sting-place
of all the world worthy to be named.

For every other love on earth is but a poor, pale counterfeit of love--a
wan Ophelia, wandering with a garland of sad perished flowers to
crown the dust.

* * *

As the loving creature progresses he will find himself ceasing to live
in things, or thoughts of things or of persons, but his whole mind
and heart will be concentrated upon the thought of God alone. Now
Jesus, now the High Christ, now the Father, but never away from
one of the aspects or personalities of God, though his conditions of
nearness will vary. For at times he will be in a condition of great
nearness, at times in a condition of some farness, or, more properly
speaking, of obscurity. He will be in a condition of waiting (this
exceedingly frequent, the most frequent of all); a condition of
amazing happiness; a condition of pain, of desolation at being still
upon the earth instead of with God. He will be in a condition of
giving love to God, or a condition of receiving love, of
remembrance and attention. He will be in a condition of
immeasurable glamour, an extraordinary illumination of every
faculty, not by any act of his own, but poured through him until he is
filled with the elixir of some new form of life, and feels himself
before these experiences never to have lived--he but existed as a part
of Nature. But now, although he is become more united to Nature
than ever before, he also is mysteriously drawn apart from her,
without being in any way presumptuous, he feels to be above her,
not by any merits but by intention of Another. He is become lifted
up into the spirit and essence of Nature, and the heavy and more
obvious parts of her bind him no more. He is in a condition of
freedom, he is frequently in a condition of great splendour, and is
wrapped perpetually round about with that most glorious
mantle--God-consciousness.

These are man's right and proper conditions. These are the lovely
will of God for us. And too many of us have the will to go contrary
to Him. Oh, the tragedy of it! If the whole world of men and women
could be gathered and lifted into this garden of love! Persuaded to
rise from lesser loves into the bosom of His mighty Love!

For the truly loving soul here on earth there are no longer heavens,
nor conditions of heavens, nor grades, nor crowns, nor angels, nor
archangels, nor saints, nor holy spirits; but, going out and up and on,
we reach at last THE ONE, and for marvellous