y know its
secrets best. For them contemplation and action are not opposites,
but two interdependent forms of a life that is _one_--a life that
rushes out to a passionate communion with the true and beautiful,
only that it may draw from this direct experience of Reality a new
intensity wherewith to handle the world of things; and remake it,
or at least some little bit of it, "nearer to the heart's desire."

Again, the great mystics tell us that the "vision of God in His
own light"--the direct contact of the soul's substance with the
Absolute--to which awful experience you drew as near as the
quality of your spirit would permit in the third degree of
contemplation, is the prelude, not to a further revelation of the
eternal order given to you, but to an utter change, a vivid
life springing up within you, which they sometimes call the
"transforming union" or the "birth of the Son in the soul." By this
they mean that the spark of spiritual stuff, that high special power
or character of human nature, by which you first desired, then
tended to, then achieved contact with Reality, is as it were
fertilised by this profound communion with its origin; becomes
strong and vigorous, invades and transmutes the whole personality,
and makes of it, not a "dreamy mystic" but an active and
impassioned servant of the Eternal Wisdom.

So that when these full-grown, fully vital mystics try to tell us
about the life they have achieved, it is always an intensely active
life that they describe. They say, not that they "dwell in restful
fruition," though the deep and joyous knowledge of this, perhaps
too the perpetual longing for an utter self-loss in it, is always
possessed by them--but that they "go up _and down_ the ladder
of contemplation." They stretch up towards the Point, the unique
Reality to which all the intricate and many-coloured lines of life
flow, and in which they are merged; and rush out towards those
various lives in a passion of active love and service. This double
activity, this swinging between rest and work--this alone, they
say, is truly the life of man; because this alone represents on
human levels something of that inexhaustibly rich yet simple life,
"ever active yet ever at rest," which they find in God. When he
gets to this, then man has indeed actualised his union with
Reality; because then he is a part of the perpetual creative act, the
eternal generation of the Divine thought and love. Therefore
contemplation, ev