l at an immense distance from Him; then
we shall become uneasy, depressed, fancy ourselves neglected,
imagine we have lost Him--and so we have till we gloriously
recover Him by means of giving.

And if at times in the stress of this giving, when He makes no
response, we feel it is too much, we can give no more, we are too
discouraged to continue, let us remember the strain and stress and
endeavour that we and all our friends give to trifles, and quietly use
our common sense to judge whether in the winning of a game of ball,
or in the pleasing and finding of God, we shall be the more blessed.
For God is to be found: He waits.

* * *

The truth about our endeavours is that we have one pre-eminent,
pressing need above all other needs, which is to Find God. When we
have accomplished this we discover without any further teaching
that we no longer care to pass our time with air-balls, because they
appear so paltry, so inadequate. We are grown up and are no longer
puerile in our desires: at the same time we are not without desires,
but, on the contrary, we glow with a new, more ardent, and larger set
of desires.

V

What I know of the soul's actual Finding and Contact with God I
keep very closely to myself. Here and there to a few, a very few
souls, I may speak: to all others I am forbidden to speak. I am
stopped; and I understand perfectly why this is: it is that I should do
more harm than good. Anyone looking at me would say (and all the
more so because I am dressed in the fashion of the day, and not in
some peculiar way, or in a nun's habit, for such trifling things affect
many minds), "That person is demented to think that she knows
what it is to have Contact with God," and it would seem a scandal to
them. But the explanation of the mystery is not so simple as this. I
am not demented. I never was so sane, so capable in my life as now.
I never was so perfectly poised as now. But if you say to me,
"Explain what it is that you know, in order that I too may know,"
then I can say to you nothing more than, "Come and know for
yourself, for God awaits you."

To illustrate a mere fraction of the difficulty of passing such a
knowledge from one self to another self, let us take such a case as
that of a man born blind. He sits beneath a tree, on the grass. You
put a blade of grass in his fingers, and also a leaf from the tree, and
you say to him, "This is grass, and this is the leaf of the tree which
shelters you, and both a