and sham values, into which our
children are now born, would be annihilated. The whole race, not
merely a few of its noblest, most clearsighted spirits, would be
"in union with God"; and men, transfused by His light and heat,
direct and willing agents of His Pure Activity, would achieve that
completeness of life which the mystics dare to call "deification."
This is the substance of that redemption of the world, which
all religions proclaim or demand: the consummation which is
crudely imagined in the Apocalyptic dreams of the prophets and
seers. It is the true incarnation of the Divine Wisdom: and you
must learn to see with Paul the pains and disorders of creation--
your own pains, efforts, and difficulties too--as incidents in the
travail of that royal birth. Patriots have sometimes been asked to
"think imperially." Mystics are asked to think celestially; and
this, not when considering the things usually called spiritual, but
when dealing with the concrete accidents, the evil and sadness,
the cruelty, failure, and degeneration of life.

So, what is being offered to you is not merely a choice amongst
new states of consciousness, new emotional experiences--though
these are indeed involved in it--but, above all else, a larger and
intenser life, a career, a total consecration to the interests of the
Real. This life shall not be abstract and dreamy, made up, as
some imagine, of negations. It shall be violently practical and
affirmative; giving scope for a limitless activity of will, heart, and
mind working within the rhythms of the Divine Idea. It shall cost
much, making perpetual demands on your loyalty, trust, and
self-sacrifice: proving now the need and the worth of that training in
renunciation which was forced on you at the beginning of your
interior life. It shall be both deep and wide, embracing in its span
all those aspects of Reality which the gradual extension of your
contemplative powers has disclosed to you: making "the inner
and outer worlds to be indivisibly One." And because the
emphasis is now for ever shifted from the accidents to the
substance of life, it will matter little where and how this career is
actualised--whether in convent or factory, study or battlefield,
multitude or solitude, sickness or strength. These fluctuations of
circumstance will no longer dominate you; since "it is Love that
payeth for all."

Yet by all this it is not meant that the opening up of the universe,
the vivid consciousne