You took it in with your head then, not with your heart. Old traditions were too strong, I suppose, and you had not made up the last little bit of your mind, to be true to the convictions that had come to you through your prayers for light.
And so you have gone on, see-sawing to and fro, not really believing the old orthodox ideas, but not courageously sweeping them away for yourself. So although the key was in your hands, you have not used it until now. You have given me the key, and I have been allowed, as my New Year's gift, to fit it in the door.
This is how Jesus Christ has stood so long at the door of your heart and knocked. He could only enter through the one door—namely, that one opened in the highest point of your spiritual realisation. I see now that He comes in at that door in each soul, and, as spiritual evolution unfolds in each heart, so is the special position of that door shifted; but the fact of His presence is the vital one! It was not possible for Him to do otherwise than hide His face, as it were, whilst you were barring His only door of access—i.e. your true point of realisation.
It all seems so clear to me now. And this is how He comes to so many in different guises.
He is the Perfected Manifestation of GOD, as the Divine Man—the Flower of Humanity.
But He can come into the heart in the narrowest creed, so long as the holder of that creed is at his true point of growth and not trying to stifle God's gift of ever-advancing truth by cowardly want of trust, or fear of being worse off in the end, by being absolutely honest to himself and his own convictions in the present.
It has been a long message, and you have taken much of it awkwardly, but on the whole it represents what I wanted to say.
H. D.
III
H. D.—I feel now that you want to know what I meant by telling Miss R. it was the likeness to the old world which puzzled me here.
You see, we have all imbibed traditional ideas with our mother's milk, however much our intellects may have modified them. Instinct is stronger than intellect, because it is more elemental.