he most desolate and lonely of all
creatures in the Universe; and on another exalted to almost
unbearable pinnacles of bliss, equal to the angels in felicity, and
blest beyond all power of words to say--such and so are the lovers of
God.

* * *

The soul has six wings: love, obedience, humility, simplicity,
perseverance, and courage. With these she can attain God.

We know very well that no man will find God either enclosed, held
fast, or demonstrated within a circle of dogmatic words; but every
man can find, in his own soul, an exquisite and incomparable
instrument of communication with God. To establish the working of
this communication is the whole object and meaning of life in this
world--this world of material, finite, and physical things, in which
the human body is at once a means and a debt.

The key to progress is a continual dressing of the will and mind and
heart towards God, best brought about by continually filling the
heart and mind with beautiful, grateful, and loving thoughts of Him.
At all stages of progress the thoughts persistently fly away to other
things in the near and visible world, and we have need quietly and
perpetually to pick them up and re-centre them on Him. With the
mind turned in this way, steadily towards God, we are in that state
known to science as polarisation: we are in that condition in which
common iron becomes a magnet. It is so that God transforms us into
a diminutive part-likeness of Himself.

When at last the soul reaches union with Him, she is for a while so
caressed, so held in a perpetual contact and nearness, that we may
think ourselves already permanently entered into Paradise! But this
is not the plan; and, our education being exceedingly incomplete, we
return to our schooling.

We commence to experience profound and even terrible longings to
leave the world and all creatures, for we cannot bear either the sight
or the sound of them, and seek all day long to be alone with the
Beloved God. To conquer this last selfishness and weakness of the
soul, we must go again--as in the beginning--to Jesus. He teaches us
to go to and fro _willingly,_ gladly, from the highest to the lowest.
To pick up our daily life and duties, our obligations to a physical
world, in all humility, sweet reasonableness, and submission. He
teaches us to willingly accept incessant interruptions, and with
smiling face and perfect inward smoothness to descend from a
high contemplation of God (and on