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field, multitude or solitude, sickness or strength. These fluctuations of
circumstance will no longer dominate you; since "it is Love that payeth
for all."
Yet by all this it is not meant that the opening up of the universe, the
vivid consciousness of a living Reality and your relation with it, which
came to you in contemplation, will necessarily be a constant or a govern-
able feature of your experience. Even under the most favourable circum-
stances, you shall and must move easily and frequently between that
spiritual fruition and active work in the world of men. Often enough it
will slip from you utterly; often your most diligent effort will fail to re-
capture it, and only its fragrance will remain. The more intense those
contacts have been, the more terrible will be your hunger and desolation
when they are thus withdrawn: for increase of susceptibility means more
78
pain as well as more pleasure, as every artist knows. But you will find in
all that happens to you, all that opposes and grieves you even in those
inevitable hours of darkness when the doors of true perception seem to
close, and the cruel tangles of the world are all that you can discern an
inward sense of security which will never cease. All the waves that buf-
fet you about, shaking sometimes the strongest faith and hope, are yet
parts and aspects of one Ocean. Did they wreck you utterly, that Ocean
would receive you; and there you would find, overwhelming and trans-
fusing you, the unfathomable Substance of all life and joy. Whether you
realise it in its personal or impersonal manifestation, the universe is now
friendly to you; and as he is a suspicious and unworthy lover who asks
every day for renewed demonstrations of love, so you do not demand
from it perpetual reassurances. It is enough, that once it showed you its
heart. A link of love now binds you to it for evermore: in spite of derelic-
tions, in spite of darkness and suffering, your will is harmonised with
the Will that informs the Whole.
We said, at the beginning of this discussion, that mysticism was the art
of union with Reality: that it was, above all else, a Science of Love.
Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and towards which the
soul of the contemplative has been stretching out, is a condition of being,
not of seeing. As the bodily senses have been produced under pressure of
man's physical environment, and their true aim is not the enhancement
of his pleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment to
those aspects of the natural world which concern him so the use and
meaning of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too. These, when de-
veloped by a suitable training, reveal to man a certain measure of Real-
ity: not in order that he may gaze upon it, but in order that he may react
to it, learn to live in, with, and for it; growing and stretching into more
perfect harmony with the Eternal Order, until at last, like the blessed
ones of Dante's vision, the clearness of his flame responds to the un-
speakable radiance of the Enkindling Light.
79
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