rded by the gradual broadening and
deepening of your perceptions, by an initiation into the
movements of a larger life, You have been a knocker, a seeker,
an asker: have beat upon the Cloud of Unknowing "with a sharp
dart of longing love." A perpetual effort of the will has
characterised your inner development. Your contemplation, in
fact, as the specialists would say, has been "active," not
"infused."

But now, having achieved an awareness--obscure and indescribable
indeed, yet actual--of the enfolding presence of Reality,
under those two forms which the theologians call the "immanence"
and the "transcendence" of the Divine, a change is to take
place in the relation between your finite human spirit and
the Infinite Life in which at last it knows itself to dwell. All that
will now come to you--and much perhaps will come--will happen
as it seems without effort on your own part: though really it will
be the direct result of that long stress and discipline which has
gone before, and has made it possible for you to feel the subtle
contact of deeper realities. It will depend also on the steady
continuance--often perhaps through long periods of darkness and
boredom--of that poise to which you have been trained: the
stretching-out of the loving and surrendered will into the dimness
and silence, the continued trustful habitation of the soul in the
atmosphere of the Essential World. You are like a traveller
arrived in a new country. The journey has been a long one; and
the hardships and obstacles involved in it, the effort, the perpetual
conscious pressing forward, have at last come to seem the chief
features of your inner life. Now, with their cessation, you feel
curiously lost; as if the chief object of your existence had been
taken away. No need to push on any further: yet, though there is
no more that you can do of yourself, there is much that may and
must be done to you. The place that you have come to seems
strange and bewildering, for it lies far beyond the horizons of
human thought. There are no familiar landmarks, nothing on
which you can lay hold. You "wander to and fro," as the mystics
say, "in this fathomless ground"; surrounded by silence and
darkness, struggling to breathe this rarefied air. Like those who
go to live in new latitudes, you must become acclimatised. Your
state, then, should now be wisely passive; in order that the great
influences which surround you may take and adjust your spirit,
that the unacc