joy--never was such gladness! My griefs and pains
and woes were wiped away--totally effaced as though they had
never existed!

Oh, the magnificence of such splendid joy! The whole of space
could scarcely now be large enough to hold me! I needed all of it--I
welcomed its immensity as once I was oppressed by it. God and my
Soul, and Love, and Light, and Space!

PART II

At last my little suffering life is sheltered in the known, the felt,
protection of the Ineffable and Invisible Being. The Being
Who, without revealing Himself to me by sight or sound, yet
communicates Himself to me in some divine manner at once
all-sufficing and inexpressible. I ask no questions: I am in no haste of
anxious learning. My heart and my mind and my soul stand still and
drink in the glory of this happiness. All day, often half the night, I
worship Him. I love Him with this new love, so different from
anything known before. The greatest earthly love, by comparison to
it, has become feeble, impure, almost grotesque in its inefficiency--a
tinsel counterfeit of this glistening mystery which must still be
spoken of as love because I know no other name.

I find it difficult, almost impossible, to speak to my fellow-creatures,
because I have only two words, two thoughts in my entire being: my
God, and my love for Him.

I am like a thing that is magnetised, held: I am not able, day or night,
to detach my mind from God.

I wake with His name upon my lips, with His glory in my soul. In all
this there is no virtue on my part; there is no effort; the capacity for
this boundless devotion is a free gift. Coming immediately after my
anguished prayer on the hill, it appears to me to have come solely on
account of that one prayer--the previous prayers, struggles,
endeavours of five-and-twenty years are entirely forgotten. I
comprehend nothing of the mystery, neither as yet do I feel any
desire to comprehend it; but in a world where only love, beauty,
happiness, and repose exist, I walk and talk and live alone with God.

Yet the war was continuing as usual, my husband was in the same
danger, I became ill with influenza, my friends continued to die of
wounds, my relations to be killed one by one; but in all this there
was no pain: the sting, the anguish, had gone out of every single
thing in life.

My consciousness feels to be composed of two extremes: I am a
child of a few years of age, to whom sin, suffering, pain, evil, and
temptation are not