its
apparent collisions, cruelties, and waste, yet springs from an
ardour, an immeasurable love, a perpetual donation, which
generates it, upholds it, drives it; for "_all-thing_ hath the being
by the love of God." Blake's anguished question here receives its
answer: the Mind that conceived the lamb conceived the tiger
too. Everything, says Julian in effect, whether gracious, terrible,
or malignant, is enwrapped in love: and is part of a world
produced, not by mechanical necessity, but by passionate desire.

Therefore nothing can really be mean, nothing despicable;
nothing, however perverted, irredeemable. The blasphemous
other-worldliness of the false mystic who conceives of matter as
an evil thing and flies from its "deceits," is corrected by this
loving sight. Hence, the more beautiful and noble a thing appears
to us, the more we love it--so much the more truly do we see it:
for then we perceive within it the Divine ardour surging up
towards expression, and share that simplicity and purity of vision
in which most saints and some poets see all things "as they are in
God."

Lastly, this love-driven world of duration--this work within
which the Divine Artist passionately and patiently expresses His
infinite dream under finite forms--is held in another, mightier
embrace. It is "kept," says Julian. Paradoxically, the perpetual
changeful energies of love and creation which inspire it are
gathered up and made complete within the unchanging fact of
Being: the Eternal and Absolute, within which the world of
things is set as the tree is set in the supporting earth, the enfolding
air. There, finally, is the rock and refuge of the seeking
consciousness wearied by the ceaseless process of the flux. There
that flux exists in its wholeness, "all at once"; in a manner which
we can never comprehend, but which in hours of withdrawal we
may sometimes taste and feel. It is in man's moments of contact
with this, when he penetrates beyond all images, however lovely,
however significant, to that ineffable awareness which the
mystics call "Naked Contemplation"--since it is stripped of all the
clothing with which reason and imagination drape and disguise
both our devils and our gods--that the hunger and thirst of the
heart is satisfied, and we receive indeed an assurance of ultimate
Reality. This assurance is not the cool conclusion of a successful
argument. It is rather the seizing at last of Something which we
have ever felt near us