We are made to love and adore God, but the mode of entry into this is not by beseeching God to come down and love us, but by constant endeavour to enter up into His estate, to offer Him love: this enthusiasm for God brings about a mysterious accomplishment of all needs, desires, joys.
We are made to love and adore God, and because of this without Him we are an Emptiness, a Great Want. Such is the lovely and perfect reciprocity of love that as this Great Want we are the pleasure and the joy of the All-Giving God. And He is the All-Giving that He may rejoice and fill our extremity of Want. So we are each to each that which each most desires. This is Divine Love.
Do not let us imagine that by making very much of earthly loves we shall by that obtain the heavenly: on the contrary, love of creatures, and too much turning to and thinking of and depending upon creatures, is a sure manner of hindering us till we have learnt to unite with Divine Love. This love for creatures is often for the heart and soul what treacle is to the wings of a fly! Do not be content with creatures, but seek beyond the creaturely for the heavenly.
This is not to say that we are not to love our fellow-creatures, attend to them, wait upon them, bear with them, and work for them; but whilst doing all these we are not to make them the object of our life: we are not to think that by merely running about amongst creatures frenzied with plans for their social improvement and comfort the nearer we are necessarily getting to God, or even truly pleasing Him. All these multiplicities of frenzied interests are best centred upon the finding and knowing and loving of Jesus Christ within our own hearts. When this finding, knowing, loving and believing has been accomplished, then we shall have accomplished the only work God asks us to accomplish, and all other works will automatically, peacefully, and smoothly come to their proper fruition in us through Him.
Neither imagine we shall do this finding of Jesus in, or because of, another person. We shall not find Him in another person or anywhere till we have first found Him in ourselves: and this by inward pondering, delicate tender thinkings, loving comparisons, sweet enthusiasms, persistent endeavours to imitate His gentle ways and manners as being some proof of our desire to love and find Him. The need which is the most pressing of all our needs is to find that Light which will light us when we have to go out from the light of this world into the awful solitudes of that which we often so lightly and confidently speak of as "the other world."
Without Christ we go out into a fearful loneliness: with Christ we walk the rainbow paths of Paradise.
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Having tasted the blissful wonders of God, nothing less than God Himself can satisfy, comfort, or fill either the soul, heart, or mind; and yet we are still in a too small and imperfect condition to endure the power and strength of God's bliss for more than brief spells, so that after coming to these high things our portion here is to learn to be a useful willing servant, carrying with as cheerful a face as we are able the burden of life in the flesh, and endure this waiting to be with Christ free of the flesh.
What are these blisses of God? They are contact with an immeasurable Ardour, they are our ardour meeting the Fountain of all Ardours: and God is communicated to us by a magnetism which in its higher degrees becomes luminous and unbearable.
Are these divine joys and comforts of God towards us because we are more loved by God, because our salvation is more sure than that of those who are without these comforts? Most emphatically no. It is because we obey a particular and subtle law of giving to God, and do not (as is more natural to us) content ourselves with merely believing, expecting, and hoping to receive from God.