This is the circle of His way with us. First is prayer; then love; and after love, humility. With humility comes grace; and after grace, temptation; and in temptation we must quickly enter prayer again.
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O wonderful and ineffable God! who, while remaining hidden from His lovers in this life, yet so ravishes their hearts and minds and souls that they are unable to find truly sweet even the greatest of life's former joys—for nothing can now ever satisfy them but the secret and marvellous administrations of His love and grace! On one day feeling to be forsaken, the 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.
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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 only those who know high contemplation can judge of the immensity of what I say) to listen and attend to some most trivial want of a fellow-creature! Reader, it is the hardest thing of all. No sooner have we learnt the hard and difficult way of ascent than we must willingly come down it, even remain altogether in the valley below, and that with a smiling face and, if possible, no thought of impatience! This is the true sacrifice of the soul. Now, the sacrifices of the creature are the giving up of the near and visible joys and prides of the world to follow Christ, and are not real but seeming sacrifices, for, if done heartily and with courage, an exchange between these joys and the joys of the invisible is rapidly effected, and there remains no sacrifice, but "the hidden treasure" is ours! But the sacrifice of the soul is real and long; for having at last re-found God, she must resign her full joy of Him till the death of the body—and this willingly, thankfully, without complaint, not asking favours but pouring up her gratitude. In joy or in pain, in happiness or in tribulation—gratitude! gratitude!—and this not by her own strength but by strength of the Holy Ghost.
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