ost centre of the soul,
where God Himself must dwell." And she goes on to say that "the soul, I
mean the spirit of the soul, is made one with God ..."; and this union
may be likened to "two wax candles, the tips of which touch each other
so closely that there is but one light; or again, the wick, the wax,
and the light become one, but the one candle can again be separated from
the other, and the two candles remain distinct; or the wick may be
withdrawn from the wax." But there is another more intimate union, and
this is "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming
one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain-water cannot be
divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot
afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to a room into
which a bright light enters through two windows--though divided when it
enters, the light becomes one and the same." And what difference is
there between this and the internal and mystical silence of Miguel de
Molinos, the third and most perfect degree of which is the silence of
thought? (_Guia Espiritual_, book i., chap. xvii., Sec. 128). Do we not
here very closely approach the view that "nothingness is the way to
attain to that high state of a mind reformed"? (book iii., chap. xx., Sec.
196). And what marvel is it that Amiel in his _Journal Intime_ should
twice have made use of the Spanish word _nada_, nothing, doubtless
because he found none more expressive in any other language? And
nevertheless, if we read our mystical doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we
shall see that the sensitive element is never excluded, the element of
delight--that is to say, the element of personal consciousness. The soul
allows itself to be absorbed in God in order that it may absorb Him, in
order that it may acquire consciousness of its own divinity.

A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed
in God and, as it were, lost in Him, appears either as an annihilation
of self or as a prolonged tedium to our natural way of feeling. And
hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has
more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from
irreverence or perhaps impiety, with reference to the heaven of eternal
glory as a place of eternal boredom. And it is useless to despise
feelings such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous.

It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take note o