er--and all my sorrows fled away in a great joy.

This third conversion produced a fundamental alteration of my
whole outlook and grasp on life. It brought me into direct contact
with God, and was the commencement of a total change of heart and
mind and consciousness; the centre of my consciousness, without
any effort of my own, suddenly moving bodily from a concentration
upon the visible or earthly to a loving and absorbed concentration
upon, and a fixed attention to, the Invisible God--a most
amazing, undreamed-of change, which remained permanent, though
fluctuating through innumerable degrees of intensity before coming
to a state of equilibrium. And now Christ went away from me, so
that I adored Him in God. After this for some weeks I went through
extraordinary spiritual experiences, the like of which had never
previously so much as entered into my heart to imagine; again I will
say nothing here of these. I came to all these experiences with great
innocence and ignorance, never having read any religious or
psychological book, and I think now that it is perhaps easier to have
it so.

Knowing that nothing is done without a purpose, I would question
myself what I could possibly be intended to learn out of these things;
and though I have never yet found a reason for any one given
experience, yet I see this: the whole (which lasted for some
weeks and was gone through at night and always in a state of
semi-wakefulness, though not in a normal wakefulness, for the body
would be stiff and set like a board)--the whole was the most
convincing proof that He could have given me (without destroying
my flesh) of the reality of the life unseen. For how otherwise could
we be made to know of the reality of spiritual things if we were
never _taken into_ them? And having been taken into them, and
they being a thousand times more poignant than any earthly
experience, how could we forget them? Whenever doubts upon
anything presented themselves, I had nothing more to do than to
Remember! Nothing He could have devised to do for me could have
been of greater or more direct assistance to me. These experiences
were to my creature what the centre-board is to the racing yacht.
With these memories I could keep an even keel, and without them I
must have capsized many a time.

By these spiritual experiences He gives us an immense courage, and
personal knowledge of a mysterious and hitherto unknown life of
joys so great and so intense that all