At last my little suffering life is sheltered in the known, the felt, protection of the Ineffable and Invisible Being. The Being Who, without revealing Himself to me by sight or sound, yet communicates Himself to me in some divine manner at once all-sufficing and inexpressible. I ask no questions: I am in no haste of anxious learning. My heart and my mind and my soul stand still and drink in the glory of this happiness. All day, often half the night, I worship Him. I love Him with this new love, so different from anything known before. The greatest earthly love, by comparison to it, has become feeble, impure, almost grotesque in its inefficiency a tinsel counterfeit of this glistening mystery which must still be spoken of as love because I know no other name.

I find it difficult, almost impossible, to speak to my fellow-creatures, because I have only two words, two thoughts in my entire being: my God, and my love for Him.

I am like a thing that is magnetised, held: I am not able, day or night, to detach my mind from God.

I wake with His name upon my lips, with His glory in my soul. In all this there is no virtue on my part; there is no effort; the capacity for this boundless devotion is a free gift. Coming immediately after my anguished prayer on the hill, it appears to me to have come solely on account of that one prayer the previous prayers, struggles, endeavours of five-and-twenty years are entirely forgotten. I comprehend nothing of the mystery, neither as yet do I feel any desire to comprehend it; but in a world where only love, beauty, happiness, and repose exist, I walk and talk and live alone with God.

Yet the war was continuing as usual, my husband was in the same danger, I became ill with influenza, my friends continued to die of wounds, my relations to be killed one by one; but in all this there was no pain: the sting, the anguish, had gone out of every single thing in life.

My consciousness feels to be composed of two extremes: I am a child of a few years of age, to whom sin, suffering, pain, evil, and temptation are not known, and yet, though knowing so little, I know the unutterably great I know God. This cannot be expressed merely, it can be said that two extremes have met.

This new consciousness, this new worship, this new love is for the Godhead. Christ is gone up into the Godhead, and I worship Him in, and as One with, the Godhead. For three months this continues uninterruptedly. Then Jesus Christ presents Himself to my consciousness. Jesus, Who led me to this happiness, now calls and calls to my soul. Immediately I commence to respond to Him. He is drawing me away; He is teaching me something at first I do not know what, but soon I know that He is leading me out of this Eden, this paradise of my childhood: I know it, because I begin to feel pain again, and to recognise evil. O my Jesus, my Jesus, must I really follow Thee out of Paradise back into pain? Yes, in less than two weeks I am fully back in the world again but not the same world, because I know how to escape from it. The Door that I knocked at, and that all in one moment was opened to me, is never closed. I can go in and out. God never closes to me the right of way; never severs those secret wires of Divine Communication.

But my soul is not nursed, as it were, in His Hands day and night she must learn to grow up. Woeful education, deadly days of learning, stony paths that hurt, that hurt all the more because of the felicity that only so recently was mine.

For three months I am walking further and further out of Eden and back into the horrors of the world following Jesus.

One night I compose myself as usual for sleep, but I do not sleep, neither can I say that I am quite awake. It is neither sleep, nor is my wakefulness the usual wakefulness. I do not dream, I cannot move. My consciousness is alight with a new fiery energy of life; it feels to extend to an infinite distance beyond my body, and yet remains connected with my body. I live in a manner totally new and totally incomprehensible, a life in which none of my senses are used and which is yet a thousand, and more than a thousand, times as vivid. It is living at white heat without forms, without sound, without sight, without anything which I have ever been aware of in this world, and at a terrible speed. What is the meaning of all this? I do not know: my body is quite helpless and is distressed, but I am not afraid. God is teaching me something in His own way. For six weeks every night I enter this condition, and the duration and power or intensity of it increase by degrees. It feels that my soul is projected or travels for incalculable distances beyond my body (long afterwards I understand through experience that this is not the mode of it, but that the soul remaining in the body is by some de-insulation exposed to the knowledge of spirit-life as and when free of the flesh) and I learn to comprehend and to know a new manner of living, as a swimmer learns a new mode of progression by means of his swimming, which is not his natural way.

By the end of three weeks I can remain nightly for many hours in this condition, which is always accompanied by an intense and vivid consciousness of God.

As this consciousness of God becomes more and more vivid so my body suffers more and more. By day I can only eat the smallest morsels of food, which almost choke me, but I drink a great quantity of water. I am perfectly healthy, though I have hardly any sleep and very little, indeed almost no, food the suffering is only at night with the breathing and the heart when in this strange condition. But I have no anxiety whatever; I am glad that He shall do as He pleases with me. Nothing but love can give us this supreme confidence.

During the whole of these experiences I live in a state of very considerable abstraction. But this now suddenly increases, increases to such an extent that I hardly know whether to call it abstraction or the extremity of poverty. I now become divested of all interests outside and inside, divested of the greater part of my intelligence, divested of my will. I am of no value whatever, less than the dust on the road.

In this awful nothingness I am still I. My consciousness continues and is not confounded with or lost in any other consciousness, but is reduced to stark nakedness and worth nothing: and this worthless nothing is hung up and, as it were, suspended nowhere in particular as far from earth as from heaven, totally unknown and unwanted by both God and Man. I am naked patience waiting. I have a few thoughts, but very few: I think one thought where in normal times I should think ten thousand. I feel and know that I am nothing, and I feel that this has been done to me; just as before, all that I had was also done to me and was a gift. So I acknowledge that I once had and was perhaps something and that now I possess and certainly am nothing I acknowledge it, I accept it, without hesitation, without protest. One of my few thoughts is that I shall remain for the rest of my natural life in this pitiful state where, however, I shall hope to be preserved from further sinning simply because I have not a sufficiency of will, intelligence, or thought with which to sin! I am too completely nothing to be able to sin. I have another thought, which is that as I no longer have any intelligence with which to deal with the ordinary difficulties of life, such as street life and traffic, I shall shortly be run over and killed; and so I put a card with my address on it into my little handbag, for the convenience of those who shall be obliged to deal with my body afterwards.

I have just sufficient capacity left me to automatically, mechanically, go through with the necessities of life. I have not become idiotic. I live in a tremendous and profound solitude, such a solitude as would frighten many people greatly. But my beautiful pastime had accustomed me to solitude and also to something of this nothingness a brief nothingness was a necessary part of the beautiful pastime: so I have no fears now of any kind; but I wonder. Perhaps I am just four things wonder, patience, resignation, and nothing.

Yet through this dreadful solitude penetrates the inspiration of some unseen guide. As regards this particular time I am convinced that this guide is an outside presence. I depend in all my goings and comings upon the guidance of this guide who proves incredibly accurate in every detail, in details of even the smallest necessities. If this guide is a part of myself, it is that of me with which I have not previously come in contact; and it is not the Reason, but far beyond the Reason, for it divines. It is then either a spiritual guide, companion, or guardian angel, or it is a power possessed by the soul herself a foretasting cognisance, a mysterious intuition of which we as yet comprehend little or nothing, and which we have not yet learnt to command: it presents itself; it absents itself; but it condescends to every need; it is always helpful, always beneficent; it sees that which it sees before the event; it hears that which it hears before the words are spoken. It guides by what would seem to be two very different modes: the greater things come by a mode altogether indescribable; but for the small things of every day I will take simple examples here and there. I am abroad. Someone in the family at home is taken dangerously ill. I am urgently needed; but the trains are overcrowded, I am unable to get my seat transferred to an earlier date, I cannot let them know at home when I shall return: all is uncertain, all is chaos. I am painfully anxious, I am ashamed to say I am greatly worried: I turn as always to my Lord, asking Him to forgive these selfish fears and to help me. A little while later a scene presents itself to me I see my own room, I hear the voice of a page-boy standing in the door and saying, “You are wanted on the telephone”; then I am at the telephone, and a voice is saying to me, “Your train accommodation is transferred to Friday the 19th.” That is all, because I am rung off.

Five days pass. I am in my room, and the page is really standing at the door, and he says, “You are wanted on the telephone.” I go to the telephone, and a voice says, “Your train accommodation is transferred to Friday the 19th.” That is all, because I am rung off.

Again, there is a young lay-reader, closely in contact with Christ; he has a wife and young child. The weather is bitterly cold. A picture suddenly comes before me of this family, and there is a voice saying, “He was gathering together the last little pieces of fuel when your present came.” Immediately I understand that I am required to send coal to these people, and to do it at once without delay. The following day the wife comes with tears to thank me, and she tells me, “We were in despair; my husband’s heart is so weak he cannot bear the cold, he becomes seriously ill. He was gathering together the last little pieces of fuel when your present came.”

Or, again, I very badly need a pair of walking shoes, but for weeks I have been so absorbed in contemplation that the pain of bringing myself from this holy joy to do shopping is too great, and I delay and delay; I cannot bring myself to it; but shoes are a necessity of earthly life. Having exceedingly narrow feet, I am obliged always to get my shoes from a certain maker, and now, during the war, he makes so few shoes. To-day a picture of the shop comes before me, and the words “Go to-day, go to-day,” urge themselves upon my consciousness. Then a picture comes of the assistant; I show her my foot, and she says, “There is only one pair left; how fortunate you came to-day!” So I understand I must go to my shopping and, greatly against my will, I go that afternoon. The assistant comes forward, and I show her my foot, and she says, “There is only one pair left; how fortunate you came to-day!”

Always in this mode of the guiding are the little picture and the exact words: all of it of the easiest to describe; but of the other and the greater guiding I do not know how to tell. It is sheer pure knowledge, received not in parts, pictures, or words, but as a whole and in a mode so exquisitely mysterious as to be at once too intricate for description, and yet simplicity itself!

Sure, perfect, and serene mode of knowledge! Royal knowledge which knows no toil, no sweat of work, no common drudgery, art thou of the soul herself, or art thou altogether from outside the soul? This I know, that though the first mode would seem to be very small and to deal with littleness, and the last mode seems to be entirely apart from it because of the greatnesses with which it deals that they are linked and that the power is one power soaring to the highest, condescending to the smallest.

So now, in the time of this strange abstraction and poverty, when the cinematograph of my mind is closed down, and with it the delicate mechanism which takes up, uses, and connects all that we take in by the senses, and which makes the world so real and so comprehensible, is become unhitched and disconnected, so that nothing in the world seems any longer real or possesses either value or meaning, and I stand before it all defenceless, seemingly unable to deal with it, utterly indifferent to it; then and now Reason may very well say to me, “You are in very great danger”; but I am not in any danger, because I am guided whenever necessary by some condescending sagacity far more sagacious than my poor Reason, infinitely more penetrative and effectual than any sense of eye or ear. I remain fully convinced that at this time, at any rate, it was an outside sagacity which guided me truly a guardian angel.

This period of intense abstraction, this strange valley of humiliation, poverty, solitude, seemed a necessary prelude to the great, the supreme, experience of my life. As I came slowly out of this poverty and solitude, the joyousness of my spiritual experience increased: the nights were no longer at all a time of sleep or repose, but of rapturous living.

The sixth week came, and I commenced to fear the nights and this tremendous living, because the happiness and the light and the poignancy and the rapture of it were becoming more than I could bear. I began to wonder secretly if God intended to draw my soul so near to Him that I should die of the splendour of this living, My raptures were not only caused by the sense of the immediate Presence of God this is a distinctive rapture running through and above all raptures, but there are lesser ecstasies caused by the meeting of the soul with Thoughts or Ideas, with melodies which bear the soul in almost unendurable delight upon a thousand summits of perfection; and with an all-pervading rapturous Beauty in a great light. There is this peculiarity about the manner of these thoughts and melodies and beauties they are not spoken, heard, or seen, but lived. I could not pass these things to my reason and translate the Ideas into words or the melodies into sounds, or the beauty into objects, for spirit-living is not translatable to earth-living, and I found in it no words, no sounds, no objects, and I comprehended and I lived with that in me which is above Reason and of which I had, previously to these experiences, had no cognisance.

There came a night when I passed beyond Ideas, beyond melody, beyond beauty, into vast lost spaces, depths of untellable bliss, into a Light. And the Light is an ecstasy of delight, and the Light is an ocean of bliss, and the Light is Life and Love, and the Light is the too deep contact with God, and the Light is unbearable Joy; and in unendurable bliss my soul beseeches God that He will cover her from this most terrible rapture, this felicity which exceeds all measure. And she is not covered from it. And she beseeches Him again; and she is not covered; and being in the last extremity from this most terrible joy, she beseeches Him again: and immediately is covered from it.

My soul, my whole being, is terrified of God, and of joy. I dare not think of Him, I dare not pray; but, like some pitiful and wounded child, I creep to the feet of Jesus.

When on the following evening once more the day closes and I compose myself for the night, I wonder tremblingly to what He will again expose me; but for the first time in six weeks I fall into a natural sleep and know no more until the morning.

Then I understand that the lesson is over. Mighty and Terrible God, it was enough!

In the light of these measureless joys what is any earthly joy? What is the very greatest experience of earthly happiness but so much waste paper?

What are the joys of those vices for which men sell their souls, but soap-bubbles!

The whole meaning of life, together with all the graduated and accepted values of it, becomes for ever changed in the light of the knowledge of Celestial Happiness.