al life, is content with this increase of sensibility; and,
becoming a "nature-mystic," asks no more.

So you are to begin with that first form of contemplation which
the old mystics sometimes called the "discovery of God in His
creatures." Not with some ecstatic adventure in supersensuous
regions, but with the loving and patient exploration of the world
that lies at your gates; the "ebb and flow and ever-during power"
of which your own existence forms a part. You are to push back
the self's barriers bit by bit, till at last all duration is included in
the widening circles of its intuitive love: till you find in every
manifestation of life--even those which you have petulantly
classified as cruel or obscene--the ardent self-expression of that
Immanent Being whose spark burns deep in your own soul.

The Indian mystics speak perpetually of the visible universe as
the _Lila_ or Sport of God: the Infinite deliberately expressing
Himself in finite form, the musical manifestation of His creative
joy. All gracious and all courteous souls, they think, will gladly
join His play; considering rather the wonder and achievement of
the whole--its vivid movement, its strange and terrible evocations
of beauty from torment, nobility from conflict and death, its
mingled splendour of sacrifice and triumph--than their personal
conquests, disappointments, and fatigues. In the first form of
contemplation you are to realise the movement of this game, in
which you have played so long a languid and involuntary part,
and find your own place in it. It is flowing, growing, changing,
making perpetual unexpected patterns within the evolving
melody of the Divine Thought. In all things it is incomplete,
unstable; and so are you. Your fellow-men, enduring on the
battlefield, living and breeding in the slum, adventurous and
studious, sensuous and pure--more, your great comrades, the
hills, the trees, the rivers, the darting birds, the scuttering insects,
the little soft populations of the grass--all these are playing with
you. They move one to another in delicate responsive measures,
now violent, now gentle, now in conflict, now in peace; yet ever
weaving the pattern of a ritual dance, and obedient to the music
of that invisible Choragus whom Boehme and Plotinus knew.
What is that great wind which blows without, in continuous and
ineffable harmonies? Part of you, practical man. There is but one
music in the world: and to it you contribute perpetually