ain, and where does He lead us? Straight
back into the world, the daily life from which we thought we had
escaped! Here truly is a Woe, a Woe worse than any Woe we ever
had before. Now we enter the Course of spiritual temptations, woes,
and endurances, and in the midst of the pots and pans of daily life
Christ teaches us heavenly manners.

II

Since Contemplation is so necessary for Union with God and for the
soul's _enjoyment_ of God--is it a capacity common to all persons?
Yes, though, like all other capacities, in varying degrees; but few
will give themselves up to the difficulties of developing the capacity;
and it is easy to know why, for our "natural" state is that we work
for that which brings the easiest, most immediate, and most
substantially visible reward.

Those who could most easily develop their powers of contemplation
are those to whom Beauty speaks, or those who are delicately
sensitive to some ideal, nameless, elusive, that draws and then
retreats, but in retreating still draws. The poet, the artist, the dreamer
_that harnesses his mind_--all can contemplate.

The Thinker, _thinking straight through,_ the proficient business
man with his powers of concentration, the first-rate organiser, the
scientist, the inventor--all these men are contemplatives who do not
drive to God, but to the world or to ambition. Taking God as their
goal, they could ascend to great heights of happiness; though first
they must give up ("sacrifice") all that is unsavoury in thought and
in living: yet such is the vast, the boundless Attraction of God that
having once (if only for a few moments) retouched this lost
Attraction of His, we afterwards are possessed with no other desire
so powerful as the desire to retouch Him again, and "sacrifice"
becomes no sacrifice.

Truly, having once known God, we find life without Him to be
meaningless and as unbeautiful as a broken stem without its flower:
pitiful, naked, and helpless as the body of a butterfly without the
wings.

III

At this time I read Bergson's _Creative Evolution_--a masterpiece of
thinking by a man who, like most others, is seeking for God. But I
am unable to read the book through because of the pain it causes.
The pain is partly the same pain which I knew (and which I re-enter
again in sympathy with the writer) when I tried in my youth to climb
to God by the intelligence and will of my mind; but there is also a
new pain, wide as an ocean, the pain of Compassio