and
such thoughts of my heart and mind as might not be pleasing to Him,
so that they disappeared from my knowledge and my actions!

By this marvellous act He removed my difficulties, and put me into
a state of innocence which resembled the innocence I remember to
have had up to the age of four or five years. But I find this new
innocence far more wonderful than that of childhood, which is but
the innocence of ignorance. But this new innocence--which is a gift
of God--is innocence with knowledge. I am not able to express the
gratitude and amazement and wonder that have never ceased to fill
me about this. Such things can only be spoken of by the soul to her
lover, and then not in words but in a silence of tears.

What did I ever do that He should show me s