When we offer this Peculiar Love, offer it as only it can be offered—for love's sake,—immediately we are in the Presence of God, secretly, marvellously united to Him; we are in the Consolations of God, and we have no need to ask for anything whatever; indeed, we find ourselves unable to ask, because we are filled to the brim, overflowing, inexpressibly satisfied, utterly blessed.

But supposing that we do not give to God, but, earnestly seeking Him, we merely ask some favour, and sit and wait for Him to give? Then probably we shall not be sensible of receiving anything from Him whatever; we shall feel at an immense distance from Him; then we shall become uneasy, depressed, fancy ourselves neglected, imagine we have lost Him—and so we have till we gloriously recover Him by means of giving.

And if at times in the stress of this giving, when He makes no response, we feel it is too much, we can give no more, we are too discouraged to continue, let us remember the strain and stress and endeavour that we and all our friends give to trifles, and quietly use our common sense to judge whether in the winning of a game of ball, or in the pleasing and finding of God, we shall be the more blessed. For God is to be found: He waits.

* * *

The truth about our endeavours is that we have one pre-eminent, pressing need above all other needs, which is to Find God. When we have accomplished this we discover without any further teaching that we no longer care to pass our time with air-balls, because they appear so paltry, so inadequate. We are grown up and are no longer puerile in our desires: at the same time we are not without desires, but, on the contrary, we glow with a new, more ardent, and larger set of desires.

V

What I know of the soul's actual Finding and Contact with God I keep very closely to myself. Here and there to a few, a very few souls, I may speak: to all others I am forbidden to speak. I am stopped; and I understand perfectly why this is: it is that I should do more harm than good. Anyone looking at me would say (and all the more so because I am dressed in the fashion of the day, and not in some peculiar way, or in a nun's habit, for such trifling things affect many minds), "That person is demented to think that she knows what it is to have Contact with God," and it would seem a scandal to them. But the explanation of the mystery is not so simple as this. I am not demented. I never was so sane, so capable in my life as now. I never was so perfectly poised as now. But if you say to me, "Explain what it is that you know, in order that I too may know," then I can say to you nothing more than, "Come and know for yourself, for God awaits you."

To illustrate a mere fraction of the difficulty of passing such a knowledge from one self to another self, let us take such a case as that of a man born blind. He sits beneath a tree, on the grass. You put a blade of grass in his fingers, and also a leaf from the tree, and you say to him, "This is grass, and this is the leaf of the tree which shelters you, and both are green." "And what," he asks, "is green?" And to save your life you cannot make him know what it is, or make him know the tree, or know the grass, though he touches them both with his hands. How, then, shall God, Who can be neither seen, nor heard, nor touched, how shall He be made known from one to another? He must be experienced to be known. And if you should say to me, "What does it feel like to have found God?" then I should say, "It feels that the roof is lifted off the world, and wherever we may be or stand it is a straight line from us to God and nothing between, nothing between, day or night."

VI

To come to the contemplation of God it is not necessary to go through any lengthy toil, some process of throwing out this or that, painfully, slowly, denying the existence of everything in order to arrive at God. The way is not denying, but concentrating; and in the act of concentration, because of love, all other things whatsoever in creation fall away into nothing and are no more, because God in all His graciousness reveals Himself, and then He alone exists for the enraptured soul.