ce the world, men,
and me--a something I knew only by being myself an existence. It was
more me than myself; yet it was not me, or I could not have loved it. I
never thought me myself by myself; my very existence was the
consciousness of this absolute existence in and through and around me:
it made my heart burn, and the burning of my heart was my life--and the
burning was the presence of the Absolute. If you can imagine a growing
fruit, all blind and deaf, yet loving the tree it could neither look
upon nor hear, knowing it only through the unbroken arrival of its life
therefrom--that is something like what I felt. I suspect the _form_ of
the feeling was supplied by a shadowy memory of the time before I was
born, while yet my life grew upon the life of my mother.

"By degrees came a change. What seemed the fire in me, burned and burned
until it began to grow light; in which light I began to remember things
I had read and known about Jesus Christ and His Father and my Father.
And with those memories the love grew and grew, till I could hardly bear
the glory of God and His Christ, it made me love so intensely. Then the
light seemed to begin to pass out beyond me somehow, and therewith I
remembered the words of the Lord, 'Let your light so shine before men,'
only I was not letting it shine, for while I loved like that, I could no
more keep it from shining than I could the sun. The next thing was, that
I began to think of one I had loved, then of another and another and
another--then of all together whom ever I had loved, one after another,
then all together. And the light that went out from me was as a nimbus
infolding every one in the speechlessness of my love. But lo! then, the
light staid not there, but, leaving them not, went on beyond them,
reaching and infolding every one of those also, whom, after the manner
of men, I had on earth merely known and not loved. And therewith I knew
that, for all the rest of the creation of God, I needed but the hearing
of the ears or the seeing of the eyes to love each and every one, in his
and her degree; whereupon such a perfection of bliss awoke in me, that
it seemed as if the fire of the divine sacrifice had at length seized
upon my soul, and I was dying of absolute glory--which is love and love
only. I had all things, yea the All. I was full and unutterably,
immeasurably content. Yet still the light went flowing out and out from
me, and love was life and life was light and light wa