n
which you can take refuge. It either covers everything, or it isn't
religion. Religion never has seemed to me (I don't know if I'm wrong)
one thing, like other things, so that you can change about and back
again.... It's either the background and foreground all in one, or it's
a kind of game. It's either true, or it's a pretense.

"Well, all this, in a way, taught me it was absolutely true. Things
wouldn't have held together at all unless it was true. But it was no
sort of satisfaction. It seemed to me for a while that it was horrible
that it was true; that it was frightful to think that God could be like
that--since this Jenny-business had really happened. But I didn't feel
all this exactly consciously at the time. I seemed as if I was ill, and
could only lie still and watch and be in hell. One thing, however,
Father Hildebrand thought very important (he asked me about it
particularly) was that I honestly did not feel any resentment whatever
against either God or Jenny. It was frightful, but it was true, and I
just had to lie still inside and look at it. He tells me that this shows
that the first part of the 'process,' as he called it, was finished (he
called it the 'Purgative Way'). And I must say that what happened next
seems to fit in rather well.

"The new 'process' began quite suddenly when I awoke in the shepherd's
hut one morning at Ripon. The instant I awoke I knew it. It was very
early in the morning, just before sunrise, but there was a little wood
behind me, and the birds were beginning to chirp.

"It's very hard to describe it in words, but the first thing to say is
that I was not exactly happy just then, but absolutely content. I think
I should say that it was like this: I saw suddenly that what had been
wrong in me was that I had made myself the center of things, and God a
kind of circumference. When He did or allowed things, I said, 'Why does
He?'--_from my point of view_. That is to say, I set up my ideas of
justice and love and so forth, and then compared His with mine, not mine
with His. And I suddenly saw--or, rather, I knew already when I
awoke--that this was simply stupid. Even now I cannot imagine why I
didn't see it before: I had heard people say it, of course--in sermons
and books--but I suppose it had meant nothing to me. (Father Hildebrand
tells me that I had seen it intellectually, but had never embraced it
with my will.) Because when one once really sees that, there's no longer
any puzz