e everywhere; and then the heart cries out to
him, Every day is like a jewel, every day I see the whole world
decked and garlanded with all the beauty of Thy mind: each tree,
each flower, each bee or bird tremulous with the life and wonder of
Thy creative ingenuity! Each day is a new jewel set upon the
necklace of my thoughts of Thee.

VIII

One of the trials that we have to endure as beginners is a joyless, flat,
ungracious condition; a kind of paralysis of the soul, a dreary torpor.
When we would approach God--pray to Him--He is nowhere to be
found: He has disappeared, and everything to do with finding Him is
become hard work, such hard work that it suddenly seems to us
quite unprofitable: we suddenly remember a number of outside
things which we would far sooner do: we try to pray, but the prayer
goes nowhere-in-particular; it has no enthusiasm, no force behind it:
has prayer then suddenly re-become a duty? This is terrible; what
shall we do--shall we ask God to help us? When we do, we do it in
so halfhearted a manner that our prayer feels to merely float around
our own head like some miserable mist. We feel certain that this
joyless, withered state will endure to the end of life on earth (the
conviction that our unhappy condition is permanent is characteristic
of all severe trials, because if we supposed the condition or
difficulty only momentary it would not produce a sufficient trial,
and consequent effort to overcome it on our part). This trial (though
it may not always be a trial, but an actual blemish of the soul, a
serious lack of unselfish love which must at once be strenuously
corrected) is given for several reasons--we have become, perhaps,
too greedy of _enjoyment_ of prayer: or we have come to take this
joyousness of prayer for granted: or we have come to think we are
uncommonly clever at knowing how to love and to pray; that we
know so well how to do it that we can do it of our own power and
capacity without God's assistance.

Or the trial may be sent not for any of these reasons, but solely in
order to increase the strength and perseverance of our love to God,
and of our Generosity.

This is one trial, and another is that God allows us to become
convinced that He has nothing more to give us, He withdraws His
graciousness from our apprehension; He leaves us as a tiny,
unwanted, meaningless speck, alone in a vast universe. It would be
idle to say that the soul does not suffer from this change; but th