Page 5 (part 3)

The secret of attainment does not lie in meditation or in thinking, in the realisation of Divine qualities, in the invocation of saints or angels; it is a work between the naked soul and God in His uttermost essence, in an essence so uttermost that "it profiteth little, or nothing at all, to think upon the loving kindness of God, or upon the holy angels and saints, or else upon the glory and joys of heaven." That, and all that, is fair work and square work, good and true work, but it is not materials for building the Most Secret, Most Holy Temple, into which God and the soul go in and one only comes out. Yet is the old doctrine the true doctrine still; there is nothing abrogated and there is nothing reduced. In all but the deepest paths, it is meet and right and salutary to seek the interceding angels and the communion of saints, to dwell upon the Passion of Christ, and so forth. The old histories also are truly understood in the old way; the Passion was no shadowy pageant; Christ died and rose in the body; in the body He ascended into Heaven, and no less and no differently in that body He sitteth at the right hand of the Father Almighty. And yet these references to doctrine and practice, to symbol, rite and ceremony, are only like the hills standing about Jerusalem, and into the city mystic, into the central place of debate, they do not enter anywise. They have not been expelled-they are simply not there, and the reason is that there they do not belong. Once more, it is between God and the soul. It is as if the ways were filled with the pageants of the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies; as if the Masses and the Matins and the Vespers celebrated in marvellous and stately measures the Holy Trinity, the dilucid contemplation of the Persons, the ineffable secrets of the hypostatic state and the super-incession of Divine natures. But after all these wonders, rank after rank of the Blessed Angels, after all visions of the Great White Throne, it is as if a quiet centre opened unawares and through an immeasurable silence drew down the soul-from the many splendours into the one splendour, from the populous cities of the blest, from the things that are without in the transcendence into the thing that is of all within--as if the soul saw there the one God and itself as the one worshipper. But after a little while the worshipper itself has dissolved, and from henceforth and for ever it has the consciousness of God only. This is the knowledge of self, no longer attained by a reflex act of the consciousness, but by a direct act in the unity of the infinite consciousness; in this mode of knowledge there is that which knows even as it is known, but such mode is in virtue of such an union that the self does not remain, because there is no separateness henceforth. It follows that the Divine Union, as I have sought to give it expression apart from all antecedents and warrants of precursors-I think indeed that there are none-is something much deeper and higher than is understood by the Beatific Vision, which shines with all the lights of noon and sunrise and sunset at the summit of the mountain of theology. That Vision is more especially of St. Thomas, the Angelic Doctor, the mighty Angel of the Schools, expounding the Transcendence to himself in the most resplendent and spiritual terms of the logical understanding. The intervening distinction between it and the term of all is that the one is the state of beholding and the other is the state of being; the one is seeing the Vision and the other is becoming it.