arer
"the shadows of the angels' houses" than that which the practical
landlord usually provides.

All these have felt sure that a great part in the drama of creation
has been given to the free spirit of man: that bit by bit, through
and by him, the scattered worlds of love and thought and action
shall be realised again as one. It is for those who have found the
thread on which those worlds are strung, to bring this knowledge
out of the hiddenness; to use it, as the old alchemists declared
that they could use their tincture, to transmute all baser; metals
into gold.

So here is your vocation set out: a vocation so various in its
opportunities, that you can hardly fail to find something to do. It
is your business to actualise within the world of time and space--
perhaps by great endeavours in the field of heroic action, perhaps
only by small ones in field and market, tram and tube, office and
drawing-room, in the perpetual give-and-take of the common
life--that more real life, that holy creative energy, which this
world manifests as a whole but indifferently. You shall work for
mercy, order, beauty, significance: shall mend where you find
things broken, make where you find the need. "Adoro te devote,
latens Deitas," said St. Thomas in his great mystical hymn: and
the practical side of that adoration consists in the bringing of the
Real Presence from its hiddenness, and exhibiting it before the
eyes of other men. Hitherto you have not been very active in this
matter: yet it is the purpose for which you exist, and your
contemplative consciousness, if you educate it, will soon make
this fact clear to you. The teeming life of nature has yielded up to
your loving attention many sacramental images of Reality: seen
in the light of charity, it is far more sacred and significant than
you supposed. What about _your_ life? Is that a theophany too?
"Each oak doth cry I AM," says Vaughan. Do you proclaim by
your existence the grandeur, the beauty, the intensity, the living
wonder of that Eternal Reality within which, at this moment, you
stand? Do your hours of contemplation and of action harmonise?

If they did harmonise--if everybody's did--then, by these
individual adjustments the complete group-consciousness of
humanity would be changed, brought back into conformity with
the Transcendent; and the spiritual world would be actualised
within the temporal order at last. Then, that world of false
imagination, senseless conflicts,