m. How can we say, then, that it is poverty to be
filled with God! Rather is it rightly expressed as being a heart fixed
in singleness upon God, through drastic simplification of interests:
the which is no poverty, but the wealth of all the Universe.

* * *

Some of us seem open to suggestion, others to the steadier effects of
personal influence. I never came under the personal influence of
another except once, when I came under the influence of the being I
loved most--my brother. At ten he saved my life from drowning, and
at eighteen his influence and total lack of faith in God, coupled with
the searchings and probings of my own intelligence, took me away
from God, in whom I had previously had a comfortable faith. At
seventeen I began to lap up the hardest scientific books as a cat laps
milk. I said to myself, "I must find truth, I must find out what
everything really is"; but I could not reconcile science with Church
teaching. I was not able to adjust the truths of science--which were
demonstrable to both senses and intelligence--with the unprovable
dogmas set forth by the Church as necessary to salvation. I slowly
and surely lost what faith I had, and hung a withered heart upon the
pitiless and nameless bosom of the Cosmos. Inward life became for
me a horrible emptiness without hope. Surrounded with gaieties and
the innumerable social successes of youth, I found that neither
science nor society could satisfy my soul, or that something living
within me which knew a terrible necessity for God. For two long
and dreadful years I fought secretly and desperately to regain this
lost belief, and when at last I succeeded there remained a monstrous
and impenetrable wall between myself and God. But by comparison
with the horrors of past loneliness it was heaven to me to feel Him
there, even behind that wall. (Now that I have found Him by love, I
am able to return to science as to a most exquisite unrolling of the
majesty of His truths and powers and laws, and am brought nearer
and nearer to Him the more I learn of science.) Outside the wall I
remained for more than twenty years, seeking and searching for an
opening in that mighty barrier.

And after more than twenty years I found the Door--and it was Jesus
Christ.

* * *

Lately I have seen the word "contemplation" used as expressing the
heights of attainment in God-consciousness of men, and I find it
inadequate. From the age of seventeen I fell into the habit of
contem