The progress of our spiritual advance would feel to be that because we become more and more aware of the failure of earthly consolations and amusements, and more and more aware of the suffering, the sin, and the evil that there is about us, so more and more our desires go out towards the good, and more and more we turn to Christ. Then Christ may deliberately make Himself non-sufficient for the soul, and if He so does she must reach out after the Godhead; then by means of more woes the soul and the creature clamour more and more after the Godhead and will not be satisfied with less than the Godhead, and, continuing to clamour, are brought by Christ to the new birth, the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.

Immediately the soul and creature become rid of Woe; and, living a life altogether apart from the world, in a marvellous crystal joy they taste of the Godhead and of Eternal Pleasures.

This for a short time only: we have entered the Kingdom, but are still the smallest of spiritual children: tenderly, wonderfully God cares for us, but we must grow, we must learn heavenly manners. So Jesus Christ calls us again, and where does He lead us? Straight back into the world, the daily life from which we thought we had escaped! Here truly is a Woe, a Woe worse than any Woe we ever had before. Now we enter the Course of spiritual temptations, woes, and endurances, and in the midst of the pots and pans of daily life Christ teaches us heavenly manners.

II

Since Contemplation is so necessary for Union with God and for the soul's enjoyment of God—is it a capacity common to all persons? Yes, though, like all other capacities, in varying degrees; but few will give themselves up to the difficulties of developing the capacity; and it is easy to know why, for our "natural" state is that we work for that which brings the easiest, most immediate, and most substantially visible reward.

Those who could most easily develop their powers of contemplation are those to whom Beauty speaks, or those who are delicately sensitive to some ideal, nameless, elusive, that draws and then retreats, but in retreating still draws. The poet, the artist, the dreamer that harnesses his mind—all can contemplate.

The Thinker, thinking straight through, the proficient business man with his powers of concentration, the first-rate organiser, the scientist, the inventor—all these men are contemplatives who do not drive to God, but to the world or to ambition. Taking God as their goal, they could ascend to great heights of happiness; though first they must give up ("sacrifice") all that is unsavoury in thought and in living: yet such is the vast, the boundless Attraction of God that having once (if only for a few moments) retouched this lost Attraction of His, we afterwards are possessed with no other desire so powerful as the desire to retouch Him again, and "sacrifice" becomes no sacrifice.

Truly, having once known God, we find life without Him to be meaningless and as unbeautiful as a broken stem without its flower: pitiful, naked, and helpless as the body of a butterfly without the wings.

III

At this time I read Bergson's Creative Evolution—a masterpiece of thinking by a man who, like most others, is seeking for God. But I am unable to read the book through because of the pain it causes. The pain is partly the same pain which I knew (and which I re-enter again in sympathy with the writer) when I tried in my youth to climb to God by the intelligence and will of my mind; but there is also a new pain, wide as an ocean, the pain of Compassion—for it is so long this way to God that Bergson pursues, so long, so long; and the particular way of this book is to me not like climbing, but descending: it resembles the frenzied action of a man searching for lilies downwards, digging with painful persistence in the dark earth amongst roots. How much more joyous to find the lily where she blooms, above in the light! There is another way of the Intelligence: a way of climbing to icy heights, bare, unwarmed by any ray of love, but less painful than this descent amongst dark roots. Cold, hard Intelligence, once to slip upon thy frozen way is to be broken on thy pitiless bosom! O God, in thy tender pity incline our hearts to seek Thee by the way of Love! For the road of Love comes easily to knowledge, but the road of knowledge comes not easily to Love.