We learn then that Grace awaits every creature that attunes himself to the Will of Christ: it awaits good and bad, saint and sinner, it transforms the sinner into the saint, and but for its deliberate withdrawals we might suppose its action to be automatic, we might suppose it a fixed power like the sun, shining upon worthy and unworthy alike in degree. But Grace is far more subtle and mysterious than this. Grace is the most sublime, the most exquisite secret of all the mysteries which exist between the Soul and her Maker.
* * *
I find that He works upon my soul by two opposite ways: He draws her up to contact and sublime content; He sets her down to solitude and hides Himself: He is there, and will not speak.
And she suffers horribly: and why not? Where is the injustice of this pain?
Countless ages ago—who can count them?—the soul, born in a palace, has deliberately willed and chosen to become the Wanderer, the Street Walker; therefore fold up self-pity and lay it aside, because it does not live in the same house with Truth.
Cast off self-consciousness and pride, because they are ridiculous, and a man can only be great or noble in just so far as he has abandoned them.
* * *
What is it that often makes it so much harder for the soul to refind God when she is enclosed in the male body? Perhaps the greater strength of the natural lusts of the male: perhaps the pride of "Being"—as lord of creation; or the pride of Intelligence which says, I rely easily upon myself, I need no religion of hymn tunes, I leave hymn tunes to women, for the ardour and capacity of my manhood rush to far different aims.
But can any sane man think that the Essential Being who has created the universe, with all its infinite wonders, and this earth with its beauty and its wonderful flesh, and so much more that is not flesh but the still more wonderful spirit—can any sane man really think that this Essential Being is stuck fast at hymn tunes (which are Man's own invention!) and knows not how to satisfy the needs and longings of that which He has Himself created!
Ardent and greatly mistaken Sinner, know and remember that to Find God is to Live Tremendously.