offer
your spirit a garden--even a garden inhabited by saints and
angels--and pretend that it has been made free of the universe.
You will not have peace until you do away with all banks and
hedges, and exchange the garden for the wilderness that is
unwalled; that wild strange place of silence where "lovers lose
themselves."

Yet you must begin this great adventure humbly; and take, as
Julian of Norwich did, the first stage of your new outward-going
journey along the road that lies nearest at hand. When Julian
looked with the eye of contemplation upon that "little thing"
which revealed to her the oneness of the created universe, her
deep and loving sight perceived in it successively three
properties, which she expressed as well as she might under the
symbols of her own theology: "The first is that God made it; the
second is that God loveth it; the third is that God keepeth it."
Here are three phases in the ever-widening contemplative
apprehension of Reality. Not three opinions, but three facts, for
which she struggles to find words. The first is that each separate
living thing, budding "like an hazel nut" upon the tree of life, and
there destined to mature, age, and die, is the outbirth of another
power, of a creative push: that the World of Becoming in all its
richness and variety is not ultimate, but formed by Something
other than, and utterly transcendent to, itself. This, of course, the
religious mind invariably takes for granted: but we are concerned
with immediate experience rather than faith. To feel and know
those two aspects of Reality which we call "created" and
"uncreated," nature and spirit--to be as sharply aware of them, as
sure of them, as we are of land and sea--is to be made free of the
supersensual world. It is to stand for an instant at the Poet's side,
and see that Poem of which you have deciphered separate phrases
in the earlier form of contemplation. Then you were learning to
read: and found in the words, the lines, the stanzas, an
astonishing meaning and loveliness. But how much greater the
significance of every detail would appear to you, how much more
truly you would possess its life, were you acquainted with the
Poem: not as a mere succession of such lines and stanzas, but as a
non-successional whole.

From this Julian passes to that deeper knowledge of the heart
which comes from a humble and disinterested acceptance of life;
that this Creation, this whole changeful natural order, with all