All of us would seem to have two personalities: we are the repentant and the unrepentant Magdalene and daily change from one to the other. But true repentance cannot come before love: if we think we repent before we love, then it is no more than a repentance of the mind, which says to itself, "I must stand well with God because of my future well-being." Where love comes first we get the repentance of the heart, which works this way in us—we love Jesus a little, we love Him more and more, and because of this love increasing to real warmth we suddenly perceive the frightful offences we have committed against this sweet love, and instantly the heart melts and breaks and we are shaken to our depths that we have ever grieved our Holy Lover. This is true repentance—no anxious fears for our own future, but love grieving and agonised for its offences. Such repentance as this pierces to the deepest recesses of the heart and mind, and leaves upon them a deep indelible mark, changing all the aims of our life, and is the beginning of all joys in Christ Jesus. Let us aim therefore not first at repentance, but first at love. A little love to Jesus given many times a day as we walk or wait or work, if only at first said by the lips with desire for more warmth, after a while we shall find ourselves giving it from the heart; then the Divine Seed has begun to grow because we have watered it.
If the natural man were asked, "What is life? what is it to live?" he would reply, "It is to eat, drink, laugh, love, and have pleasure or pain: to hear, see, touch, taste and smell, and to be conscious that I do all these things." Yet this consciousness is but a tiny speck of consciousness, and some mysterious voice within the deeply-thinking man tells him that this is so. But how uncover a further consciousness? This is the secret of the soul.
To pass from one form of consciousness to another—this is to increase life fifty, a hundred, a thousand times according to the degrees of consciousness we can attain. These degrees would seem to be irrevocably limited because of the mechanical actions of heart and breathing, which automatic actions become suspended or seriously interfered with in very high states of consciousness. When first these very great expansions of consciousness take place, the creature is under strong conviction that the soul has left the body—that it has gone upon some mysterious journey—this because of several reasons. The first is because of a certain persistent sound of rushing; the second is because of the sense of living at tremendous speed, in a manner previously altogether unknown and totally undreamed of, in which the senses of the body have no concern whatever and are completely closed down; thirdly, on returning from this "journey" we are not immediately able to exact obedience from the body, which remains inert and stiffly cold and suffers distress with too slow breathing. But reason demands, "How is it possible that the soul should leave the body and the body not die? and also we perceive this, that, though the consciousness is projected to an infinite distance, or includes that infinite distance within itself, it yet remains aware of the existence of the body, though very dimly."
The method employed, then, for administering these experiences to the soul and the creature is not by means of drawing the soul out of the body, but by a withdrawal of the condition of insulation from Divine Life or great magnetic emanation, in which insulation all creatures have their normal existence, living in a condition which may be termed a state of total Unawareness. By Will of God this condition of insulation is removed, the soul enters Connection and becomes instantly and vividly aware of Spiritual Life and of that which Is, at an infinite distance from herself, so that the soul is at one and the same time in paradise or heaven, and upon the earth: space is eaten up. Without seeing or hearing, the soul partakes in a tremendous and unspeakable manner of the joys of God, which, all unfelt by us as "natural" man, pass unceasingly throughout the universe.
These experiences give an immense and unshakable knowledge to the soul and the creature of the immense reality of the Unseen Life, and are doubtless sent us to effect this knowledge. Why, then, is not every man given this knowledge? Because the creature must qualify before being allowed to receive it, and too many hold back from the tests. By these experiences we learn some little portion of the mystery which lies between the pettiness of that which we now are and the great glories that we shall come to; and in this awful heavenly mystery in which are fires that have no flame, and melody which has no sound, the soul is drawn to Everlasting Love. But we cannot endure the bliss of it, and the soul prays to be covered on account of the creature.
But because of the limitations of the flesh we are not to despise it but regard it not as an aim or end (as that if we satisfy its lusts that shall be our paradise), but regard it as a means. Christ willed the flesh and the world to be a rapid means of our return to God. Subdue the flesh without despising it, in humility and thankfulness. Suffer its trials and penalties not in dejection, rebellion, or hopelessness, but as a means to an end. "For everyone shall be salted with fire," says Scripture; and can anything whatever be well forged or made without it be first melted and cleaned? So, then, for each his Gethsemane. As for Christ, so for Judas, who, not being able to endure, went out and hanged himself. Let our care, then, be to choose that Gethsemane which shall open to us the gates of heaven and not hell.
In our raw state we fear the Will of God, thinking it a path of thorns; but as Christ moulds and teaches us we grow to know the Will of God as a great Balm: to long to conform to it, joyfully to join it, to sink into it as into an immense security where we are safe from all ills; and at last, no matter what temporary trials we endure, so great does our love and confidence grow by Grace of God upholding our tiny efforts that, like Job, we cry to Him with absolute sincerity and confidence, "Though Thou slay me, yet will I trust Thee"; having learnt it is not His Will to slay but to restore and purify and make glad. Incessant work is the lot of the awakened and returning soul, and justly so, for because of what folly and ingratitude did she ever leave God? A multiplicity of choices lie before her, and her great concern is which amongst all these possible decisions will prove the shortest path to God. These choices and decisions must be brought down to the meanest details of everyday life. At first on awakening the soul would like nothing better than to forsake and cast away material things altogether, and is inclined to despise the body. But Jesus teaches her that this is not pleasing: it is His Will that she should continually lend assistance to the creature in its weaknesses and uncertainties, not disdaining it but helping it. It is the soul which maintains contact with the Divine Guide, and then in turn should guide the creature. As the Divine Guide condescends to the soul, never despising her, so must the soul condescend to the creature: acknowledging and understanding that nothing is too small or humble for the soul to attend to and lead the creature to do in a beautiful and gentle manner.
By these means the permeation of the natural world by the Divine is carried out, and no act or fact of life can be considered too insignificant for the soul to attend to for the development of this aim.
The more we become familiar with spiritual life the more we observe the regularity of certain laws in it, and the more we find analogies between these new and unmapped laws and the laws and forces already known to us in the visible world. Rightly expounded by some scientific mind, these could bring the world of human thought and aspirations straight into the arms of God.
Science is the friend and not the enemy of religion. Science will light up and illuminate the dark gaps. This world is a house fully wired for lighting: the wiring is perfect, the bulbs alone are incomplete; they give no light: it is the task of the soul to perfect these human bulbs.