He says our Lord ‘ went to a city called Naim.’ Naim means son of a dove, which suggests simplicity. The soul shall never rest in her potential power (or nature) till she is simplified to God. It also signifies a flow of water and implies passivity of soul towards sin and imperfection. The disciples symbolise the divine light which shall flow in and flood the soul. The ‘ much people ’ are the virtues whereof I lately spoke. The soul shall ascend in fiery aspiration and pass above the manifold merit of the angels to the greater virtues. So she comes ‘ under the gate ’ and enters into love and unity: the gate whence they bore out the youth, the widow’s son. ‘ Our Lord came and touched the bier whereon the body lay.’ How he came and how he touched I will not dwell upon but upon the words, ‘ Young man. Arise! ’ He was the son of a widow: her man was dead. Ilcncc dead too was her son, the only son of the soul, the will and all the powers of the soul, for all these are one in the innermost mind, and mind {ix, intellect) is the man in the soul. Her husband was dead, therefore her son was dead also. ‘ Young man, I say unto thee. Arise! ’ When the Word addresses the soul and the soul replies in the living Word, then the Son is alive in the soul.
Philosophers ask which is the better, the power of plants or the power of words or the power of stones? Let us consider. Words derive their power from the original Word. But the abuse and multiplication of words impairs their force. Plants possess great power. I have heard that a serpent was fighting with a weasel when the weasel ran off and fetched a little plant which, wrapping in another plant, it launched upon the serpent and, breaking asunder, the serpent lay dead. What endowed the MEISTER ECKHART weasel with this wisdom? The virtue of plant-lore. Therein lies much wisdom. Words, too, have prodigious power: with words we can do wonders. And stones again are very potent in virtue of the likeness wrought in them by the starry and celestial force. Like works in like most mightily, and that is why the soul, by raising herself up in the natural light, can get into angelic light and in the angelic light enter the light divine and so stand in the three lights, at the cross-ways, at the vertex, where the lights run into one. There the eternal Word is saying life in her, and there the soul is living and gainsaying in the Word. So may we be gainsay ers in the eternal Word, God helping us. Amen.
XXXVII YOUNG MAN, ARISE!
AdolescenSj tibi dico: surge (Luc, 7^^), We read in the gospel that a woman came to our Lord Jesus Christ. She said, ‘ Sir, I am a widow, and had an only son who is dead.’ Our Lord said, ‘ Young man, Arise! ’ The widow, this woman whose husband was dead, and her only son. By this woman is meant the understanding, her husband is the man of the soul, and the youth the highest intelleet, for that is the young man. When the soul is dead in imperfection, the higher mind awakening into understanding cries to God for grace. Then God gives it divine light and it becomes self-knowing. Therein it sees God. I said, intellect alone can receive divine light. The other powers of the soul are instruments and agents for raising the intellect to its maximum lucidity.
It is a question with the theologians, which ranks higher, under- standing or love? One school says understanding, the other school, love. It is a lively subject of debate. Understanding says: How canst thou love a thing thou dost not know? Love says: What avails thee thy knowledge without love? Loveless, thou shalt never find eternal happiness. Understanding says: I am born in the clear light of self-knowledge. Love says: Great knowledge without love is vain. Understanding says: Give place, thou are only my slave: thou dost help me to rise and remainest. Love says: I am the good that God is himself. Knowledge says; High is thy claim: without me thou dost fall to the ground. Love says: It would be well for thee to bear me more in mind. Understanding says: I can rise higher not fettered to thee; my vision is clearer, nay, I want none of thee. I have what I will the while I know what hitherto I have descried and into which I now have flowed to abide for aye in perfect SERMONS AND COLLATIONS unity. Here, I am above love and transcend all activity. Here I have intuition; and my real knowledge of all things, all I believed, is now come true. Faith and hope and all the powers of the soul remain, they can go no further. True love says: I must abide with thee, for I am eternal. Our sisters stay behind, that is but meet: they are our servants who have brought thee to the actual enjoyment of thy eternal happiness. — Now comes the highest intellect, that which receives all things direct from God, and says: I have conceived the sovran good wherein is naught save unity. Intuition says; I shall cleave to thee, iny place is at thy side. Intellect says: Knowledge and love must remain behind. Intui- tion says: It is meet I should enjoy what I have divined. Highest intellect replies: What you have brought me to and which I hitherto have known, now knows itself in me. Wherefore I find I need none else. All created things must remain behind with all I ever was. I stand before my cause.
To go back to the widow and our Lord’s command, ‘ Young man, Arise! ’ we must bear in mind that anything not far from birth is young. Thus it is with intellect as standing in the presence of its cause; oblivious of the aids to its ascent it fondly weens it has been there for aye and there shall eternally remain. That may not be.
Then take the words: ‘ by the widow is meant the understand- by her son the intellect, and by her husband the man of the soul.’ Now you must know, when the man of the soul begins to rise, the masters say it is another man. By which you must not understand it is another soul: it is another being of the soul; the old mode is done, it is dead. The soul assuming her real mode stands in her virgin innocence. The man of the soul, transcending his angelic mode and guided by the intellect, pierces to the source whence flowed the soul. Intellect itself is left outside with all named things. So the soul is merged into pure unity. This we call the man of the soul, and, having reached this consummation, he has no need of any help. What he did here- tofore God now does in him. God knows him as he knew him, God loves him as he loved him. God is doing all the work and the man of the soul is absolutely idle.
When a man has reached this point we may well say, this man is God and man. All Christ has by nature he has won by grace. His body is filled with the noble nature of the soul, which she receives from God, with divine light, wherefore we may truly ery, Behold, a man divine! Pity them, my children, they are from home and no one knows them. Let those in quest of God be careful lest appearances deceive them in these people who are peculiar and hard to place; no one rightly knows them but those in whom the 102 MEISTER ECKHART 102 MEISTER ECKHART same light shines. Namely, the light of truth. Yet it may well be that wayfarers to that same good, but who have not yet reached it, will come across these perfect of whom we have been speaking. Believe me, did I know one such, and had a convent-full of gold and precious stones, I would give the whole of it for a single fowl for him to eat. Further I declare, if all the things God ever made were mine, I would for with give them all for the enjoyment of that man, and rightly, for they are all his. Nay, more I say: his, too, is God in the fullness of his power, and if there stood before me all who in imperfection arc anhungered, I would not withhold from that man’s need a single feather of the fowl, though I might feed that multitude. For, you must remember, with one in imperfec- tion, anything he eats or drinks will drag him down and make him prone to sin. But not the virtuous man: what he eats and drinks he raises up in Christ to the Father. So look well to yourselves.
You are familiar with Christ’s words, ‘ Where two arc gathered together in my name I will be with them.’ Here Christ is referring to the harmonious union of the body and the soul, where body wants nothing except what the soul wills. God is with these: they are the people we have been speaking of. Here the man of the soul is in actual possession of his eternal happiness, and, being docked of all her powers, the soul encounters no sort of opposition. I warn you, you must keep a sharp look out, for they arc difficult to tell; thus if they should need it, while other people fast they will be eating, while other people watch they will be sleeping, while other folks are pra> ing they will hold their peace. In short, the things they say and do seem imaeeountable, for what God makes obvious to persons on the way to their eternal happiness is foreign to those that have arrived there. These have no wants whatever: they arc rich in the possession of a city of their own. I call that my own which is mine eternally and no one can take from me. These people, you must know, do most valuable work. They work within, you understand, in the man of the soul. Blessed is the kingdom wherein dwells one of them; in an instant they will do more lasting good than all the outward actions ever done. See ye withhold not aught of theirs. May we recognise these people and loving God in them, with them possess the city they have won. So help us God. Amen.
XXXVIII PEACE XXXVIII PEACE Steiit Jesus in medio discipulorum et dixit: pax etc. {Luc. 2435, Joh, 20^3). St John tells us in his gospel that ‘ on the first day of SERMONS AND COLLATIONS the week, at evening, when the doors were shut, came our Lord and stood in the midst of the disciples and said: Peace be unto you! ’ and again, ‘ Peace be unto you! ’ and a third time, ‘ Receive ye the Holy Ghost! ’ Now the evening never comes unless morning and midday have gone before. We say that the middle of the day is warmer than the evening. But in so far as evening takes in middle-day and stores up its heat, it is the warmer, when, too, before the evening there goes a whole bright day. Late in the year, again, after the summer solstice, when the sun is drawing nigh to earth, the evenings will grow warm. But midday never comes till morning goes nor evening until noon has passed away. The moral of which is, that when the divine light breaks forth in the soul, getting brighter and brighter unto the perfect day, then morning does not vanish before noon nor noon ere eventide: they close up to one. So the evening is warm. There is perfect day in the soul when all the soul is full of light divine. But it is evening in the soul, as I have said before, when the light of this world fades and the soul goes in to rest.
God said, ‘ Peace! ’ and ‘ Peace 1 ’ again, and ‘ Receive ye the Holy Ghost! ’ Jacob the patriarch came to a place, in the evening, and putting underneath his head some stones which lay about, he sank to rest. In his sleep he saw a ladder reaching up to heaven with angels ascending and descending and God leaning down over the top of the ladder. This place Jacob slept in had no name. Which is as much as to say: the God- head alone is the place of the soul, and is nameless. Concerning this our doctors say: a thing which is another’s place must be above it; as heaven is the place of all things and fire is the place of air and air the place of water and water, partially, the place of earth and earth is not a place. An angel is a heavenly place, and any angel who has got the least drop more of God than any other is the place, the habitation, of that other, the most exalted angel being the place, the room, the measure of the rest while he himself is without measure. But although he is without measure, natheless God is his measure.
Jacob rested in the place which is nameless. By not naming it it is named. On getting to this nameless place the soul will rest: where all things are being God in God, there shall she rest. The abode of the soul, which God is, is unnamed. I say, God is unspoken. But St Augustine says that God is not unspoken; were he unspoken, that even would be speech and he is more silence than speech. One of our most ancient philosophers who found the truth long, long before God’s birth, ere ever there was Christian faith at all as it is now, to him (I say) it seemed that what he could manage to utter of things only conjured up within him MEISTER ECKHART something monstrous and unreal and therefore he refused to speak at all. Not even would he say, give me meat or give me drink. He declined to mention things because he could not say them as perfect as they sprang from their first cause: he chose rather to be dumb and to make known his wants by pointing with his finger. How much more does it beseem us, if he knew not the way to talk of things, to be absolutely mute concerning him who is the origin of all things.
We say that God is a spirit. Not so. If God were really a spirit he would be spoken. According to St Gregory, we cannot rightly speak of God at all. Anything we say of him is bound to be a stammering. This place which is not named, wherein all creatures thrive and bloom in orderly array, this habitat of all creatures, is gotten suddenly out of the ground of this orderly place, the seat of the soul proceeding out of this ground.
Jacob wanted to rest: mark you, he wanted to rest. Whoso resteth in God his rest is will-free. We say that will is without habit. Will is free, it takes nothing from matter. In this sense it is freer than intellect, and some rash people pouncing upon this would put it above knowledge. That is not so. Intellect also is free despite that intellect does take from matter and from corporal things in the locality of soul, for, as 1 pointed out on Easter Eve, various of the soul-powers are in link with the five senses, for in- stance, sight and hearing, which convey to them the things we know. A master says: ‘ God would never choose that eye or ear should sense what crowns the summit of the soul: none other than the nameless place, which is the place of all things.’ It gives a fair reflection, and is useful in that way, but is marred by colour and by sound and corporal things. It is only by the senses that the soul is roused and the idea of wisdom naturally imprinted in her. Plato says, and with him St Augustine: The soul has all know- ledge within, and all wc can do from without is but an awakening of knowledge. — Jacob rested in the evening. Let us pray ever for the now; ’tis but a little thing wc ask, just for one evening. May it be granted us, So help us God. Amen.
XXXIX EVERY GOOD GIFT Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum descendit a patre luminum {Jac. Ij^). My Latin quotation is from the Epistle of St James. He says, ‘ Every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights. With him is no variableness nor shadow of time (or, temporal SERMONS AND COLLATIONS reflection).’ These two terms he uses, good gift and perfect gift, refer to different things, so our masters say. Datum befalls in time; donum has no thought of time. Datum is a matter of self-seeking, but donum is free and unconditioned and wholly without why. A perfect gift is one betokening nothing but good- will. The perfect gift is therefore free and unconditional. The perfect gift is a friendly offering, essentially a giving albeit not bestowed. According to our masters, gifts are perfect in so far as they are love-bearers; but good gifts are like hucksters and have ever their price. In the words of one of the saints, ‘ Blood of the Holy Ghost and its glow is in one sense eternal and in another temporal.’ If my face were eternal and were held before a mirror it would be received in the mirror as a temporal thing albeit eternal in itself. The Holy Ghost has its glow. The eternal glow of his eternal blood is the perfect gift; when the soul is worthy and receives the same it turns to the good gift. Meaning to say that this gift which is temporal in us is in itself eternal. God would give us not only his good gift; he is ready to bestow on us his perfect gift as well, to wit, the Holy Ghost itself. Hence his words, ‘ Every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights.’
From another point of view he means, so it appears to me, that the Holy Ghost is the perfect gift only as working in the intellect. As proceeding forth in the practice of good works, albeit godly, or withal in thought, it becomes good gift. It is the perfect gift so far as the soul is living in God, immanent in the light and savour of God, hanging motionless in his perfect light-nature. As St Paul says, ‘Ye shall taste the things that are above.’ The Holy Ghost is the Gift wherein ye abide in the perfection of light. The soul suspended in pure intellectual light is enjoying the things that are above. Our masters teach that corporeal things arc called matter. We say, the light of intellect shuns matter, but albeit in itself wholly devoid of things it still has potentiality and that for matter. He says, ‘ Taste the things that are above,’ not, that arc above the earth. We have a saying. So far from matter so far pure intelligence. When in the light the grey tint of the cloth assails my eye, I see it. If it were intellect I should see nothing. We recognise another power as being far removed from matter. How so? Suppose I saw a man twenty years ago, he may now be dead, but still I have a likeness of his form as though he stood before my eyes. This power needs no matter, but it has the imperfection of receiving from matter~in forms, that is to say. On the other hand, the light, intelligence, transcends what is already matter or is so potentially. While the soul abides in God, suspended in his MEISTER ECKHART intellectual light she has no material objectivity nor likeness nor potentiality. He says, ‘ Every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights.’
What docs he mean by calling it ‘ good gift? ’ Betwixt those things whose being-and-doing is in eternity and the things whose being and doing are in time there needs must be some middle term. He means that it is God, this thing whose being-and-doing is the perfect gift; so the being-and-doing of the perfect gift is in eternity. But the being-and-doing of the good gift are in time; which of course must mean that the soul is on the way to eternal life. Why does he promise both good and perfect gifts? When God bestows the Holy Ghost itself, whose being-and-activity is in eternity, that is his perfect gift which, peering forth in thought, is his good gift.
St Augustine says, and the masters too, the soul has some capacity which is open towards God and into which he alone can speak, whereas creature speaks into another. Into this highest power, which is addressed by God alone, he utters wisdom, which is his perfect gift. But the other one that creature speaks to is satisfied with reason. The same gift is perfect, being timeless, and good as perfecting the things of time. What is temporal in us is eternal in God. Datum in us is donum in God. What is mixed and temporal and good in us becomes, if we follow it up, perfect in God. What we are able to receive of him is infinitely small compared to what he is. Whatever else one may know one docs not know God.
He says, ‘ he comes down from on high from the Father of lights.’ What docs he mean? The Son and the Holy Ghost have one source in the Father, and the Holy Ghost and the Son arc one light and they arc both of them lights. God is the Father of lights. St Augustine tells what the soul is tasting in God. He explains that in that food the tongue is savouring the invisible light; he says the soul is not a thing of sensible appetites and pleasures; she has a hidden energy and luminosity.
According to the masters, the angels are a light: God is the entire light, with whom is no change nor time nor turning. The nobler the creature the more akin to God. All creaturely being- and-doing is in time. But the angels, who are higher, are in essence timeless and without alteration in themselves. Their wonted activities in God are free from time, but in that they look down they have an aspect (or shadow) of time. But in none of his works has God any shadow of time nor of change. So far as there is no changing, no shadow in man, so far he compares with divinity. Creature has ever this and that, one thing and another; but in God exists neither this nor that, neither one nor tother; SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 107 and unless there be in us what two and two are, what is one plus other, the happenings within us remain just good and ill. There is no one or other with the Father of lights. May we be given every good gift and eveiy perfect gift wherein we are exalted above time to the Father of lights with whom is no variableness nor temporal nature, So help us God. Amen.
XL EVERY GOOD GIFT Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum de sursum est descendens a patre luminum {Jac. l^^). St James says in his epistle, ‘ Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from above from the Father of lights.’
Now yc must know that people who resign themselves to God and diligently seek to do his will, to these, I say, whatever God may send will be the best. As God lives, be sure it is the very best, and there can be no better way. Some other may seem better yet is not so good for thee; God wills this way and not that, therefore this way is bound to be the best. Sickness or poverty, hunger or thirst, what God does give thee or what he does not, that is the very best for thee, aye, though it be fervour or the interior life which, alas! thou dost lack. Whatever thou hast or hast not, accept it all to the glory of God, and then whatever he sends thee will be for the best.
Peradventure thou wilt say. How can I tell whether it is God’s will or not? If it were not God’s will it would not be. Neither sickness nor anything else dost thou have excepting God wills. And therefore knowing it to be God’s will thou oughtest to rejoice in it and to be so content therewith that any pain shall lose its sting for thee; aye, even in extremity of pain to feel the least affliction or distress were altogether wrong: accept it from God as the best since it is bound to be the best thing for thee. It is of the essence of him to will what is best. Let me then will it too; there is nothing that should please me better. Supposing there was someone I tried hard to please and whom I knew for certain liked me in a grey coat more than any other; doubtless that coat would please me too, and I should prefer it to any of the rest however nice they were. Given then my wish to please a certain person, the things I know he wishes both of word and deed are the things that I would do and those alone. Judge for yourselves then of your love! If ye do indeed love God ye will Uke nothing better than that which best enables him to work his will in us. However great may seem the pain or the privation.
108 MEISTER ECKHART except thou take deliglit therein as great as in thine ease and plenty, it is wrong.
One thing I am wont to say, and it is the fact, that daily we cry in our pater noster^ Lord, thy will be done! and when his will is done we grumble and are discontented at it. Whatever he does let us deem that the best and like that best of all. Those who do take it as the best always remain tranquil. Sometimes ye will say, Alas! ’twere better something else had happened, or, had that not been, things would have turned out better. As long as thou dost think so thou wilt never be at peace. Accept it all for the best. That is the first moral of our text.
There is another meaning, mark it well. He says ‘ every gift.’ The very best and the very highest, these are innate gifts and in him the most innate of all. God gives nothing so gladly as great gifts. Once in this very place I said, God likes forgiving big sins more than small ones. The bigger they arc the gladder he is and the quicker to forgive them. It is the same with graces, gifts, and virtues: the greater they arc the greater his pleasure in bestowing them, for the giving of largesse is his nature. The bigger the things and the better the more shall ye get. [The noblest creatures are the angels who are minds and nothing else; they have no carnal nature and they are in number infinitely more than all the corporal things.]
Once upon a time I laid it down that to be properly expressed a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form: it must come, not in from without but out from within. It really lives in the recesses of the soul. There all things arc present to thee, subjectively alive and active in their zenith, in their prime. Why art thou unaware of it? Because thou art not at home. The more noble a thing the more common it is. Feeling I have in common with the beasts and life in common with the trees. Being is still more innate in me and that I have in common with all creatures. Heaven exceeds all neighbouring things, and it is nobler also. The nobler the thing the bigger it is and the more universal. Love is as noble as it is universal. It does indeed seem hard, as our Lord commands, to love our evenchristians as ourselves. The unenlightened say that we ought to love them just the same as they love themselves. Not so. We ought to love them no more than our own selves, which is not difficult. If you come to consider, it is matter for reward more than a behest. The command seems hard but the reward desirable. He who loves God as he ought and must (whether he would or not), and as all creatures love him, will love his evenchristian as himself, rejoicing in his joys and hoping for his honour as much as for his own and treating the other like himself. By this means he is always happy SERMONS AND COLLATIONS whether in honour or in need, just as though he were in heaven and withal has more enjoyments than the blessings of himself alone.
The plain truth is that it is wrong for thee to hold thine honour dearer than another’s. Remember, an thou seekest aught of thine thou never shalt find God, for thou art not seeking God merely. Thou art seeking for something with God, making a candle of God, as it were, with which to find something, and then, having found it, throwing the candle away. Thus shalt thou fare: aught that thou findest with God is naught, whatsoever it be, whether profit or wages or the interior life or anything else: naught dost thou seek and naught shalt thou find. Thou shalt find naught because it is naught thou dost seek; that is all. All creatures are a mere naught. I say not they are small, are aught: they are absolutely naught. A thing without being is not (or is naught). Creatures have no real being, for their being consists in the presence of God. If God turned away for an instant they would all perish. I have sometimes said, and it is true, that he who has gotten the whole world plus God has gotten no more than God by himself. Having all creatures without God is no more than having one fly without God; just the same, no more nor less.
This is a true saying. The man who gives a thousand marks of gold for the making of convents or of churches is doing a great deed. But that man gives a great deal more who gives a thousand marks for naught; he is doing far more than the other. When God created all creatures he could not move in them, they were so small and narrow. But the soul he made so like himself, so nearly his own peer, on purpose to give himself to her: nothing else that he could give her would she care for in the least. God must give me himself for my own as he is his own, or I shall get naught, nor is aught else to my taste. Whoso receives him thus outright must wholly have renounced himself and gone out of himself; he gets straight from God all that he has, as his own just as much as it is his, and our Lady and all the habitants of heaven. All this is meet and proper to this man. Those who have renounced themselves and are in this ' sense dead unto themselves receive the same, no less.
Thirdly, the term ‘ Father of lights.’ The word father implies to us a son. Father stands for abstract generation, and is an expression for the universal principle of life. The Father generates his Son in his eternal intellect and the Father generates his Son in the soul just as he does in, his own nature; he bears his Son in \ the soul as her own, and his existence depends on his bringing his Son to birth in the soul, whether he would or no. On one occasion ' MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART I was asked what the Father is doing in heaven? I said, He is begetting his Son, an act he so delights in and which pleases him so well that he does nothing else but generate his Son» and these .■ twain are flowering with the Holy Ghost. When the Father gives birth to his Son in me I am his very Son and not another: we are another in manhood, true, but there I am the Son himself and no other. As sons we are lawful heirs. He who knows the truth wots this right well. The word father connotes just be- getting and having of sons. We are sons in his Son and are the Son himself.
Now consider the words, ‘ they come from above.’ I said, referring to this very thing. Whoso desires to receive from above must needs be below in true humility. Know in good sooth, if a thing is not right underneath it receives nothing nor conceives nothing: not a single thing however small. Hast thou an eye to thine own self or to any thing or person, then thou art not right under and thou receivest nothing; but being brought right under thou receivest all at once and in perfection. It is God’s nature to give, and his existence depends on his giving to us when we are under. If we are not, then we get nothing: we do him violence and kill him. Or if unable so to do to him, we do it to ourselves as far as in us lies. If thou wouldst really give him all, see to it thou dost put thyself right humbly under God, raising up God in thy heart and in thy understanding. The Father sent his son into the world in the fullness of time of the soul, when she had finished with time. Wheii the soul is free from time and place the Father sends his Son mto the soul. This is the explanation of the words, ‘ the best gifts come from above from the Father of lights.’ Let us be ready to receive these same best gifts. So help ■ i us God the Father of lights. Amen.
XLI A LITTLE AND YE SHALL NOT SEE ME Modicum videbitis me et modicum non videbitis {Joh. I617, i»)* I quote in Latin from the Gospel of St John a saying of our Lord to his disciples. The translation runs, ‘ A modicum, a little, ye shall see me and a modicum, a little, and ye shall not see me.’ The disciples were ignorant and did not understand. They were sa3ring to each other, ‘ We know not what he means.’ So St John relates, and he was there. Follows a parable which I will not dwell on. Then, knowing what was in their hearts he says quite plainly, ‘ I shall see you again and your joy shall be full.’
Now, to my mind this saying will bear four interpretations.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 111 More or less the same in wording but widely different in meaning. The kernel of the prime conception and of eternal happiness is knowledge. One theologist who spoke at Paris insisted with loud fulminations that this is not so. Then up and said another one, better than the best they have at Paris: Sir, you are very positive, but in the gospel did not God declare the very thing that you denounce so roundly? Our Lord’s words are, ‘ This is eternal life, to know thee the only true God ’ — ‘ A little and ye shall see me.’ Meaning to say, ye must get to look upon everything in you as little and of small account if ye are ever to see God. It follows that we must observe minutely what will help and hinder divine knowledge. However small what comes from God, if treated rightly it recurs, it comes again, for we have one divine thing of our own that we can work with as with our own soul; not that I work and God looks on: I, as it were, co-operate with my own tool which is mine and in me. Thus man being lifted up in time shall sec God out of himself. I have sometimes said, the time St Paul saw nothing he saw God. Now I say something better: when St Paul saw all nothing he saw God: when he saw all things as nothing he saw God, and what God means to say is this: when things are all reduced to naught in you then ye shall see God.