Sermons and Treatises of Meister Eckhart

such all is aa'cII. Things here in tinui have each tlieir cause. Ask a man why he eats ? ‘ For strength,’ he says. Why he sleeps ? ‘ For tile very same reason.’ And so Avith everything in time. But ask a good man, " hy dost thou lo\^e God ? ’ -He says : ‘ I knoAv not ; for God’s sake.’ ‘ Why dost thou love the truth V — ‘For the truth’s sake.’— ‘ Why dost thou lo\c right?’ — ‘For righteousness’ sake.’ ‘ Why dost thou loA^e good?’ — ‘ For good’s sake.’- ‘ Why dost thou live ? ’ — ‘ I’ faith, I knoAV not ! 1 like living.’ A philosopher says : ‘ He aa Iio has once been touched by truth, by right, by good, though it entailed the pangs of hell, that man could ncA^er turn therefrom, not for an instant.’ The man, whoe’er he be, nioAxd by these three — truth, righteousness and goodness — can no more quit these three than God can quit his Godhood. A philosopher says that goodness has three branches. The first is use, the second is enjoyment and the third is secmlincss. Concerning his AA^ords, ‘ they AA^orsliip the Father.’ Why does he say ‘ the Father ’ ? Seek God alone and thou shalt find with God all that he gives. It is the positiA^e truth, true of necessity, a Avritteii axiom though no less true uiiAvritten, that if God had more

he could not keep it from thee, he would have to sliow it thee, to give it thee, and, as I soinctinu^s say, he gives it to thee as a birth. Philosophers say the soul is double-faeed, her upper face gazes at God all the time and her lower fac’e looks somewhat down, informing the senses ; and the upper face, whieli is the summit of the soul, is in eternity and has nothing to do with time : it kno\vs nothing of time or of body. Kls(‘wherc T have (‘xplaiiu'd how in this li(‘S hid llu* fount as it were of all good, as a shining light that is always shining, a burning brand that is always hairning, which brand is none other than the Jloiy Ghost. Philosophers say that out of the summit of the soul there tlow twin powers. The one is will, the oilier intiHeet, and her ])owers’ jierfeetion lies in the sovran })ower of intellect. TJiis ne\'cr rests. It wants (xod not as Holy Ghost nor 3'et as Son ; it (lees the Son. It wants God not. as (iod. And why ? Heeanse thus he has name ; \vere th(*re a thousand (»ods ye t would it penudrate them all in the desire to get to where he has no name at ail : it wants a nobler, better thing than (iod as having nanux Wiiat Avonld it, tlien ? It do('S not know : it would havc‘ Jiiin Kiithca*. ‘ Lord, show" us the Patiier,’ Pliilij) erics, ‘ and \V(' shall be content.’ It wants him as the quick of kindness ; it wants liini as the miirrow dripping fatness ; it w^ants him as the root, the main of goodness : thus he is simply Father.

Our Lord says : ‘No man know^eih the Father but the Son, nor tlic Son but tlic Father.’ In truth, to know tlie father we must be the Son. I have laid dowm tliese three' maxims wdiich take like three bad gra])es and drink tb(‘reafter. First, if wci arc Son, we must have the Fatlier : none f'an say lie is ii son unless lie has a father, nor father unless he has a son. His father dead, he says, ‘ he w’as my father.’ II is son being deael, he says. ‘ he was my son.’ The son’s life hangs upon tlu‘ father, and the father’s on the son, and thendbre none can say : ‘ 1 am the Son ’ unless he have the Fatlier and he is in truth Son whose every work is wrought for love therein. Secondly, that which most makes man Son is equaliility. lleing sick lie would as soon be sick as sane, as sane as sick. His frit nd dit s, ‘ In God’s name ! ’ He has an eye out, ‘ In God’s name ! Fhirdly, it beseems the Son to bow the head to no one save the Father. Truly, a royal power this, transcending time and w"ithoiit place ! And by the facd of its transcending time it both contains all time and is tlu? w")iolc of time, and the least jot of that which transcends time makes a man rich indeed, for things at the antipoilcs an^ no more distant to this power than those present here. It is of these he says, ‘ the Father seeketh such.’

Look you, God loves us so, God importunes us so, because God cannot work till the soul is shelled and trimmed of creatures, and the plain truth is that of necessity God is bound to cherish us just as though his Godhood were at stake, as in fact it is. God can no more do without us than we can without him, nay, even if we turned from (lod it would be imj^ossible for God to turn his back on us. I vow 1 will not pray to God for gifts nor worship him because of gifts bestowed, but I will entreat him to make me worthy to receive and worship him for being of the essence and of the nature that must give. lie who would spoil God of this would spoil him of Ins veiy life, of his very being. That we may thus in truth be Son, help us the truth of which I speak. Amen.

When a man delights to read or h(‘ar tell about, Ciod, that comes of divine grace and is lordly entertainment for the soul. To entertain God in one's thoughts is sweet(‘r than Jioney, but to be sensible of God is teeming consolation to the nol)le‘ soul, and union with God in love is everlasting joy which we relish here as we arc fitted for it. They arc all too few who are fully ripe for gazing in God’s magic mirror. Precious few sin^eced in living tlie contemplative life at all here upon earth. Many begin, but fail to consummate it. Because they have not rightly lived the life of Martha. As the eagle spurns its young that (cannot gaze at the sun, even so fares it with the spiritual child. lie who would build high must lay firm and strong foundations. The true foundation is the very way and pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ, who liimsclf declared : ‘ I am the way, the truth and the life.’ Dionysius says, ‘ The soul shall follow God into the desert of his Godhead, so far as here the body follows Christ in outward willing poverty.’ — ‘ But that soul is idle.’ To which St Bernard answers : ‘ Waiting upon God is not idleness but work which beats all other work to one unskilled in it.’ In order to find God, we must seek him in his Godhead. Christ says, ' If father and mother or anything else be a hindrance, quit them for good and serve God unhindered.’ The philosopher says, ‘ The soul which is mov^ed by the power of the Prime Cause need seek no counsel from any human wisdom ; he is obeying what transcends wisdom, for lie is niovx*d by the latent primitive truth.’

Though we meditate upon the blessed works of our Lord’s poverty and his humility, yet coveting them not ourselves, the ^ See Preger, Zeitschr. f. hist. Theol., Bd. 36. 1866. (Two versions.) thoughts are useless. And to cov’-et them is useless too, unless wc diligently seek how we may acquire them. We would fain be humble ; but not despised. To be despised and rejected is the heritage of virtue. Wc would be poor too, but without privatioti. And doubtless we are patient, except with hardslups and with disagreeables. And so with all the virtues. The willing poor, imsolaccd by corru[)tiblcs, descend into the valley of humility. They arc pursued by insult and adversity, the best school of self-knoAvledge. And self-knowledge gets Godkn owl edge. My children, ye who suffer insult, if the world reject you, do ye therewith likewise assail yourselves, helping to reject yourselves. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘ The servant is not greater than his lord. If the world hate you, know ye it hated me before it hated you.’ We ought to recompense our Lord for all that he has done. There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honours, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.

Some there be, neither wanting nor looking for honours, yet, chancing to come their way, honours affect them. St Lernard says : ‘ When a soul comes to wanting what few desire : to be nam<*lcss, outcast and disgraced, and makes all welcome equally, then she attains to peace and the true freedom needed for real vision in the mirror of divinity.’ Perfect rest is absolute freedom from motion. Our Lord says, ‘ Continue in my word and the trutli shall make you free.* Freedom of soul consists in this : in finding in hcrs(*lf no sin ; in tolerating in herself no spiritual imperfection. She is more free lacking all hold on what possesses name and it on her. Freest of all when she transcends her selfhood and Hows with all she is into the bottoml(*ss abyss of her primordial mould, into God liimsclf. Our liord Jesus Christ exhorts us to renounce all things that we may be less hindered. St Bernard declares : ‘ All the time thou oceupiest not with God is accounted unto thee for lost.’ And again, ‘ The most subtle temptalion that can beset us is to occupy ourselves too much in outward works.’ Further he says, ‘ The best preparation 1 know for heaven is having no home among externals.’

Our least interior act is higher and nobler than our grandest outward one, and yet our loftiest interior act halts in God’s unveiled presence in the soul. The very best work that wc can do is to prepare for union with the present God and wait for this with fixed intention. St Paul says, Optimum esse unire deo : Best of all is to be one with God. In this union the soul is dead, not only to all outward but also to all inward ghostly acts. God operates unhindered, and the soul bears his godly operation to which she yields obediently enough for God to bring to birth his only Son in her no less than in himself. This is the atonement wherein, in the twinkling of an eye, the soul is made more one with God than by her doing any act, bodily or ghostly. The oftencr this birth happens in the soul the closer grows her union with God. God is born in the empty soul by discovering himself to her in a new guise without guise, without light in divine light. St Augustine says, ‘ The soul being aflame with divine love, God is born in the soul, the Holy Ghost being the enkindler of love.’

God has vouchsafed divine light to the soul that he may blithely work in his own image. Now no creature can do what is not in its power. Hence the soul cannot act above herself, not even with the bridal gift that God has given her in tlie shape of her most exalted faculty. This light, albeit divine, is still created. The creator is one and the light another. So God comes to the soul in love, purposing that love shall raise her to a higher power, to a function superior to her own. But love fails to tell unless she meets or makes her match. As far as God finds his likeness in the soul, so far is God in operation. If her love is boundless, God acts as boundless love. A man might live a thousand years and go on growing all the time in love, just as fire will burn so long as there is wood. The bigger the fire and the stronger the wind, the more fiercely it ^ burns. Now put love for the fire and the Holy Ghost for the I wind : the greater the love and the stronger the inspiration of the I Holy Ghost in grace, the quicker the work of perfection is achieved. Yet not suddenly, but by the gradual growth of the soul. It would not be well for the whole man to be consumed at once.

The soul becomes so one with God that grace confines her ; she is not satisfied with grace, for grace is creaturcly. The soul is so curiously glamoured, she does not realise that she exists : she fancies herself God, so utterly she has escaped from self. But be she never so far gone from self, she goes on being creature. Pouring a drop of water into a vat of wine does not destroy it. Seeing herself the soul sees spirit ; seeing the angels she again sees spirit ; but God is such pure spirit that soul and angel are nigh bodily compared with him. A portrait of the highest seraph limned in black would be a better likeness far than God portrayed as highest seraph : that were a pre-eminent unlikeness. Now in the contemplative state we are consumed by fiery love in the Holy Ghost. Sooner than knowingly commit a sin, venial or mortal, we shall prefer to suffer every imaginable martyrdom. If by one venial sin we were enabled to release from hell souls without number, we would not ransom them. Such love to God must a man have to be familiar with him in contemplation. Moreover, he must have a mind at ease ; and in preparing for it, an undisturbed retired spot is necessary. The body should be rested from bodily labour, not only of the hands but of the tongue as well and all five senses. The soul keeps clear best in the quiet, but in jaded body is often overpowered by inertia. Then by strenuous effort we travail in divine love for intellectual vision till, clearing a way through recollected senses, we rise past our own mind to the wonderful wisdom of God, though this is quite beyond the grasp of any creature. We rise to divine heights. David says : Accedat homo ad cor altum et exaltahitur deus, that is, Man rising to the summit of his mind is exalted God. From this divine eminence we see the lowness and insignificance of creatures. We feel an inkling of the perfection and stability of eternity, for there is neither time nor space, neither before nor after, but evcrytliihg present in one new, fresh-springing noiv where millenniums last no longer than the twinkling of an eye. And we win participation in the manifold delights of tlie heavenly host. So great the joy of Mary Queen in heaven, that having but a thousandth part of it, each member of the heavenly company would taste far more than ever they have earned. There every spirit rejoices in the joy of every other, relishing it each in his degree. Every celestial habitant is, knows and loves in God, in his own self and in every other spirit whether soul or angel. And the distinctive conscious-, ness of one Gpd in three Persons and the Three one God gives such ineffable, amazing satisfaction that all their passionate longing is fulfilled. And just what they are full of they crave unceasingly, and what they crave is all their own in new, fresh-springing joyful ecstasy, theirs to enjoy in all security from everlasting unto everlasting.

Thereafter we press on into the truth, into the simplicity God is himself, not seeking what is his. So we fall into peculiar wonder. In this wonder let us remain, for human wit is powerless to fathom it. Plumbing the deeps of divine wonder but stirs facile doubt. In hoc ajpparuit charitas dei in nobis etc. ‘ In this was manifested the love of God toward us that he sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live with the Son, ’ that is, 1 See also Wackeraagel, No. Ixv, p. 172. ‘in and through the Son.’ Those that live not through the Son, verily they err. If a mighty king had a beautiful daughter and gave her to a poor man’s son, every member of his family would rise in rank and become ennobled. Thus one learned doctor says : ‘ By God becoming man the whole human race has been ennobled and exalted ; wherefore it behoves us to rejoice greatly that Christ our brother has with peculiar power ascended up above the choir of angels and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.’ This is well said, though I set but little store by it. What profit to me that my brother is rich if I am poor, or wise and I a fool ?

I say something more and more significant : God not only became man, he assumed human nature. Doctors agree that all men are of equal rank by nature. But I make bold to say that every good thing possessed by the saints and by Mary, God’s mother, and Christ in his human nature, is also mine in this same nature. Haply thou wilt ask me : ‘ If already I possess in this nature all that Christ does in his humanity, how come we to set Christ so high and honour him as our Lord and God ? ’ — Because he was a messenger from God to us, bringing us our happiness. The happiness he brought us was our own. When the Father begets his Son in the innermost ground, what moves there has this nature. This same nature is one and indivisible. Anything distinct in it or connected with it is not this one. Another thing I say, still harder. To subsist immediately in this pure nature a man must be so wholly dead to person that he wills as well to one across the seas whom his eyes have never seen as to his own present and familiar friend. While thou still wishest better to thine own person than to that man whom thou hast never seen thou art beside the mark, nor hast thou even for an instant seen into this simple ground. Haply in some far-fetched symbol thou hast beheld the truth as in an image, but it was not the best. — Secondly, thou must be pure in heart ; and only that heart is pure which has exterminated creaturehood. And thirdly, thou must be free from not.

It is a question, what burns in hell ? Doctors reply with one accord : ‘ self-will.’ But I maintain : not burns in hell. A simile 1 Suppose I take a burning coal and put it on my hand ; then if I say the coal is burning me, I do it great injustice. To define precisely what it is that bums me : not docs ; because the coal has in it something my hand has not. Observe, it is this very not that bums me. Did my hand contain what the coal is and can afford, it would possess the fire-nature altogether. In which case all the fire that ever burned might be taken and heaped upon my hand without its burning me. Likewise, I aver that because God and those who are in sight of God, have in them something pertaining to real happiness which those who are apart from God have not, therefore this not alone torments the souls in hell more than the personal will or any fire soever. In sooth I hold : as far as not inheres in thee, so far thou art imperfect. To be perfect, then, thou must be free from not.

Further, my text says : ‘ God sent his only-begotten Son into the world,’ by which ye are to understand not the external world : it must be taken of the inner world. As surely as the Father by his simple nature begets the Son innately, so surely he begets him in the innermost recesses of the mind, which is the inner world. Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground God’s ground. Here I live in my own as God lives in his own. To one who even for an instant has seen into this ground, a thousand ducats of red beaten gold are worth no more than a false farthing. Out of this innermost ground thy works should be wrought without why. Indeed, I hold that as long as thou doest thy works because of the kingdom of heaven, or God, or thine own eternal happiness, from without (that is to say), all is not well with thee. It may be tolerable but it is not the best. He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth, than by the fireside or in the stall : in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle his head in a cloak and hide him under the table. For he who seeks God under settled forms lays hold of the form while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no speeial guise lays hold of him as he is in himself, and such an one ‘ lives with the Son ’ and is the life itself. We might question life for a thousand years : ‘ Why dost thou live ! * It would only say, if it replied at all, ‘ I live because I live.’ For life lives in a ground of its own, wells up out of its own. It lives without a cause for it lives itself. And if anyone asked a proper man, one who works his own ground, ‘ Why dost thou work ? ’ he too would say, if he told the truth : ‘ I work because I work.’

Where creature stops, there God begins. All God wants of thee is for thee to go out of thyself in respect of thy creatureliness and let God be God in thee. The smallest of creaturely images that ever takes shape in thee is as big as God. — ‘ How so ? ’ — It shuts out the whole of God. As soon as this image appears God disappears with all his Godhood. As this image fades out God comes in. [No temporal image is so godly but thrice harms the soul. First, it vexes spirituality ; next, it tarnishes her purity ; and thirdly, it disturbs detachment. — ‘ What does God do to my mind ? ’ — Transcend thyself and repress creatures : God does that to thy mind.] God longs as urgently for thee to go out of thyself in respect of thy creaturely nature as though his whole felicity depended on it. Why, man, what is the harm of letting God be God in thee ? Go clean out of thyself for God’s sake, and God will go clean out of his for thy sake. Both being gone out, what remains is simply the one. In this one the Father gives birth to his Son, in his innermost source. Thence blossoms forth the Holy Ghost and thence originates in God the will belonging to the soul. The while this will remains unmoved by creatures and by creaturehood, the will is free. Christ says : ‘ None goes to heaven but he who came from heaven.’ Things are all made from nothing ; hence their true source is nothing. This noble Avill, as far as it inclines to creatures, with them elapses into nothing.

The question is, Docs the will lapse so far that it is never able to return ? Doctors reply with one accord that it docs not return so far as it has lapsed with time. But I maintain that if this will turns back, even for an instant, from its oAvri self and things created and rallies to its source, there in its own free origin the will is free and in this instant time lost is all recovered. People often say to me : ‘ Pray for me.’ And I think to myself : Why ever do ye go out ? Why not stop at home and mine your own treasure ? For indeed the whole truth is native in you. May we be apt to stay thus in ourselves and to possess the entire truth immediately, impartibly, in real happiness. So help us God ! Amen.

Quasi vas auri soliduni ornatuin omni lapide pretioso {EccL SO^q), My quotation will apply to St Augustine or to any virtuous soul, such being likened to ‘ a golden vessel, massive and lirm, adorned with every precious stone.’ Because of the perfection of the saints we have no likeness to express them, and we therefore symbolise them by the trees, the sun, or moon. So here St Augustine is compared with a chalice of gold, solid and firm, all set with precious stones. Indeed I he same thing may be said of any saintly virtuous soul who, leaving all things here, enjoys them yonder where they are eternal. Whoso renounces things in their contingent sense possesses them as absolute and eternal. Every cup has two things : it receives and holds. The spiritual vessel differs from the physical. The wine is in the cup, not the cup in the wine, though the wine is not in the cup as it is in the body ; if it were in the cup as it is in the body we should not be able to drink it. It is different with the spiritual vessel. Every- thing received in this is in the eup and the cup in it and is the cup itself. All this ghostly cup receives is its own nature. It is God’s nature to give himself to every virtuous soul, and it is the soul’s nature to receive God, and this we say referring to the soul in her loftiest capacity. There the soul bears the image of God and is godlike. No image can be without likeness, but likeness can be without image. Two eggs may be both alike white, but one is not the image of the other : for one to be the image of the other it must proceed out of its nature and be born of it and be like it.

An image has two properties. First, it rccciv es its being from the thing whose image it is, immediately and above will, for it is a natural product, sprouting out of its nature as a branch does out of a tree. Any face thrown on a mirror is, willy-nilly, imaged therein. But its nature does not appear in its looking-glass image : only the mouth, nose and eyes, just the features, are seen in the mirror. God reserves it to himself to display in his reflections, at once his nature, all In^ is and all he can, and tliis above his will. His image is prior to his will, will following the image, for out of his nature there leaps first his image, focussing into itself the whole promise of his nature and liis essence, all his nature pouring out into his image the wliih' it abides intact within itself. Now the masters locate tliis iiiiage not in flir Holy Ghost but in the middle Person, for the Son, being the earliest issue of his nature, is therefore called his Father’s express image, and not the Holy Ghost ; he is simply the flowering of the Father and the Son, and has one nature with them both. Will is not a mean between the nature and the image, nor, for that matter, can knowledge or perception, nay, nor wisdom, come betw’^een, for this image of God is the immediate product of his fecund nature. If there is means of wisdom here it is the image itself. Thus the Son in the Godhead is called the Wisdom of the Father.

Know, this impartible image of God which is stamped in the soul is sealed direct in her innermost nature ; this most fundamental, most noble part of her nature, is really what takes this soul-pattern, and that not by means cither of will or of wisdom. As I remarked just now, if wisdom comes in here at all it is (as) the pattern itself. God exists in this image without any means and the image subsists without means in God. But (iod is much more noble in the image than the image is in God. The image receives God not as being the creator ; it conceives him in the guise of understanding, the summit of her nature actually taking on his form. This is the innate divine image which God has stamped in every soul by nature. I durst not give more to this image ; to give it more would make it God himself, which it is not, or God would not be God. The second characteristic of an image we note in its likeness to its object. And here observe especially two things. First : an image is not itself, neither is it its own. So an image received into the eye is not the eye itself nor has it any real existence in the eye but is merely suspended from and tethered to the thing it is the image of, whereto it entirely belongs and wherefrom it gets its being and is being that same being. Note well my definition of an image. There are four points to bear in mind, and haply others will occur to you. An image is not itself, neither is it its own : it is solely that thing’s whose reflection it is, and it is due to this alone that it exists at all. Things apart from the thing whose image it is, it is not and does not belong to. The image takes its being direct from the thing whose image it is, having one nature therewith and being the very same being. This is not a subject for discussion in the schools, though one may well propound it from the professorial chair.

Ye are always asking how ye ought to live. Lay then to heart this answer: Just as the image is here said to do, even so it behoves thee to live. Be his and belonging to him, not thine own and belonging to thyself nor withal to anyone. Whoever has a well-beloved friend holds his belongings dear and anything against his friend he will object to. Take, for example, the dog, an irrational beast. So faithful is he to his master that he resents the things his master hates, while to his master’s friends he is most friendly. No count takes he of poverty or wealth ; were some blind beggar his master’s bosom friend, he would be more affectionate to him than to the king or emperor who was his master’s enemy. I trow if it were possible the dog should be half faithless to his master, its other half were bound to hate itself. But then some folks complain of having no interior life, no devotion, no sweetness nor any suchlike godly consolation. Marry, these folk are all unrighteous still, and though they suffer it is not the best. Verily I say, as long as any image forms in thee which is not the eternal Word nor any shadowing forth of the eternal Word, be it never so good, in sooth it is wrong. That man alone is righteous who, having naughted all created things, stands facing straight along the unswerving line into the eternal Word, where, in the right, he is idealised and transformed. That man is gotten where the Son is gotten and is the Son himself. .

According to the scriptures, ‘No man knoweth the Father but the Son,’ and hence, if ye desire to know God, ye have to be not merely like the Son, ye have to be the very Son himself. Some people think to see God with their eyes as they would see a cow, and they expect to love him as they would love a cow. This thou lovest for its milk and for its cheese : for its profit to thyself. Even so do they who love God with an eye to outward riches or interior consolation, not rightly loving God but their own i)ersonal advantage. I trow that any object thou shalt set before thy mind, except God in himself, how good soever it may be, is nothing but a barrier to the absolute truth. As I said just now that St Augustine is compared to a golden cup, closed on the underside and open to the sky, even so it behoves thee to be : if thou wouldst stand with St Augustine and in the communion of saints, then close thy heart to everything created and be open to God as he is in himself. Men are compared with the higher faculties because they always go bareheaded, and women with the lower because the head is always veiled. The superior powers transcend time and space, springing straight out of the essence of the soul, and they resemble men in always going uncovered. Accordingly, their working is eternal. The philosopher says that all the powers of the soul, inasmuch as time and space affect them, have lost their virgin purity and can never be so thoroughly abstracted nor so finely sifted as to pass into the higher faculties. Albeit they arc stamped with the same image.

Do thou be ‘ firm and steady,’ the same, that is to say, in weal and woe, in fortune and misfortune ; and ‘ set with all the precious stones,’ a treasury, to wit, of all the virtues which come naturally pouring out of thee. Traverse all the virtues and, transcending them, tap virtue only at its source, where it is one with the divine nature. And in so far as thou art more atoned than are the angels with God’s nature, to that extent they must receive through thee. May we be one, So help us God. Amen.

No man can tell of (iod exactly what he is. According to St Dionysius, God is not anything we can say or think. St Augustine cries : ‘ 1 who have ever been in God and ever more shall be, would sooner I had never been and never more should be than that we found a single word that we could say of God. Were we compelled to si)cak of God, in that case I should say : Verily, in no sense is God comprehensible nor yet attainable. God is what thought cannot better.’ Nay, I declare God beggars human thought ; he transcends all human conception. No man knows what God is. Aught that a man could or would think of God, God is not aj^ll. It is the nature of the soul not to be satisfied except ' Soe Spamer’s Texte, B. 1. with God. But all that heart can desire is small, is insignificant compared with God. Yet man’s thought may be never so rich or so rare but his desire outstrips it. So he transcends man’s desire as well as transcending human thought. St Dionysius says, God i§^ naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught. St Bernard says, I know not what ; God is ; but what I know not that he is that same is he. A heathen ^philosopher maintains that what we know of the First Cause is rather what we are ourselves than what the First Cause is. For that passes understanding. And in this strain the heathen doctor argues in his book, IVie Light of Lights, that God is super-essential, super-rational, super-intelligible, i,e. beyond the natural understanding. I speak not of gracious understanding. By grace man may be carried to the length of understanding as St Paul understood who was caught up into the third heaven and saw unspeakable things. He saw, but was not able to express them. For what a man knows he knows in its cause or in its mode or in its effect. But in these respects God remains unknown, for he is the first. Further, he is modeless, i.e. undetermined. And he is without effect, tliat is, in his mysterious stillness. Here he abides apart from the names that are given him. Moses asked his name. God answered. He- who- is hath sent thee. Otherwise he could not tell it. God as simply being, in that sense he could never give himself to be known to creatures. Not that he could not do it, but creature could not understand it. — I have often laid it down that God’s lordship does not lie merely in his lordship over creature ; his lordship consists in his power to create a thousand W'orlds and dominate them all in his abstract essence. Therein lies his lordship. Dionysius and Gregory both teach that the divine being is not comprehensible in any sense : not to any wit nor any understanding, pot even to angelic understanding. Its simplicity and triplicity is a thing not to be grasped by the human mind even at its best, nor by the angelic mind even at its clearest. It was said by a philosopher that w’^hoso knows of God that he is unknown, that man knows God. For it is the height of gnosis and perception to know and understand in agnosia and a-perception. To know him really is to know him as unknowable. As the master puts it : If I must speak of God, then I will say, God is something which is in no sense to be reached or grasped ; and I know nothing else about him. According to St Augustine, what we say about God is not true ; what we say that God is he is not ; what we say he is not that he is rather than what we say that he is. Nothing we can say of God is true. God’s worth and God’s perfection cannot be put into words. When I say inan, I have in my mind human nature. When I say grey^ I have in my mind

the greyness of grey. When I say Gody I have in my mind neither God’s majesty nor his perfection. Dionysius insists that the more we can abstract from God the better we shall sec him. God is such that we apprehend him better by negation than by affirmation. Hence the dictum of one master that to argue about God from likeness is to argue falsely about him, but to argue by denials is to argue about him correctly. Dionysius says, writing about God, He is super-essential, lie is super-luminous ; he attributes to him neither this nor that. For whatever he conceives, God far transcends it. There is no knowing him by likeness. Rather by attributing unlikeness may we make some approach to under- ; standing him. Take an illustration. Supposing I describe a ship \ to someone who has never seen one, then on looking at a stone he will plainly see that it is not a ship. And the plainer he sees that it is not ship-like, the more he will know about a ship. It is the j same with (iod. The more we can impute to him not-likeness, > the nearer do we get to understanding him. Holy Scripture yields j us merely privatives. That we should credit God with matter, | form and work is due to our gross senses. We fail to find God one ' because we try to come at him by likeness. Dionysius cries,

‘ Friend Timothy, if thou wouldst catch the spirit of truth pursue it not with the human senses. It is so swift, it comes rushing.’ God is to be sought in opposites ; in unknowing knowing shall we know God ; in forgetfulness of ourselves and all things even to the naked essence of the Godhead. Dionysius was exhorting one of his disciples. ‘ Friend,’ quoth he, ‘ cease from all activity and empty thyself of self that thou mayst commune with the Sovran Good, God namely.’ Pray God wc may seek him so that wc shall find him nevermore to lose him. Amen.

Beati qui esuriunt et sitiunt justitiaiii (Matt. 5g). Jesus went up a mountain to a valley, into a field, and power went out of him preaching to the multitude : ‘ Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.’ Methinks this text is apt to my discourse. Blessed are they that hunger for righteousness and endure work and poverty here, for this is but a moment and will surely pass. They are blessed though not most blessed. Blessed are they that hunger not to be deprived of God, albeit the wonder is that man can be without him without whom he cannot be. St Augustine says it is amazing that anyone should live apart from him apart from whom he cannot live at all. They are blessed and yet not most blessed. More blessed those who so hunger that they cannot live without God ; that is a fiery affection which transforms their nature. The while a man yet finds in his desire or in his hope or his affection anything impermanent, he is not most blessed. He is blessed but not most blessed. Blessed, supremely blessed, are they who arc installed in the eternal now, transcending time and place and form and matter, unmoved by weal or woe or wealth or want, for in so far as things arc motionless they are like eternity.

[The heaven adjoining the eternal now, wherein the angels are, is motionless, immoveable. But the heaven next to that which touches the eternal now, wherein the angels are, and betwixt (that and) the heaven where the sun is, is set in motion by angelic force, revolving once in every hundred years. The heaven the sun is in, moved by angelic force, goes round once a year. The heaven the moon is in, again, is driven by angelic force and goes round once a month. The nearer the eternal now the more immoveable they are, and the further off and more unlike to the eternal now the easier to move. The heaven of the sun and moon and stars is moved by the impulse of their angel, so that they arc spinning in this temporal now ; and the eternal now imparts their motion, that being so energetic that from the motion the eternal now imparts, all things derive their life and being. Now the lowest powers of the soul arc nobler than the highest part of heaven, where it adjoins the angels and the eternal now. Moreover, all things get their life and being from the motion there imparted by the eternal now ; and if that is so noble, then what would ye expect where the soul in her superior powers contacts the ground of God ? How exalted, think ye, that must be ? — Follow then after this now, and reach this now and possess this eternal now. May we stand next the eternal now and so be in possession of it. So help us O divine power.]

[One master says : Grace springs from the heart of the Father and flows into his Son and in the oneness of them twain it proceeds from the Wisdom of the Son into the Gift of the Holy Ghost and in the Holy Ghost is sent into the soul. Grace is the face of God which is clearly stamped in the soul without any means by the Spirit of God, giving the soul the form of God. St Dionysius says : The angels are the divine mind. Moreover St Paul declares concerning those who live the angelic life here in the flesh, that into them there flows the mind of God as it does into the angels. He also says the intellectual light, God namely, has given likeness to the rational soul. Quoth St Paul : He who cleaves unto God with his whole being becomes one spirit with (iod. So help us God. Amen.]

In 'principio erat verbum {Joh> Ij). Theologians talk of the eternal Word. God never spoke but one word, and that is still unspoken. The explanation is this. The eternal Word is the logos of the Father which is his only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ. In him he pronounces all creatures without beginning and without end. This accounts for the Word remaining unborn, for it never came out of the Father. This Word is to be known in fourfold guise. First, on the altar in the priest’s hands. There it is ours to know and love the eternal Word as we, in his eternal Word, appear to the heavenly Father. Secondly, we know the eternal Word as expounded by doctors from the chair. We receive it in their person ; like water flowing in a channel, so does the eternal Word flow through its teachers. We should pay no heed to any shortcomings in the doctor : we must fix our gaze on the eternal Word in him, as it comes pouring eternally out of the ground of itself. Thirdly, we can recognise the eternal Word in our Lord’s friends who, having followed this eternal Word, have gotten proof of it in life eternal, and also those that follow it in time, such, namely, as arc quick in our Lord Jesus Christ. Fourthly, we have the eternal Word as spoken in the virgin soul by God himself ; wordlessly, to wit, since the soul is not able to express him.

I would have you know that the eternal Word is being born within the soul, its very self, no less, unceasingly. I tell you, the soul knows the eternal Word better than all the doctors can expound it. What we can express is all too little, so for the nonce she is bearing the eternal Word in mind. According to the masters we ought by rights to go to school where the Holy Ghost is teacher ; and know, where he is teacher and is bound to be, there he finds students properly equipped to profit by his lofty teaching which issues from out the Father’s heart. So the soul has, if she will, the Father and the Son and Holy Ghost : she goes flowing into the one where naked in naked is revealed to her. Our masters say that no one can attain to this so long as he retains of nether things as much as a needle-point can carry. Into the naked Godhead none may get except he be as naked as he was when he was spilt from God. The masters say, giving us wise counsel, that leaving God his glory we ought to get all things direct from him and not from creatures. We shall leave God his glory by leaving him to work just how he will and when he will, we staying idle and free. For

we must see that God does all for the best. And so I trow it lies with us, so far as it is in us, to help God to preserve his glory. A master says. Little recks the king of those of his retainers who perform the drudgery. lie notices the ones about his privy chambers and gratifies their every want. God does the same with his chosen friends, the intimates of his mysterious privacy : he never turns a deaf ear to their prayer. Withal the masters do affirm that numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom. Desiring this supremely it rests with us to compass it by practice and by strength of will. Amen.

Scio homwem in Christo ante annos quatuordecim etc. (2 Cor. St Paul declares : ‘ I know a man who fourteen years ago was caught up into the third heaven ; whether in the body or no I cannot tell : God knoweth.’ Now granting Paul was there at any time, then either body and soul both turned to spirit or else his soul took wing out of his body. It is certain that his soul left not his body, for she was giving life unto his body; she must then have seen God in her and herself in him. The soul has three powers : mind, will and rage. These three powers are in league with deity. Will cleaving unto God can do all things. God seized of his divinity bestows upon her power and fecundity. Mind cleaving to the Son knows with the Son ; it knows with the Son when it is void of knowledge. The third power is the power of attack, which is connected with the Holy Ghost. This power is ever making for the source whence it ) proceeded forth and the Holy Ghost is its initiator into the eternal nature : it floods the secret chamber of the soul, and lo ! she loses time and place in the eternal, in time transcending time. But for the soul this is not enough : had she enough she would have time in lieu of her eternity. Let us not flag. Not ours the blame if, being ready and atoned in will, God hides himself so that we cannot do all things with him although he plays his part just as the sun gives out its light and fire gives out its heat. Woodapples cannot check the letting of their gall, but God contrives from time to time to reach out to the longing soul if he is very near to her. So let her, never doubting, with hearty longing, hail God frequently : ‘ O Friend of me, how long am I to wait for thee ? ’

He says, to Christ w^as given a new name : one by the angel, another by St Paul, a third by his heavenly Father. The angel gave him the name Jesus Christ. Joseph and Mary called him by this name which signifies Weal of the World. The name is given to the wounded soul. Alas, we are too frail ! We should be well of our infirmities being raised up and gotten in ; we should be raised if we were destitute and unattached. For tlie exalted spark wherein we see the light divine, that never parts from God nor is there anything between. What matter then if good and ill and pain betide, they do but touch the lower faculties. St Paul gave him three names and called him the rclieetion of the Father. He says, the wounded soul is given the mystic heavenly bread. Whence comes her wound ? From longing. What is longing? -It is love. What is nobler than longing? What wc pray God for humbly and with longing he durst not refuse : desire ablush with modesty he leads into the triple chamber of the Holy Trinity. Paul called him also the fecundity of the Father and the image in the Father, working with the Father to brijig forth his Person. Verily I say, the soul will bring forth Person if God laughs into her and she laughs back to him. To speak in parable, the Father laughs into the Son and the Son laughs back to tlic Father ; and this laughter breeds liking, and liking breeds joy, and joy begets love, and love begets Person, and Person begets the Holy Ghost. In this wise docs he travail with his Father.

The third name he gave was. The Majesty of the Substance of God. Majesty is the essence of his divine substance, this substance being the elemental matter of the three Persons. The soul is called majesty when she gives u]) mode : then she knows the Father and paternity, the Son and filiation, and the Persons of them twain she comprehends in unity. The Father gave him five names, ineffable. God keep us every whit in him. So help us God. Amen.

Surrexit autem S aulas de terra apertisque occults nihil videbat {Act, 93). This statement which I quote in Latin is made in St Luke’s narrative about St Paul. It records that ‘ Paul rose from the ground with open eyes and seeing nothing.’ The words are open to four inter|>retations. One is, that wdien he rose up from the ground he was gazing wide-eyed at naught, that naught being God, for the vision of God he would describe as the naught. Another explanation is that when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third, he saw naught but God in all things. I’hc fourth, that in the divine vision he beheld all things as a naught. He previously tells how light came suddenly from heaven and felled him to the ground. Mark you, he says that the light came from heaven. According to our doctors, though heaven is fraught with light it does not shine. The sun is full of light and shines withal. Our doctors teach that fire docs not give any light in the simple, natural perfection of its highest state. Its nature is too pure for eye in any wise to see. So subtle is it, so unlike the eye, that were it here below within our view it could not stimulate our eyes to sight. And yet, forsooth, we see it is absorbed by different things, such as a lump of coal, a piece of wood.

By the light of heaven we see the light that is God whereto no mind of man is able to attain. As St Paul hath it : ‘ God dwells in a light that no man can approach unto.’ He says, ‘ God is light inaccessible.’ There is no admittance to God. No man still on the ascent, still on the increase in grace and in light, has ever yet got into God. God is no crescent light : we get to him by growing. In the growing procicss God is unseen. When God is seen it is in the light that is God himself. A master says, In God there is no more nor less nor this nor that. Whiles we are on the way we arc not there. He says, ‘ A light from heaven shone round about him.’ Implying the capture of his entire soul. A master says that in this light all the soul-powers are exalted and raised to a higher power, the outward senses we see and hear with as well as the inner senses we call thoughts : the reach of these and their profundity are most amazing. I can think as easily about things overseas as close at hand. Above thought comes the intellect, as seeker. She goes about looking, casting her net here and there, gaining and losing. Above intellect the seeker there is another intellect which does not seek but rests in its pure and simple essence in the realm of light. And I say it is in this light that all the soul -powers are exalted. Senses rise to thoughts. How high, how fathomless these are, that no one knows except God and the soul.

Our theologians teach, and it is a knotty question, that angels know nothing about thoughts unless the thoughts take wing and rise up into intellect — intellect the seeker ; and this intellect, the seeker, soars up into the intellect which does not seek, which is the pure light in itself. This light embraces all the powers of the soul. Accordingly he says, ‘ The heavenly light encircled him.’ One master lays it down that anything which has an emanation is exempt from these lower things. God emanates into all creatures without being affected by any. He does not need them. God energises nature and her first work is the heart. Wherefore some doctors would pretend the soul is altogether in the heart and flows thereout as life into the other members. Not so. The soul is in each member, whole. True, her chief work is in the heart.. The heart being in the middle gets protection on all sides, just as heaven is protected from outside influence and intrusion. It contains all things. It moves all things and itself remains unmoved. Not even fire, exalted though it be in its most high estate, can lick the heavens. ‘ In the encircling light he fell to earth, and his eyes being unsealed he, open-eyed, beheld all things as naught.’ And beholding all things as naught he was beholding God. Mark here what the soul says in the Book of Love : ‘ By night in my bed I sought him my soul loveth : I sought him and I found him not.’ She sought him in her bed : meaning to convey that anyone cleaving to aught below God has too narrow a lie. God’s entire creation is all too confined. Quoth she, ‘ I sought him all night through.’ There is no night without the light : only, it is veiled. The sun is shining in the night albeit screened from view. By day it shines, eclipsing all the other lights. So does the light of God ; it blinds and puts out any light. Our creaturely expectations, all these are night. What I mean to say is, that nothing we find in a creature is more than a shadow and dark. Even the highest angel’s light, exalted though it be, illumines not the soul. All but the first light is darkness, is night. By it she cannot find God. ‘ I rose and sought him all about, I scoured the broadways and the alleys. The watchmen (angels) found me, and I questioned them, “ Saw ye not him whom my soul loveth ? ” ’ But they answered not ; peradventure they could not apprehend him. ‘ It was but a little that I passed and I found him my soul loveth.’ The little, the trifle, that she missed him by has often been the burden of my teaching. He to whom mortal things are not all trivial and as naught withal, that man shall not find God.

‘ Having passed by a little,’ she says, ‘ I found him whom I sought.’ When God pours into and informs the soul and thou takes t him as a light or a state or a boon, whatsoever thou knowest about him, that God is not. We have to transcend the little, discard the adventitious and perceive God one. She says, ‘ When I had passed by a little I found him my soul loveth.’ We are very fond of saying, ‘ him my soul loveth.’ But he is far away above the soul, nor does she name her love. There are five reasons why she names him not. One is that God is nameless. Any name she gave him would have to be well chosen. God is beyond all name, none can express him. A second reason is that on swooning away into God for love, the soul is conscious of nothing but love. She fondly imagines that everyone knows him like that. She is amazed that any wight should find him aught but love alone. Thirdly, she has no time to name him. Love does not leave her any time to use another word. Fourthly, perchance she weens he has no other name than love. In love she pronounces all names. Quoth she, ‘ I rose up, I went through the broad streets and the alleys. And when I had passed a little I found him rny soul loveth.’

‘ Paul rose from the ground wide-eyed, beholding nothing.’ I cannot see what is one. He saw nothing, to wit, God. God is naught and God is one. What aught is is naught as well. What God is is he altogether. As Dionysius says about the light : speaking of God he says. He is supernatural, supervital, superluminous ; he will allow him neither this nor that, but makes him out to be I know not what that far transcends them. Aught seen, aught that may come within thy ken, that God is not ; for why, God is not this nor that. AVhocver says that God is here or there, credit him not. The light which God is shines in darkness. God is the true light : to sec it one has to be blind and strip God naked of things. A master says. To argue about God from any sort of likeness is to argue falsely about him. But to argue about God from naught is to argue soundly withal. \Vhen the soul is reduced to one and is gotten therein by discarding herself altogether, there she finds God, as it were, in a naught. It appeared to one soul as in a dream (it was a waking dream), to be big with naught like a woman with child, and in this naught God was born, the fruits of the naught. God was born in the naught. Therefore he says, ‘ He arose from the earth wide-eyed, gazing at naught.’ He had a vision of God where there are no creatures. He beheld all creatures as naught for he had the whole essence of creatures in him. He is the all -containing essence.

Another thing he means by saying, ‘ he saw naught.’ According to our masters, any perception of externals entails some inroad by them, an impression at the least. To get some idea of a thing, a stone, for instance, I do (not) take into my mind the grossest part of it ; that I leave outside. As it exists in the ground of my soul where it is at its noblest and best, it is merely a type (or idea). Things perceived by my soul from without contain an outside element : my ])creeplion of creature in God contains nothing but God alone, for in God there is nothing but God. When I sec all creatures T see not. He saw God where creatures are not. In the third place, why he saw naught. Naught was God. A master says. Creatures in God are as naught for he has in him the whole essence of creatures. He is the being that contains all beings. The master says. Nothing inferior to God, however nigh it might be to him, but has some alien taint. The master says an angel knows himself and God without means. Into other things he knows there comes an outside element, some interference still,

however slights If we are to know God it must be without means, nothing foreign can come in between. When we do see God in his light it happens in private, safe from the slightest intrusion of creaturely things. Then we have immediate knowledge of eternal life. ‘ Seeing nothing, he saw God.’ The light which is God is flowing and darkening every light. Concerning it Job says, ‘ He coiU' manded the sun not to shine and sealeih up the stars as it were with a seal.’ Enveloped in this light he could see naught beside ; his whole soul was distraught, intent upon the light that is God to the exclusion of all else ; and this is a lesson to us, for what time we are busy with God we mind little what goes on without. Fourthly, he saw naught since the light which is God is unmingled, free from admixture. It shows it ^vas the true light he beheld for there was nothing there. By light he simply means that he saw nothing with his open eyes. In that he saw not, he saw the divine naught. St Augustine says. When he saw nothing, he saw God. According to St Paul, ‘ Whoso only seeth being blind, he seeth God.’ As St Augustine hath it, ‘ God is the true light, preserver of the soul, more nigh to her than she is to herself, and by the same token, when the soul turns her hac^k on things becoming, then God must needs shine into her. This soul knows neither love nor care, she is unmindful of th(*m. The soul that fares not forth to outside things comes home to stay in her impartible pure light. She does not love nor does she fear nor care withal. Knowledge is the basis, the foundation of all being. Love has no hold except in knowledge. When the soul is blind and can see naught beside, then she sees God, it is inevitable. A master says, the eye at its clearest, without any colour, sees every colour ; not just as a colourless thing in itself, but in place in the body it has to be void of all colour for us to see colours. In colourless things all colours arc seen, aye, though it be down in one’s feet. God is something all-embracing. For God to be seen by the soul she has to be blind. Accordingly he says, ^ lie saw the naught whose light all lights are, whose being all beings are.’ The bride says in the Book of Love : ‘ When I had passed by a little I found him my soul loveth.’ The little she had passed all creatures were. Whoso putteth not these behind him shall not find God. And eke she would imply that however small, however pure a thing I know God by, yet it must go. Even the light that verily is God, if I take it where it plays upon my soul is foreign to him. I must take it at the source. I cannot really see the light that shines upon the wall unless I turn my gaze to w^here it comes from. But if I take it in its cause I am robbed of its effect. I ought to take it neither where it falls nor in its eruption nor yet

as brooding in itself; these are all mere modes. We must take God in modeless mode and unconditioned essence, for he is free from mode. St Bernard says : He who would know thee, God, must mete thee with no measure. Please God we may attain that understanding which is wholly without mode and without measure. So help us God. Amen.

AND BEHOLD THERE WAS A MAN . . . SIMEON Et ecce, homo erat in Jerusalem^ cui nomen Simeon etc, {Luc, 235). St Luke relates in his gospel that ‘ when the days were accomplished Christ was brought to the temple. And behold there was a man in Jerusalem, Simeon by name, who was just and Godfearing, waiting for the consolation of the people of Israel and the Holy Ghost was in him.’ * And behold.’ This particle et in Latin signifies joining, binding or locking together. Things fast bound or locked together are described as in union. Here I refer to the soul being bound, knit, united to God. According to our doctors, union postulates likeness. There is no union without likeness. Binding or knitting together, that is the meaning of union. Nearness to me does not constitute likeness : my sitting by someone or in the same place, for example. As St Augustine says. Lord, when I found myself afar from thee it was not from the remoteness of the place, it came of thy unlikeness wherein I found myself. One master says, people living and working wholly in time never agree, they never come together. According to our doctors, a thing whose life and work is in eternity and a thing whose life and work is here in time require a go-between. Where there is knitting and binding together there must be some likeness. The union of God and the soul is a matter of likeness. Where no difference exists there must be identity ; not merely union in mutual embrace, but one ; not merely likeness, but the same. Wherefore we say that the Son is not like the Father but he is his image, he is one with the Father.

One of our best doctors says that an image in stone or on the wall, with no foundation to it, taken simply as a form, is the same form as his whose form it is. For the soul passing into her exemplar wherein is no alien thing, only her form wherewith it is one, this doctrine holds good. Having gotten the form that is divine we behold God, we find God. In separation God is not found. On passing into her exemplar and finding herself in that image alone, in that same image the soul finds God and the finding of herself and God, which is all the same act and is timeless, is the finding of God. So far as she is therein so far she is one with God, He means : as far as a man is at the stage where his soul is the divine image. Then so far as he is he is divine. So far therein so far in God, not annexed, not united but one and the same. One master says, likeness means birth. Further he states that like is not met with in nature unless it is born. Doctors declare that fire, however fierce, would never burn had it no hope of propagation. However dry the wood supplied it would never catch (if fire) lacked power to generate its kind. What fire wants is to be born in wood, for all to be one fire, living and lasting. Extinguished and dead it were fire no more, so it wants to keep in. The nature of the soul would never have gotten its kind were it not for her wanting to have God begotten in her ; she would not have proceeded into her nature, would never have wanted to enter therein, except in the hope of this birth ; nor would God ever have brought it to pass had he not meant the soul to be born into him. God docs and the soul desires. God has the energy and the soul has the will and the power to have God born into her and herself into God. This God contrives with intent that the soul shall be like him. She must needs wait for God to be gotten in her and for her treasure to grow into God, desiring union and the safekeeping of God. God’s nature pours into the light of the soul and therein she is preserved. God purposes thus to be born into her, united with her, contained in her.- -How can that be ? Do we not say that God contains himself ? — When he draws in the soul she finds that God is self-contained and there she stays abiding nowhere else. Augustine says : ‘ As thou lovest so thou art : loving earth thou art earthly, loving God thou shalt be divine.’ If I love God then, shall I be God ? It is not I who say so ; search the scriptures. In the Prophets God says : ‘ Ye are gods and the children of the Most High.’ I say that it is in his likes that God gives this birth. Had she no expectation of this the soul would not want to attain it. She wants to be preserved in him, he is her life. God has a preserve, a safe place in himself, which man can know nothing about until he pares off and is rid of all that belongs to the soul — her life, her powers, her nature, all must go. And that means standing in that perfect light where she and God are one form, where she finds herself God. It is characteristic of God to have nothing alien in him, nor on him nor added to him. And likewise it behoves the soul to have no outside impressions, nothing put on, nothing annexed. So much for the first (word).

‘ And behold ’ : ecce. This word ecce has all the meaning of logos (or word) and it could be given no greater. Word, i.e, God. God is a word, God’s Son is a word. It conveys the idea of our life nnd all our desire being centred in and dependent upon and odented to God. As St Paul says, ‘ By the grace of God I am that I am.’ And again, ‘ I live, yet not I but God liveth in me.’ What more ? Homo erat. He says, ‘ Behold, a man.’ We use the word homo for women as well as for men, but the Latins refused it to woman because of her weakness. Homo denotes something whole, nothing lacking. Homo, a man, a mortal, means one pertaining to earth, implying humility. Earth is the basest of the elements and placed in the midst with the heavens all round, it lies open to every celestial emanation. All the work and waste of heaven is caught midway in the sink of earth. Homo in yet another sense means moisture ; as much as to say, one who is watered with grace ; referring to those humble souls who receive the immediate influx of grace. In this inflowing grace there forthwith arises that light of the mind into which God is sending a ray of his unclouded splendour. In this powerful light a mortal is as far above his fellows as a live man is above his shadow on the wall. This light is vastly potent, not merely being in itself exempt from time and place, but anything it falls upon it robs of time and place and bodily semblance and everything extraneous thereto. As I have often said before, were there no time nor place nor aught beside it would be all one being. The man who is in this sense one and casts himself into the ground of humility, there will be watered with grace.

Concerning the third point : this light deprives of time and place. ‘ There was a man.’ Who gave him this light ? The light did. This word erat belongs expressly to God. In the Latin tongue there is no word so proper to God as erat John in his gospel comes to using erat as a synonym for pure being. Things are all extras : but addition is possible only in thought ; not by mental addition but by mental abstraction. Goodness and truth are additions, in theory at least, but the abstract essence without anything to it is what is meant by erat Again, erat implies birth, an end of becoming. I was coming to-day, now I have come ; and if we eliminate time from my coming and having arrived, then coming and come close up into one. Where coming and come coincide, there we are born and re-made and re-formed into his primitive form. I have often said that all the while a thing’s aught is a matter of concrete existence it never will be re-created ; refurbished it may be and coloured afresh, even as a seal that is old : that is restamped and renewed. A heathen doctor says, Things yonder no time can stale ; there is the blessed life in the evermore : faultless, care-free, unalloyed being. Solomon says : ‘ There is nothing new under the sun,’ though this is seldom taken in its proper sense. Everything under the sun grows old and dies, but yonder is nothing but new. Time brings two things : age and

decay. What the sun shines on is present in time. Creatures are here and are from God, but yonder where they are in God they are not at all the same as they arc here ; they are as different as the sun is from the moon, far more so. Erat in eOy he says : " the Holy Ghost was in him,’ wherein is being and becoming. ‘ There was a man.’ Where was he ? In Jerusalem. Jerusalem meaning vision of peace ; it stands, in short, for man’s peace and prosperity. It possibly signifies more. Paul says, ‘ The peace that passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds.’ Pray God we may be such as to enter into this peace, which is himself. So help us God. Amen.

Qui odit animam suam in hoc mundo in vitam ceternum custodial earn (Joh» 1235). I quote in Latin the gospel saying of our Lord, ‘ He that hateth his soul in this world shall keep it in eternal life.’ Now mark what it is our Lord means when he speaks of a man hating his soul. He that loveth his soul in this mortal life and as she exists in this world shall lose her in eternal life ; but he that hateth her mortal guise shall keep her unto life eternal. There are two reasons for his using here the word soul. According to one authority soul is a name for the ground (or soil) and has nothing to do with the nature (or ground) of the soul. As a master has said, Whoso discourses of moveable things trenches not on the nature or ground of the soul. Try to name the soul as she is in herself, in her pure and abstract nature, and not a name can wc find. They call her soul as they call a carpenter, neither a human being nor after any being at all but after his work. What our Lord means is this : he that loveth his soul in her nakedness, her impartible soul-nature, to wit, will hate and despise her in this dress. She hates and detests and rues being so far from the pure light she is in herself.

Our doctors say the soul is called fire because of the force and because of the heat and because of the light that is in her. Others declare she is a spark of the celestial nature. A third school calls her a light. A fourth calls her a breath. A fifth dubs her a number. They are trying to describe the soul by something pure and luminous. Number exists in the angels and in light there is number as well, but to name her after the highest and after fhe brightest is still to fall short of the ground of the soul. God is nameless is ineffable and in her ground the soul too is ^ See also Spamer's Texte, etc., A. 5. One Latin and two German versions. ineffable as he is ineffable. There is another reason for his saying that she hates. This term we apply to the soul is the name of the soul as she is in the prison of the body, so he means the soul in her individual state, still at the stage of taking thought, still in her prison-house. By taking thought for these nether things, by taking them in by her senses at all, she is confined : words cannot name any higher nature within her.

There are three reasons why my soul should hate herself. The first, that in so far as she is mine she is not God’s. The second, because my soul is not wholly imbedded and set and re-cast into God. Augustine says, To have God for one’s own one must needs first be God’s. The third reason is : the soul’s enjoying herself as the soul while enjoying God with the soul, which is wrong. She should be enjoying God in herself since he is entirely hers. As Christ says, ‘ he that loveth his soul shall lose it.’ What the soul is in this world or beholds in this world : things comprehended, apparent at all, she shall hate. A master declares that the soul at her highest and purest transcends the whole world, nothing attaching the soul to the world but affection. Sometimes she has a natural love of the body. Sometimes she has a will inclined towards creatures. Another says the soul has no natural concern with the things of this world any more than the ear has with colour or the eye has with song. Our natural philosophers teach that the body is much rather in the soul than the soul is in the body. Even as the cask contains the wine and not the wine the cask, so does the soul keep the body in her rather than the body the soul. What the soul loves in this world she is pure from by nature. According to one philosopher, it is the soul’s nature and her natural end to achieve within herself a feat of understanding, God informing her with the general idea. He that can say he has attained his nature finds all things within himself, fashioned in light as they are in God ; not as they are in nature but as they are in God. Neither spirit nor angel touches the ground or nature of the soul. In it she comes into the first, into the beginning, whence God breaks out in goodness into all creatures. There she loves all things in God, not pure as they are in her uncompounded nature, but merely impartible as they are in God. God has made this whole world as it were out of coal. Its pattern in gold is more lasting than this one in coal. Likewise the things in the soul are purer and nobler than they are in this world. The material which God made things out of is (to its exemplar in God) baser than coal is to gold. For the purpose of making a crock a man takes a handful of clay ; that^is the medium he works in. He gives it a form he has in him, nobler than^^his material. And the moral of this is that the things in the intelligible world, the soul, to wit, ffxe in.fi;>itely nobler

than they are in this ; even as the image hewn and graven in gold so the types of all things are onefold in the soul. A master says, The soul has a natural gift for being impressed with the forms of all things. Another one says. Never did soul get to her virgin nature without finding all things imaged therein in the intelligible world which is incompreljensiblc, unthinkable. Gregory says : All reasoning in words about divine things is but a stammering. One word more about the soul and I have done. ‘ O ye daughters of Jerusalem, look not upon me because I am brown I The sun hath coloured me and the children of my mother have striven against me ’ {Cant, I5). She refers to the children of this world, to them the soul speaks. The sun is the lust of this world : the visible, tangible things thereof do turn me swarthy and brown. Brown is not a pure colour : it is part light and part darkness. When the soul thinks or acts with her powers how enlightened soever these be, still, there is confusion. And therefore she says, ' My mother’s children have striven against me.’ These children being the lower powers of the soul, all clashing and at strife with her. The heavenly Father is our father and Christendom is our mother. What though she be fair and well-favoured and good at her work, yet this is not perfect. Wherefore he cries, ‘ O thou fairest among women go forth and depart.’ This world is like a woman, weak. But why does he address her, ‘ O fairest among women ? ’ The angels are fair and arc far above the soul. He says, ‘ fairest ’ : in her light-nature. ‘ Go forth and depart ’ ; go forth from this world and depart from such things as thy soul is still prone to. And anything grasped let her hate.

Misit dominus manum suam et teligit os meum et dixit rnihi etc, {Jer, I9). ‘ The Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth and said unto me.’ When I preach it is my wont to speak about detachment, of the duty of ridding ourselves of self and of things. Or again, of return to the impartible good, God to wit. And thirdly, on the duty of remembering the high and noble nature God has put into the soul so that mortals may wonder about God. Fourthly, about the pure nature of God, the ineffable splendour of God. God is a ^ord, an unspoken word. Augustine says : ‘ All scripture is vain.’ Wo say that God is unspoken, but he is unspeakable. Grant he is somewhat : who can pronounce this word ? None but the Word, ^od is the Word which pronounces itself. Where God exists he is saying this Word ; where he does not exist he says nothing. God is spoken and unspoken. The Father is the speaking energy and the Sun is the speech energising. What is in me goes forth of me ; I have but to think and my word goes forth, at the same time abiding within. Even so does the Father speak forth his Son who meanwhile remains in him unspoken. I have repeatedly said, God’s exit is his entrance. In proportion to my nearness to God does he speak himself into me. In the case of rational creatures the more they go out of themselves in their works the more they get into themselves. Not so with corporal things : the more active these are the further they get from themselves. All creatures desire to speak God in their works : they all of them speak him as well as they can but they cannot really pronounce him. Willy-nilly, in weal or in woe they are all trying to utter God who yet remains unspoken.

David said, ‘The Lord is his name.’ Lord means one set in authority ; knox)e means an underling. Some names are proper to God and forbidden to aught beside God. God is the name peculiar to God just as 7nan is the name for mankind. A man is a man be he foolish or wise. Seneca says, ‘ ’Tis a vile man that excels not humanity.’ Anotlier name we associate with God is paternity. When wc call a man father y we take for granted a son. No father can be without having a son. True, they merge, beyond time, into eternal nature. The third name in its higher sense relates to God and in its lower one to time. God is called by many names in scripture. Now I say, anything wc can think of in God or put any name to, that God is not. God transcends name, transcends nature. Wc hear of one good man who in prayers besought God for his name. Then, ‘ Peace ! ’ quoth a brother, ‘ thou art abasing God.’ Wc can lind no name to give to God ; but we arc permitted to use the names his saints have called him by, those whose hearts inspired by God were Hooded with his divine light. Hence we learn, first, how to pray to God. Wc ought to say. Lord, in those very names which thou didst instil into the hearts of saints, suffusing them with thy light, wc praise thee and adore thee. And secondly we learn that in giving God no name at all we praise and honour him suflicicntly since God is above name and ineffable.

Out of the fullness of his power the Father speaks the Son and in iiim all things. All creatures arc the utterance of God. Like as my lips proclaim and tell forth God so does a stone’s existence, and we can glean more from the fact than from the telling of it. Work wrought by highest nature in its sovran power a lower nature cannot comprehend. If it did the selfsame work then would it not be lower, but the same. Creatures all want to copy God in all they do. But it is precious little they are able to reveal. Even the highest angels, inasmuch as they ascend and come in touch with God, are no more like than black and white to that which is in God. It is altogether different, what creatures have received, yet they all desire to speak as nearly as possible the same. The prophet says : ‘ Lord, thou sayest one and I understand two.’ When God speaks into the soul, as it falls it divides. The higher we soar in our understanding the more we arc in him. In eternity, the Father is speaking his Son all the time and i^ouring forth all creatures in him. They all have a call to return whence they came forth. Their whole life and nature is a vocation, a flight back to what they came out of.

The prophet says : ‘ The TiOrd sent forth his hand,’ meaning the Holy Ghost. He says, ‘ he touched my mouth,’ and straightway there follow the words, ‘ he spake unto me.’ The mouth of the soul is the highest part of the soul and she has this in mind when she says, ‘ he hath put lus Word into my mouth,’ this being the kiss of the soul ; mouth to mouth the Father conveys his Son into the soul, then he speaks to hi*r, saying, ‘ Lo, this day I have chosen thee to set thee over nations and over kingdoms.’ God says he will choose us to-day. Yonder in eternity, where time is not, there is ever to-day. ‘ And 1 have set thee over nations,’ i,e, above this world which thou must be rid of ; ‘ and over kingdoms,’ meaning, that more than one thing is too much ; it behoves thee to die to all things and get back to the height where we dwell in the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Spiritus dotnini replcvit orhem terrarum etc, {Saj). I 7 ). ‘ The spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole world.’ A philosopher says, All creatures bear witness to the divine ?iature whence they proceeded forth, in their will to emulate the Deity they came from. Creatures proceed forth in two ways. The first is a radical process, like I’oots coming out of a tree. The second emanation is by mode of will. Behold the twofold emanation of divinity. One the descent of the Son from the Father, this after tlie manner of a birth. The other, the outpouring of the love of Father and Son, the Holy Ghost, to wit, for in him they love one another. All creatures proclaim their origin, their divine descent betrays itself in their works. According to a Greek philosopher, God keeps all creatures in leash, as it were, and they must follow where he leads. Hence nature is aye making for the highest. The second emanation is the Holy Ghost, by mode of will. Nature would fain make nothing but the Son ; were she allowed she would do father’s work, so nature would be ever giving sons did she not suffer accidental lapses. When nature is working in time and space then father and son are different. One master explains that a carpenter building a house will erect it first in his mind and, were the house subject enough to his will, then, materials apart, the only difference between them would be that of begetter and suddenly begotten. Lo, thus it is in God, for since there is no time nor place in him, therefore they are one God, there being no distinction save outpouring and outpoured.

According to the scriptures, ‘ The spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole world.’ Why is he called Lord ? Because he fills us. Why is he called spirit ? Because he unites us with himself. A lord is known by three signs. First, he is rich. Rich means possessing all things without stint. Hence none is really rich but God in whom all things are harboured indivisibly. So he can give all things and this is the second sign of riches. A philosopher says, God hawks himself to all creatures and each takes as much as it wants. I trow God offers himself to me as he docs to the highest angel and were I as apt as he is I should receive as he does. As I have often observed, God always behaves as though he was trying to please the soul. The third sign of riches is, giving for love ; whoso giveth for aught is not really rich. God’s richness is shown by his giving all his gifts gratis. As saith the prophet, ‘ Thou art my God, thou needest not my possessions.’ He alone is the Lord and the spirit. I say, he is spirit ; our happiness lies in union with him.

The most excellent work of God in creature is being. My father gives me my nature but he does not give me my being : God does that, none beside. That is why everything that exists takes such a shrewd delight in being. The being of the soul receives the influx of God’s light ; not pure and limpid as God sends it forth but in ambient undulations. We can see the sunlight where it falls upon a tree or any other object, but we fail to apprehend the sun itself. And so with any gift of God : these arc all meted out according to the taker not according to the giver. A philosopher says, ‘ God is the standard of measure,’ and so far as one mortal contains more God than another, to that extent he is wiser and nobler and better than the other. To have more of God simply means being more like him : the more God’s likeness exists in us the more spiritual we are. A philosopher says, ‘ Where the lowest spirit ends the highest bodily thing begins.’ All of which goes to prove that God being spirit, the least of spiritual things excels the best of corporal things. Soul is more excellent than anything bodily. Soul is contained in a place, as it were, betwixt time and eternity, touching them both. With her higher powers she is in touch with eternity ; in her inferior powers she is in contact with time. Thus, mark you, in time she does not function according to time but in her eternal nature which she has in common with the angels. Spirit is a subtle thing, bringing life to all the limbs in virtue of the close accord of soul with body. Albeit spirit is rational, and does the entire work, yet we do not say, my soul docs so and so, for both of them together are a man. This fact I may make bold to state : because of the intimate union of the body and the soul the soul is in the smallest member as much as in the body as a whole. St Augustine says, ‘ The union of body and soul may be close, but closer still is the union that spirit has with spirit.’ Lo, he is Lord and spirit, may he beatify us by uniting us with him.

It is a puzzling question how the soul survives when God imprints himself in her. Consider. Were God to give her any outward being she would scorn it ; but when he gives her himself in himself she receives and suffers in his and not in her own, his being hers : he has fetched her out of her own so his is now hers and hers really is his. So she suffers in union with God. This is the spirit of the Lord which has filled the whole world. Amen.

St John saw in a vision a lamb standing on Mount Sion and with l^m stood forty and four who were not of this world nor had they wifely names. These were all virgins who stood next the lamb, and when the lamb inclined they inclined with him, singing with the lamb a new song and having their names and the name of their Father written in their foreheads. John says, ‘ I looked and lo, a lamb stood on the mountain.’ I say, John himself was that mountain whereon he saw the lamb, and whoso sees the Lamb of God must himself be the mountain, ascending to his highest, purest part. Again. He says he saw a lamb standing upon a mountain : when one thing stands upon another its lowest point touches the other’s highest. God touches all things and remains untouched. God is above all things standing in himself and his instance sustains all creatures. Creatures have an uppermost and undermost, ^od has not. God is over everything and is not touched by anything. All creatures seek outside themselves, in one another, what they lack. God does not. God does not look outside himself : everything that creatures have God has entire in him ; he is the floor, the roof of ereatures. True, one is prior to another down to the very last, one being born before another : though ereature gives not of her being to him, yet she keeps some of his. God is a simple presence, a stay-at-home in himself. With any creature, as regards her noble nature, the more she sits at home the more of herself she gives out. A common stone, like limestone, for example, gives itself out a stone and nothing more. But a precious stone, this has great power because of something in it, some interior fastness wherein it rears its head and, so to speak, peers out. According to the masters, no creature is so stay-athome as body and soul, nor goes so far afield as the soul’s highest part.

He says, ‘ I saw a lamb standing.’ From which we learn four things. First, the lamb is fed and clothed and that in goodly fashion, which to our mind looks as though we, having gotten so much from God and that so goodly, arc bound to seek in all we do only his honour and his glory. Again, the lamb stood. It is good for friend to stand by friend. God stands by us, is standing by us, steady and unmoved. He says : ‘ There stood with him a multitude, each having written in his forehead his name and the name of his Father.’ liCt at least God’s name be written in us. We must bear God’s image in us and liis light must lighten us, if we would be John.

Nunc scio vere, quia misii doininus angelum swum {Act Freed from his prison bonds by the power of the supreme God, Peter exclaims, ‘ Now I know of a surety that the Lord hath sent his angel and hath delivered me out of the power of Herod, out of the hand of the enemy.’ We will reverse the words and say, ‘ The Lord hath sent his angel, therefore I know of a surety.’ Peter symbolises intuition. As I have often said, intuition and intellect do not unify the soul in God. Intellect is a matter of pure being. Intuition, its forerunner, goes ahead and penetrates to what is born there : God’s onc-begotten Son. Our Lord declares, in Matthew, that no one knows the Father but the Son. Now, philosophers say understanding lies in likeness. Some of them say the soul is made of all things since she is capable of understanding all things. That sounds ridiculous, but it is true. They say that anything I know must be wholly present to me in the likeness of my understanding. But according to the saints, power is in the Father, likeness in the Son and union in the Holy Ghost. Hence, if the Father is all present to the Son and the Son is all-to like him, therefore no one knows the Father but the Son.

Peter says, ‘ Now I know of a surety.’ Why does he know of a surety ? Because it is divine light which does not deceive. And because we see in it quite clearly without anything to hide the view. Paul says concerning it : ‘ God dwells in light inaccessible.’ Doctors declare that the wisdom we learn here stays with us yonder. St Paul says it will go. A philosopher once said, ‘ Real knowledge, even in this body, is intrinsically so delightful that the sum-total of created things is nothing to the joys of pure perception.’ Yet noble though it be, it is but contingent ; as one small word to all the world even thus insignificant is all the wisdom we learn here compared with the whole and perfect truth. Look you. Paul says it goes. And even if it stayed it would turn to foolishness and be as nothing to the actual truth we see. Thirdly, we surely know, for things seen here as changing we see as changeless there where we get them as a whole and indivisible, approximately one, things widely sundered here being close together there where all things are at hand : both the first day and the last arc happening at the present instant yonder.

‘ Now I know of a surety that the Lord hath sent his angel.’ When the Lord sends his angel to the soul she becomes sureknowing. Not unjustly God ordained Peter should keep the key. For Peter stands for intuition, and it is intuition with the key that unlocks and goes in and finds God face to face, whereupon she notifies her find to her partner, will, she having had the will before, for what I will I seek. Perception leads the way. It is the princess seeking the prince upon the mountain- top, in virgin realms ; she proclaims him to the soul and soul to nature and nature to the passions of the body. So noble is the soul at her highest and her best, the doctors cannot find her any name. They call her anima because she animates the body. Theologians say that next to the first emanation of the Godhead, when the Son breaks out of the Father, his angel is most like to God. True, soul is like to God in her highest part, but this angel is even more like God. All that belongs to this angel is godlike. The angel was sent to the soul to bring her back to the very same form wherein he is formed, for knowledge comes by likeness. The soul is capable of knowing all things and she never rests till she attains her original form wherein all things are one ; it is there she rests, in God. In God one creature is no better than another. According to the masters, being and knowing are the same, for

things that are not are not known and things that are most are most known. God has transcendent being, so he transcends all knowing, as I said in my first sermon two days back. The soul, informed with primitive light, sealed with the seal of pure being, smacking of God prior to truth and gnosis, with every named nature sloughed away : the soul (I say) at this stage of all-perfect knowledge has gotten being to match. As St Paul says, ‘ God dwells in light inaccessible.’ He hangs suspended in his own pure being whereto naught is attached. He is merely a presence in himself, where neither this nor that exists, for what is in God is God. A heathen says. They that hang under God arc hanging in God, and while having real subsistence in themselves do yet impend in him who has neither end nor beginning, for in God nothing alien betides. Heaven affords us an example. It never takes in aliens as aliens. And by the same token, what gets to God is changed : however vile it be, on bringing it to God it sheds its self. For instance, I may have wisdom but not be it. I can gain wisdom and can also lose it. But what is God’s is God ,* it cannot leave him. It is implanted in God’s nature ; God’s nature being so stable that anything to do with it is settled in it once for all or always stops outside. Now reflect and marvel I If God converts vile things into himself, how ween ye he will treat the soul, which he has dignified with his own image ?

JEmulor enim vos dei cemulatione etc, {2 Cor. llg). In the name of our Lord. We read on the Feast of the Virgin the words of St Paul, ‘ I have espoused you to one husband, Christ, rejuvenant.’ The masters ask, ‘ Has the Son been born ? ’ We say, no ! The masters ask, ‘ Is the Son going to be born ? ’ We say, no I The masters are answered : the Son is fully born, he is being born anew unceasingly. St Paul says, ‘ Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.’ His power is his wisdom and his wisdom is his power. Christ is the man whose youth is perennially renewed. Now St Paul says, ‘To this man I have espoused you.’ For as marriage between man and wife is binding, so there is eternal marriage between your souls and God. A maid is given to a man hoping to bear his child. And God did make the soul intending her to bear in her his one-begotten Son. The happening of this birth in Mafy ghostly was to God better pleasing than his being bom of her in flesh. And this same birth to-day in the God-loving soul delights God more than his creation of the heavens and earth.

The philosophers say the soul is bigger than the heavens. St John says : ‘ He who sat upon the throne declared, “ Behold, I make all things new.” ’ Now, according to St Augustine, ‘ God’s speaking is his child-bearing and his child-birth is his Word.’ God spake never a word but one and that he holds so dear that he will never say another. If God stopped saying his Word, but for an instant even, heaven and earth would disappear. Augustine says : ‘ As the marriage of man and woman is for good and all, so is the marriage of the soul.’ The highest power of the soul, the one for ever straining up to God, is called the man. The lower power, the one that is condemned to wander among mortals, is the maid. The higher power, the man, goes all uncovered. But the lower power, the maid, is closely veiled and this lower power is taken to the higher. To this nature it belongs to be always active. It tries all the time, father-like, to beget ; and were it not prevented, a son would be always being born as with the heavenly Father. But what God does of his free gift (man’s) nature hinders and a girl is born ; but were there neither time nor place nor matter, man would rejuvenate himself as the Son does the Father, always.

God said : ‘ Behold I make all things fruitful.’ Then why am I myself not fruitful ? God first bears his image in the God-loving soul and afterwards himself. If God gave himself to the soul here in time she would be vexed. So he gives her himself in eternity, in the perennial now, up-springing freshly without ceasing. She is too curious to rest until she finds her source. This is quite plain from Philip’s words : ‘ Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.’ As the eternal Son of God comes welling up in his paternal heart, so he wells up in the God-loving soul. Mortal things work outwardly, ghostly things work inwardly. The soul this birth once happens in, that soul is nigh let into God ; if it happens twice she gets still more into God. The more frequent this birth the deeper in God and the closer knit into the Father’s heart. This birth transcends here and now. Here^ that is, place ; noWy that is, time. It befalls in eternity. May we, being born in him, enable him to bear himself in us. So help us Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.

Gaudete in dominie iterum gaudete etc, {Philip, 44). St Paul says : ‘ Rejoice in the Lord and have no more care : the Lord is present with your thoughts which are known unto God in prayer and thanksgiving.’ ‘ Rejoice in the Lord alway,’ he says. Jerome declares that none receives knowledge nor wisdom nor honour from God except he be a virtuous man. No virtuous man is he who, changing not his ways, docs not receive from God knowledge and wisdom and joy. He says again : ‘ Rejoice in the Lord.’ Not in our Lord but in the I^ord. I have repeatedly explained that God’s lordship consists not alone in his being lord of all creatures : his lordship consists in having the power to create a thousand worlds and to transcend them every one in his pure essence : therein lies his lordship. ‘ Rejoice in the Lord (alway),’ he says. And here we note two precepts. First, that we must remain all within in the Lord, not looking for him outside whether in knowledge or in love : simply rejoice within in the Lord. The other precept is : rejoice in his innermost in his first, whence all things get their joy and take their being. That is the meaning of ‘ Rejoice alway.’ As St Augustine hath it, ‘ He rejoices all the time who is rejoicing above time and timelcssly.’ Then he goes on to say: ‘Have no more care. The Lord is present, is at hand.’ The soul must needs cast off all care what time she is rejoicing in the Lord, leastwise on her union with God. And hence his words, ‘ Have no more care : the Lord is present, he is nigh.’ In other words, God is with us in our inmost soul, provided he find us within and not gone out on business with our five senses. The soul must stop at home in her innermost, purest self ; be ever within and not flying out : there God is present, God is nigh.

Another meaning of the particle by which he employs. He is in himself, not going far out but remaining all by himself. Quoth David ; ‘ Rejoice, my soul, O Lord, for unto thee have I lifted her up.’ The soul must put forth all her strength to lift herself above herself and be translated beyond time and place into the void where God is in and by himself, not going out nor eke in touch with any outside thing. Jerome remarks that ‘ God can no more have recourse to time and temporal things than stones can have angelic wisdom.’ He says: ‘The Lord is nigh.’ Quoth David: ‘God is nigh unto all them that call upon him, that call upon him in truth and invoke him.’ How to call upon him, to call upon him in truth, to invoke him, that I leave aside. But he uses the words ‘ in truth.’ The Son alone is the truth and not the Father, save in the sense that they are one truth in their essence. That is truth which reveals what I have in my heart without likeness. This revelation is truth. The Son alone is the truth. The whole content of the Father’s love he speaks at once in his Son. This utterance, this act, is the truth.

He goes on to say : ‘ Your thoughts arc known unto him in the Lord,’ i.e. in this truth with the Father. Faith inheres in intellectual light and sight in the combative faculty which is always aspiring to the highest and the purest : to the truth, where God is in himself. I have sometimes said, watch me these souls : their power is too free, too passionate to bear restraint of any kind.

Missus est Gabriel angelus etc. {Luc. Ige). St Luke says in his gospel, ‘ the angel was sent from God into a land called Galilee, into a town called Nazareth, to a virgin called Mary, who was of the house of David.’ According to Bede, the theologian, this was the beginning of our salvation. I have said before and say again that everything our Lord has ever done he did simply to the end that God miglit be with us and that we might be one with him, and that is the reason why God was made man. The masters say that God was ever being born in our Lady ghostly ere ever he was born of her in flesh, and from the overflow of that begetting wherein the heavenly Father begat his one-begotten Son within her soul the eternal Word received its human nature in her and she became with carnal child. He says, ‘ the angel was sent from God.’ The soul would scorn to have the angelic light were it not sent to her from God ; if there were not concealed in it the light of God to make the angel’s light detectable, she would have none of it.

He says, ‘ the angel.’ What is an angel ? Three doctors give three different definitions of what an angel is. Dionysius says, An angel is a mirror without flaw and passing clear containing the reflection of God’s light. Augustine says, An angel is nigh unto God and matter is nigh unto him. John Damascene says. An angel is a reflection of God and through all that is his there is shining the image of God. The soul has this image in her summit whereon the light of God for ever shines. This is his first definition of an angel. Later on he calls him a dividing sword, aflame with divine desire, and, he adds, ‘ angels are free and inimical to matter.’ He says, ‘ the angel was sent from God.’ What for ? According to Dionysius, an angel has three functions. First, he purifies, next he enlightens, and lastly he perfects. He purifies the soul from stain, i.e. he purges her from matter and gathers her together to herself, cleansing her from foulness as one angel does another. Then he enlightens her in twofold fashion. Divine light is so overwhelming that the soul is unable to bear it unless it is tempered in the angel’s light and so conveyed into the soul. He enlightens

^ See also Sievera’ No. 2. her therefore by reflection. The angel conveys his own knowledge to the soul and strengthens her in this way to bear the light of God. If I were in a wilderness alone and was afraid, the presence of a child would dissipate my dread and give me courage, so noble, so blithe a thing is life. Failing a child, a beast would comfort me. Hence necromancers use an animal, a dog (for instance), the animal’s vitality invigorating them. Knowledge is power. The angel conveyed it to the soul in preparation for the light of God. He says, ‘ the angel was sent from God.’ The soul must be like an angel in the ways that I have named if the Son is to be sent to her and born in her. But there remains the question of how the angel perfects her. May God send his angel to us. So help us God. Amen.

Missus est Gabriel angelus (Luc. Ige). ‘ In time the angel Gabriel was sent from God.’ In what time ? In the sixth month, John being then quick within his mother’s womb. When anyone asks me, Why do we pray or why do we fast or do our work withal, I say, So that God may be born in our souls. What were the scriptures written for and why did God create the world and the angelic nature ? Simply that God might be born in the soul. All cereal nature means wheat, all treasure nature means gold, all generation means man. As the philosopher says. No animal exists but has somewhat in common with mankind in time. First of all when a word is conceived in my mind it is a subtle, intangible thing ; it is true word when it takes shape in my thought. Later, as spoken aloud by my mouth, it is but an outward expression of the interior word. Even so the eternal Word is spoken in the innermost and purest recesses of the soul, in the summit of her rational nature, and there befalls this birth. Whoso has nothing more than a firm belief in and lively conviction of this will be glad to know how this birth comes to pass and what conduces to it.

St Paul says : ‘ In the fullness of time God sent his Son.’ St Augustine was asked what it meant, this fullness of time. It is the fullness (or end) of the day when the day is done : then the day is over. Certain it is that there is no time where this birth befalls, for nothing hinders this birth so much as time and creature. It is an obvious fact that time affects neither God nor the soul. Did time touch the soul she would not be soul. If God were affected by time he would not be God. Further, if time could touch the soul, then God could not be bom in her. The soul wherein God is born must have escaped from time, and time must have dropped away from her ; she must be absolutely one in will and desire. Another fullness of time. If someone had the knowledge and the power to gather up the time and all the happenings of these six thousand years and all that is to come ere the world ends to boot, all this, summed up into one present now, would be the fullness of time. This is the now of eternity, when the soul knows all things in God, as new and fresh and lovely as I find them now at present. The narrowest of the powers of my soul is more than heaven wide. To say nothing of the intellect wherein there is measureless space, wherein I am as near a place a thousand miles away as the spot I am standing on this moment. Theologians teach that the angel hosts are countless, the number of them cannot be conceived. But to one who sees distinctions apart from multiplicity and number, to him, I say, a hundred is as one. Were there a hundred Persons in the Godhead he would still perceive them as one God.

As regards the angels. The angels, of whatever rank, abet and assist at God’s birth in the soul ; that is to say, they have satisfaction, they delight and rejoice in this birth. Nothing is wrought by the angels : the birth is due to God alone and anything that ministers thereto is work of service. May God be born in us, So help us God. Amen.

Beatus es, Simon Bariona, quia caro et sanguis non revelavit tibi^ sed pater meus, qui in coelis est {Matt, I617). ‘ Blessed art thou, Simon Peter,’ says our Lord, ‘ for flesh and blood have not revealed it to thee, but my Father which is in heaven.’ St Peter has four names : Peter and Barjona and Simon and Cephas. Our Lord says, ‘ Blessed (or happy) art thou.’ Everyone desires happiness. As the philosopher hath it. All men desire to be. Hence St Augustine’s dictum, The good man wants no praise, he wants to be praiseworthy. And our own doctors teach withal that virtue is so pure, so wholly abstract and detached from corporal things in the ground and summit of its nature that nothing whatever can occur therein without defiling virtue and introducing vice. The least thought or suggestion of self-seeking and it is not virtue : it is turned to vice. Such is virtue by nature. A heathen philosopher says, Virtue, except for virtue’s sake, is in uo wise a virtue.^ If its object is 'praise or aught else, that is. bartering virtue. Genuine virtuJ^s not to be sold for anything on earth. Wherefore the good man seeks no praise : he seeks to be praiseworthy. It is not the chiding that we ought to mind but the fact of deserving to be chidden.

^ Blessed art thou,’ quoth our Lord. Beatitude lies in four things. To have all that has being and is lustily to be desired and brings delight ; to have it all at once and whole in the undivided soul and that in God, revealed in its perfection, in its flower, where it first burgeons forth in the ground of its existence, and all conceived where God is conceiving himself— that is happiness. The name Peter means seer of God. Now, theologians question whether the kernel of external life lies more in intellect or will. Will has two operations : desire and love. Intellect, with its simple function, is therefore better ; its work is understanding, and it never stops till it gets a naked hold on what it sees. Withal it nins ahead of will and tells it what to love. We desire a thing while as yet we do not possess it. When we have it we love it : desire then falling away. What must a man be to see God ? He must be dead. ‘ No man can see me and live,’ said our Lord. Now St Gregory says, ‘ That man is dead who is dead to the world.’ Ye can judge for yourselves how dead one may be and how little can touch us the things of this world. By dying to this world we do not die to God. St Augustine prayed a variety of prayers. ‘ Grant me, Lord,’ he said, ‘ to know both thee and me.’ ‘ O Lord, have mercy upon me and show me thy face and grant me that I die not until I eternally behold thee.’ This is the first point ; one must be dead to see God. So much for the first name, Peter.

One philosopher says, were there no means we should sec the beloved in heaven. But another one says, were there no means we should see nothing. Both of them are right. The colour on the wall which is carried to my eye is filtered and refined in the air and in the light and transmitted in a pure state to my eye. Even so the soul must be strained by light and grace before it can see God. So rather is that master right who said that without means we should not see at all. But the other one is also right who said that without means we should see the beloved in heaven. For the soul would see God naked if there were nothing between. The second name, Barjona, signifies a son of grace, in whom the soul, clarified and sublimed, is meet for the vision of God. The third name is Simon. That is to say, one who listens, one who obeys. To hear God one must be divorced from the world. David says, ‘ I will be still and listen to what God is saying in me.’ He pronounces peace in his Word, on his saints, on his people, on all such as commune with their heart. Happy the man who is

busy attending to what God is saying in him. He is directly subject to the divine light-ray. The soul that stands with all her powers under the light of God is fired and inflamed with divine love. The divine light shines straight in from above, and a perpendicular sun on one’s head is a thing that few can survive. Yet the highest power of the soul, her head, is held erect beneath this shaft of godly light so that there can shine in this light divine which I have oft described as being so bright, so overwhelming, so transcendent, that all lights are but darkness in comparison with this light. All creatures, as so being, are as naught ; dowsed in the light wherein they get their being they are aught. IIow noble soever the natural mind yet to reach, to grasp God without means the soul must possess these six qTialifications I speak of. First, she is dead to changing things. Next, she is well clarified in light and grace. Thirdly, she is without means. Fourthly, she hears God’s Word in her heart. Fifth, she is under the divine light. The sixth is the heathen philosopher’s definition of happiness : one perpetual ascension and vision of beatitude in God. Where the Son himself is understanding, in his first leaping forth, there in God’s highest we too shall understand. Wherefore it behoves us to keep our head turned steadfastly that way.

Cephas means a head. Understanding is the head of the soul. The superficial notion is that love stands first. Rut the soundest arguments expressly state (what is the truth) that the kernel of eternal life lies rather in knowledge than in love. This mark, for our best masters say, will no special thing, and lo ! intellect, understanding, this flics straight up to God. Love turns to the loved : she finds there what is good. Intellect seizes the cause of the good. Honey is sweeter in itself than anything we make from it. Love takes God as being sweet, but intellect goes deeper and conceives God as being. ‘ Blessed art thou, Simon Peter,’ quoth our Lord. To the righteous man God gives divine being, and calls him by the name which is appropriate to that being. Thus he goes on to speak of ‘ my Father which is in heaven.’ Among names none is more appropriate than He-who-is. That one should recognise a thing and simply say, it is, would seem absurd ; call it a stone, a bit of wood, and we know what that means. But suppose everything detached, abstracted, pared away, and nothing left except the is ; that is the characteristic nature of his name. Our Lord promised his disciples, ‘ My followers shall sit at my table in my Father’s kingdom, and shall eat my meat and drink my drink which my Father hath prepared for me.’ Happy is the wight who has attained to receiving with the Son just where the Son receives. Right there we too shall find our happiness, and there in

his felicity, there where he has his being, in that same ground his friends shall all behold and thence shall draw their happiness. That is the table in God’s kingdom. May We approach that table. So help us God. Amen.

Vir mens serous tuus mortuus est {4 Reg. 4j_7). The woman said to the prophet, ‘My husband thy servant is dead and the creditors are come to take my two sons as bondsmen for the debt, for I have nothing but a drop of oil.’ Then said the prophet, ‘ Go borrow empty vessels and pour a little in : it will increase and multiply and will pay thy debt and release thy sons. Thou and thy children can live on the rest.’ The spark {i.e. the intellect, the head of the soul), the so-called husband of the soul, is none other than a spark of the divine nature, a divine light, a ray, an imprint of divinity. A woman begged our Lord for the water which he gives. Whoso drinks of this shall never thirst. Theologians say, the best gift of God is the Holy Ghost wherein God bestows all his grace and favour, his living water, namely. ‘ Whom I give this to shall never thirst.’ This water is grace and light upspringing in the soul to everlasting life. The woman said, ‘ Sir, give me of this water.’ And our Lord replied, ‘ Bring me thine husband.’ She said, ‘ I have no husband.’ Quoth our Lord, ‘ Tliou hast well said ; thou hast not one, thou hast had five, and he whom now thou hast is not thine husband.’ St Augustine asks : ‘ Why docs our Lord reply, “ Thou hast well said ” ? ’ What he means is this : thy five senses, these are the five husbands thou hadst in thy youth, after thine own heart ; now in thine age thou hast one, not thine own : intellect, namely, and this thou dost not obey. When the man in the soul, the intellect, is dead, unchecked evil prevails. To separate soul and body is bad enough, but for the soul to be divorced from God, that is a far worse matter. As the soul is the life of the body so God is the life of the soul. As the soul suffuses our members so God suffuses the powers of the soul and is passed on by them in goodness and love to everything round that they may be aware of him as flowing all the time, i.e. above time, in eternity and in the life they live.

The woman said, ‘ Sir, my husband thy servant is dead.’ Serous means one who receives, receiving another’s ; one who keeps and keeps for another. To keep for himself would make him a thief. Intellect is a servant, more so than will is or love. Will and love fall on God as being good : were he not good they would ignore him. But intellect pierces right through into essence, reckless of goodness, of power, of wisdom, of things accidental whatever they be and added to God. Not looking for these she gets them in him when, merged into his essence, she knows God simply as existence. What though he be not good nor just, yet she enjoys him as pure being. Here intellect is like the highest rank of angels of which there are three choirs. The Thrones receive God into them and preserve God in themselves. In the Cherubim God rests; they sec God continually. The Seraphim are ardent (burning) : like to these is the God-bearing intellect. With these angels the intellect spies God, in his vestibule, naked, as one without difference. Quoth the woman, ‘ Sir, my husband thy servant is dead, and the creditors have come for my two sons.’ What arc the two sons of the soul ? St Augustine, and with him a heathen doctor, speaks of the two faces of the soul. One is turned towards this world and towards the body, in this she works virtue and wisdom. The other face gazes straight into God ; the divine light is always in it, and this tells upon it unless, through being from home, she has it unawares. When the spark of the intellect carries right into God, then the man is alive. The birth lakes place. Not once a year it happens nor yet once a month nor once a day but all the time, beyond time, in the open, where there is neither here nor now nor thought nor nature. That is why we speak of sons, not daughters.

Now, to speak of the two sons in another sense. As understanding and will. Understanding leaps out of the intellect first and is afterwards followed by will, from them both. But no more of this. — These two sons of intellect may be taken in yet another way. One as power, the other as actuality. One heatlicn doctor says that it is in this power the soul becomes all things, ideally. In her actuality she is, like the Father, making all things new. It pleased God to seal her in the nature of all creatures : before the world when she existed not. God wrought this whole world ghostly in every single angel before he made the world itself. An angel has two understandings. The one is morning light, the other is the evening light. In the morning light he sees everything in God. In the evening light he sees things in the light of his own nature. When he goes out into things it grows night. So long as he remains within he has the evening light. We say that the angels rejoice when a man becomes good. But, our best doctors ask, do the angels also repine when a man commits sin ? We say : No ; they see into the justice of God and enjoy all things therein

as they are in God. Therefore they do not repine. Intellect in its potential power is like the angel’s natural light, i,e. the evening light. With her actual power she raises all things up into God, where all things are bathed in the morning light. Quoth the woman, ‘ The creditors are come to seize my two sons for their slaves.’ Then said the prophet, ‘ Go borrow empty vessels from thy neighbours.’ These neighbours mean all creatures and the five senses and the powers of the soul with her interior faculties which work in secret and are angels. From all these neighbours borrow empty vessels. Let us borrow empty vessels ; these filled with heavenly wisdom will give us means to pay our debt and, on the rest, to live eternally. So help us God. Amen. Homo quidam fecit coenam magnum {Luc, St Luke relates in his gospel how ‘ a certain man gave a great supper or evening entertainment.’ Who makes it ? A certain man. What does he mean by calling it a supper ? One master says this betokens great affection, seeing none arc bidden save the intimates of God. * When we give a morning party all and sundry are invited but to an evening meal wc invite important people, the people that we like and our own familiar friends.* Secondly, he has in mind how perfect are those souls who enjoy this evening meal. The evening never comes without a whole day having gone before. Were there no sun there were no day. Sunrise, that is morning light which goes on getting brighter up to middle-day. Just as the divine light rising in the soul gradually eclipses the powers of the soul until the advent of the noon. No day, no spiritual day, at all can dawn within the soul except she receive divine light. * Divine light breaks into the soul and makes her morning, and the soul mounts up in this light into space, to the zenith at high noon.* Thirdly, he implies that to take this supper worthily we have to come at evening. When the light of this world fails it is the evening. As King David sings, ‘ He riseth in the evening and His name it is the Lord I ’ So Jacob at eventide did lay him down to sleep. This betokens peace of mind. Fourthly, he remembers, as St Gregory points out, that after supper there comes no other meal. * When the spark in the soul takes in divine light it needs no other sustenance but keeps ever to this divine light.*

^ See also Jostes, Nos. 1 and 0 ; and Spainer’s Texte, A. 4 (3 versions), from which the starred passages are added. To whom God grants this provender, so fragrant, so delicious, that soul shall never relish any other fare. St Augustine says, ‘ God is of such a nature that once embracing him we can never rest elsewhere.’ St Augustine says, ‘ Lord, so thou take from us thyself, grant us then another thee or we shall have no rest ; we have no mind for aught but thee.’ One holy man says of the God-loving soul, that she gets out of God whatsoever she will, befooling him so thoroughly he can deny her not a thing there is. He took himself in one way and gave himself another way: he took himself God-and-man and gave himself God-andMan, another self in a mystic vessel. Very precious hallows arc not wantonly exposed to public gaze and touch. So he clad himself in the frock of the appearance of bread, even as my bodily food is altered in my soul, which is not in my nature for an instant without combining with it. For there is a power in nature which separates the base and throws it out, and the high invades the low to the last needle-point and is embodied in it. The things I ate a fortnight since are every bit as much united with my soul as what I did receive within my mother’s womb. Whoso takes this food fasting becomes as truly one therewith as flesh and blood arc with my soul.

There was a certain man ; the man had not a name because this man is God. The philosopher affirms concerning the first cause that it transcends speech. All words fail. Because of the surpassing pureness of its nature. We have but three ways of speaking about things : first, in terms of things above them ; second, of their likes ; and thirdly, of the works of the things. To give you an example. The power of the sun draws up the precious sap out of the roots into the shoots and brings it out in flower, here the solar power being above it. * As wc say of the tree, so we say of the things above the tree ; of the sun, for example, which is working in the tree.* Likewise I say the divine light is working in the soul. * The spark in the soul being drawn up in this light and in the Holy Ghost and borne aloft to its first source. But nothing true can be spoken of God, because there is nothing above him.* That the soul expresses God does not in anywise affect his real intrinsic being : no one can express what he actually is. Sometimes we say one thing is like another. * We can say nothing of God because nothing is like him.* Creatures enclose a mere nothing of God wherefore they cannot disclose him. The painter who has painted a good portrait therein shows his art : it is not himself that it reveals to us. Creatures can no more give out God than they can take in exactly what he is.

The God-and-Man has prepared this supper, the ineffable man who is wordless. According to St Augustine, what we say about God is not true and the things that we say not are true. Things we say that God is he is not ; what we say he is not that he is rather than what we say that he is. Who has prepared this repast ? A man, the man who is God. King David says, ‘ O Lord, how great and manifold is thy entertainment, the sweets that are laid up for them that love thee ! ’ (Not ‘ them that fear thee.’) St Augustine meditating on this food, regarded it with loathing and distaste, when lo! he heard a voice from within, ‘ I am the food of the great, wax and grow great * eating me ; nor ween not that I shall be turned into thee : thou shalt be turned into me.* When God works in the fiery heat the diverse things within the soul sublime and burn away. By the absolute truth ! soul enters more into God than any food into us ; nay, the soul is changed into God. There is a power in the soul which splits off what is base and is absorbed into God. To wit, the spark of the soul. My soul becomes more one with God than food does with my soul.

Who has prepared this evening meal ? A man. Dost know his name ? * Not I. His name is not spoken. He is more silence than speech. He is above name. What food has he prepared for this feast ? Himself, no less than himself.* (What does the servant mean ?) According to St Gregory the servant means preachers. And in another sense the servant means the angels, *thc angels ever calling us with interior voice.* Thirdly, methinks this servant is the spark of the soul, which is sent there by God and is his light striking down from above, the reflection (or image) of his divine nature and ever opposed to anything ungodly : not a power of the soul, as some theologians make it, but a permanent tendency to good ; aye, even in hell it is inclined to good. According to the masters, this light is of the nature of unceasing effort ; it is called syndcresis, that is to say, a joining to and turning from. It has two works. One is remorse for imperfection. The other work consists in ever more invoking good and bringing it direct into the soul, even though she be in hell. It is a great supper. He said to the servant, ‘ Go out and compel them to come in, those that are bidden, for all things are now ready.’ All that he is the soul receives. What the soul desires is now prepared. The things God gives have always been. Behold them new and fresh and all at once in the eternal now.

A gr^at philosopher declares that anything I see comes into my eyes purified and ghostly, and the light that comes into my eyes would never get into my soul but for a power above it. * There is a power in sight which is superior to the eyes set in the head and more far-reaching than the heavens and earth. This power seizes all the things that come into the eye^ and bears them up into the soul.* St Augustine says the spark comes nigher to the truth than any human knowledge, flight burns. They say that one is lighted from another. If so, the light is higher than the thing that burns. For instance, take a taper, extinguished but still glimmering and smoking, and hold it to the light ; this will glance down and light the other. They say one fire burns another. But I traverse that. Fire, I ween, does burn itself. For one thing to burn another it must needs be above it, like heaven, for example, which burns not and is cold ; natheless it sets on fire and that by dint of contact with the angels. For this the soul prepares by practice. Then she is fired from above. By the angelic light. He says to the servant, ‘ Go out and say to them that were bidden, Come, for all things arc now ready.* Then one said,

‘ I have bought a piece of ground, I cannot come.’ These arc they who still have worldly cares ; they never taste this supper. A second said, ‘ I have bought five yoke of oxen.’ These five yoke, I fancy, stand for the five senses, for each sense is self and other and the very tongue is double. So in my story yesterday, when God said to the woman, ‘ Bring me thy husband,’ she replied, ‘ I have none.’ Whereupon quoth he, ‘ Thou sayest truly : thou hast had five, and him whom now thou hast is not thine husband.’ The moral is that those who live the life of the five senses never taste this food. The third one said, ‘ I have married a wife, therefore 1 cannot come.’ The soul is all-to single when she turns to God. As glancing down in this direction she is woman ; but as seeing God in himself and visiting God at home she is the man. Of old it was forbidden to men to dress in woman’s clothes or women man’s. She is man when she penetrates into God, impartibly and without means. But when she peers forth at all she is woman. * As I have repeatedly said, the man in the soul is the intellect. When the soul looks straight up to God with her mind then the soul is the man, she is one and not two. But thinking and glancing down she dons female dress.* Quoth our liOrd, ‘ Verily, these shall not taste of my supper ’ ; and he commanded the servant, ‘ Go out into the streets and the lanes, into the highways and hedges — the narrower the wider and hedged about.’ * For the more recollected the soul the less scattered she is and the more concentrated the wider her ken.* And some of her powers arc hedged into one sense. The power I see with I do not hear with, nor with my power of hearing can I see. So with the rest (of the five senses). But on the other hand, the soul exists entire in every member; there is some power, therefore, not confined to place at all.

What is the servant ? Angels and preachers (so says St Gregory). But, as it seems to irie, the servant is a symbol of the spark. He says to the servant, ‘ Go out into the hedges and drive in thither these four kinds of folk : the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind : Verily, none other shall taste of my supper.’ Let us throw off those three and rise up man, So help us God. Amen. The meat and drink I took a fortnight since has turned into my blood, my flesh, my nature. That is due to the power of the soul which brings it into my nature ; it is as truly one with me as what was born with me. So does the power of the Holy Ghost take the purest and lightest and highest and the spark of the soul and carry it up in the fire of love. Just like the sun’s power ; this lays hold in the roots of the tree of what is most pure and essential, drawing it up into the branches where it flowers. Even so is the spark of the soul being always drawn up in the light and in the Holy Ghost and conveyed into its source, becoming all-to one with God and searching him so throughly that it is more the same as God than food is with my life.

I say it is the light up in the soul where the soul nature Mark first in St Andrew his singleness of life and spiritual attainments whereby his soul was enabled, in her intellect, to ascend in the grace of God above all creatures into God. For the power of the Holy Ghost seizes the very highest and purest, the spark of the soul, and carries it up in the flame of love. Just as the power of the sun takes what is purest and subtlest out of the roots of the tree and draws it into the branches where it is in flower. Likewise the soul-spark is conveyed aloft into its source and is absorbed into God and is identified with God and is the spiritual light of God. There are two lights in the soul, one is a light up in the ^ See Zuchhold, No. 26. Turallel passages from an Oxford MS. of Eckhart’s Sermons (Sievers’ copy), and a sorinon on St Andrew, evidently by the same hand, but boaring tlie name of Nikolaus von Landau. See also Jostes, Nos. 1 and 69. touches angelic nature and passes into the angelic nature ; it is from God and is pouring into the soul above nature.

Some say it is a power. It is not. A servant is mentioned, that is the intellect. There soul attains angelic nature and is the image of God. In this light the soul has intercourse with angels and ckc with those angels that are fallen into hell. There the spark subsists without any kind of suffering, turning straight up into God. And withal she is like the good angels in this power, who work unceasingly in God, beholding God in God and returning all work into God. This light the soul carries within her. The masters call it a power in the soul, this synderesis. It is not. It means something hanging to God and is ever averse from evil. In hell it tends to God. It is soul at the point where the soul is by nature in contact with the angels’ nature. The other light is what I speak of. This light pours into the soul from on high, above nature. Some call it a power of the soul. But it is not. It is called synderesis. To wit, the intellect which is a spark (or ray) of God the Father given by God out of his Godhead’s Godnature, and is the form of God without any difference at all. In it she is in touch with the angelic nature.

In this light the soul has community with angels also those cast into hell. There the spark is free from all suffering and faces straight up into God and has precisely his nature. And withal she has a somewhat, mind, in common with good angels who are constantly working in God and emanating from God and bearing back all their work into God and receiving God from God in God. The intellect is like to these good angels, drinking God in his eternal savour, his living sweetness and in his own ground. She is sent away from God and is ’ a light that (re)turns : the reflection of the divine nature which the soul has cast into her. The masters call it synderesis which is as much as to say something suspended from God all the time and which never docs wrong. In hell, says St Augustine, it ever at war in the soul with the impure and the ungodly. is turned to God. In the soul it wages constant war with things that are not pure and are not godly. It looks neither to God’s glory nor possessions. It presses up into the goal of divine essence and is the true God’s messenger which leads and draws mankind to the celestial feast : ct misit servum suum hora ccne.