And we know that love is above learning and wisdom. Did not Solomon choose wisdom? and we think him so wise to have made this choice, but he had been far wiser to have chosen holy love. For wisdom lost herself and him in the arms of unworthy love: so we see the highest degree of the Wisdom of Man held in bondage to, and undone by, even the lowest degree of love.
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Dig deeply, and what do we find is at bottom our great, our persistent need? What is it that instinctively we look for and desire? Happiness, and the Ever-new.
In and out of every day persistently, desperately, endlessly we seek. And because we seek amongst the near-to-hand, the visible, the small, we seek in vain: we discover there is nothing in this world which can wholly and permanently satisfy either of these desires.
God Himself is Happiness. God Himself is the Ever-new.
In Divine Love there is no monotony: the soul finds that each encounter with God is ever new, the Ever-new tremulous with the beauty of rapture: new and wonderful as the first dawn.
IV
Not only is God a Mystery of Holiness, of Truth, of Love and Beauty: He is also Generosity, a mystery of Eternal Giving, and His giving is and must for ever be, the supreme necessity of the Universe: for without He gave how should we receive life, truth, beauty, love, or Himself?
And it cannot be too deeply impressed upon the soul that would come to His Presence that because of His law of like to like she must conform to this law in order to come to His Presence. By thinking it over we shall see that it is more difficult for us to be perfect holiness, perfect truth, perfect love, perfect beauty, than it is for us to be perfectly generous: it is easier for us to give God all that we have, to empty heart, mind and soul, and worldly goods at His feet, than it is to reach to any other perfection; for generosity appears to be more universal, more within our capacities, more "natural" to us than any other virtue—do we not see it continually used, exercised, spent, thrown away on the merest trifles? Let us take, for instance, the tennis player: to win the game he must give every ounce of himself to it—mind, eye, heart, and body,—sweating there in the glare of the sun to win the game. Would he give himself so, would he sweat so, in order to find God, or to please God? Oh no! Yet in the hour of death and afterwards, will he be helped by this victory of flying balls? If by chance we could lift a corner of the veil, we might catch a glimpse of the face of Folly, mockingly, cunningly peering at us, as all too easily she persuades us to give of our royal coins of generosity to wantons, to phantom enterprises, to balls filled with air, to dust and vanity.
Generosity is our easiest means of coming to God, because it is also the way of love: if the tennis player did not love the game, he would not give himself so to it. But we cry, "I have nothing whatever to give to God; it is to God I turn in order that He may give everything to me." Quite so: there is too much of that. We have obedience to give: obedience is a great gift to God, or, more truthfully speaking, in His magnanimity He accepts it as such; we have also love to give, and again we may cry, "But my love is puny, shifting; it is nothing at all, a mere trifle." That is true of "natural" love, of the love that we commence of our own human nature to love Him with; but it is not true of the love which we receive of the Holy Ghost when He baptizes us.