Now theologians say, God is by nature bound to draw his likes out of their selfhood into himself just as the sun will draw up moisture. Then the soul, merged in the naked Godhead, is no more to be found than a wine-drop in mid-ocean. That soul can no more sin than God can. The man is said to be conformed to God. God is his active principle. He has real perception. Things are in him without image, for he is one with God in whom are all things. In this case it is true to say, all things are in man formless. The masters say: ‘To gauge the soul we must gauge her with God, for the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one nature.’ The part that gives life to the body is the least part of the soul. The man who realizes this has fresh and inexhaustible delight. What though he walks in time, he dwells in his eternal nature. He inhabits the truth. This man is known by five signs. First, he never complains. Next, he never makes excuses: when accused, he leaves the facts to vindicate him. Thirdly, there is nothing he wants in earth or heaven but what God wills himself. Fourthly, he is not moved in time. Fifthly, he is never rejoiced : he is joy itself.
Here the trusty confessor comes seeking his daughter in an unknown land, earnestly entreating her to hold converse with him. She says, ‘ I can talk with you of outward things.’-—‘ ’T will serve,’ quoth he. ‘ Tell me, what, thinkest thou, made thee most ripe for the eternal truth?’ She answered: ‘ Leaving myself wherever I found myself. Next, never excusing myself from accusations which concerned myself alone. Thirdly, whatever my pain, wanting still more and compelling myself to bear it equably. Fourth, being supple to insignificance, poverty and lack of creature comforts. Fifth, never seeing souls sin without rebuke and never hearing things against the gospel and the life of Christ without I fought them to the death. But know that it has been my habit rather to rebuke those persons whose sins I saw were doing them a mortal mischief. I never did it save purely out of love to God, being moved to pity for them. Many an insult they have hurled upon me. Sixth, never avoiding occasion of insult: I fled from honour but I stayed for shame. Seventh, never looking back when once I knew the way to my eternal happiness; and taking no man’s counsel, but plodding straight on. Eighth, being never content with present light nor present sight, which were as nothing to my certainty. Ninth, never resisting any use God chose to put me to. Tenth, rigid discipline, inward and outward.’
‘God be praised,’ he said. ‘Thou hast told me thy outward rule ; now tell me thy inner.” Quoth she, ‘ God wot, I fear it is
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beyond you.’—‘ But just a hint; deny me not,’ he urged. And she responded : ‘ At the moment of confirmation there existed in me all the works God ever wrought as a little thing inferior to heaven. My abode was heaven. I dwelt there with the inmates of the Trinity which to me was as familiar as to the householder the house he dwells in, and saw the partition between all creatures and God’s whole creation : it was as plain as the five fingers on my hand.’—‘ He said, ‘ Explain more fully.” She replied, ‘I will. I had assembled all my soul-powers. When I saw into myself I saw God in me and everything God ever made in earth and heaven. Let me explain it better. As you know right well, anyone who faces God in the mirror of truth sees everything depicted in that mirror: all things, that is to say. Such was my inner habit before confirmation. Do you quite take me ? ’—* It must be so, of course,’ he said. ‘Is that not thy rule now?’ She answered, “No, I have nothing to do with saints nor angels nor crea- tures nor anything created; it is all uniform: not merely nothing created but nothing uttered concerns me.’—* Explain,’ he said. She said, ‘I will. I am confirmed in the naked Godhead, wherein is neither form or image.’-—‘ Art there for good?’ he asked. She answered, ‘ Yes.” Quoth he, ‘ Daughter, say on, this talk delights me.’ And she proceeded, * As I am no creature can be, as creature. —‘ Explain,’ he said. Quoth she, ‘I am as I was before I was created: just God and God. No saint nor angel nor choir nor heaven. Eight heavens are often spoken of and nine choirs of angels ; there is nothing of that where Iam, You must know that expressions of that sort, which conjure up pictures in the mind, merely serve as allurements to God. In God there is nothing but God ; no soul gets to God until she is God as she was before she was made.’
He said, ‘ You speak the truth, daughter. Now do for God’s sake counsel me as best thou canst how I may gain possession of this good.’—* I will give you sure guidance,’ she said. ‘As you are well aware, creatures were made from nothing and must return to nothing ere they reach their source.’ ‘True,’ he agreed. Quoth she, ‘ Enough said. Tell me now, what is nothing?’ He replied, ‘I know what is nothing and I know what is less than nothing. Imperfections, I take it, are nothing to God. So that anyone subject to imperfections is less than nothing.’-—‘ How so?’ — He is the servant of imperfection. Nothing is nothing. The servant of imperfection is less than nothing.’ Quoth she, ‘ Pre- cisely. The way then to obtain your good is to subordinate yourself to yourself and creatures till you can find no more to do towards God’s working in you.’—* You are right,’ he cried. ‘ One master says, He who loves God as his God, and prays to God as
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his God and is therewith content, is to me as an unbeliever,’— “ Blessed be the master who’said that,’ quoth she. ‘ He knew the truth. For you must understand that anyone content with what can be expressed in words—God is a word, heaven is a word— whose soul-powers, love and knowledge, insist on nothing further than what can be expressed, is aptly styled an unbeliever. It is the lower senses orfpowers of the soul which grasp things uttered. The higher powers are not content with that: these keep on pressing forward till they strike the source from whence the soul flowed forth. The powers of the soul cannot enter her source. All nine powers of the soul serve the man of the soul ; they draw him out of nether things and speed him to his source. When the soul stands before her cause, superior to things in her main power, her powers remain without. Look you, it is the naked soul, naked of things nameable, one in the same, that progresses in the naked Godhead, like oil that creeps in cloth: so the soul goes creeping forward, flowing on and on so long as God ordains her to give life to the body in time. Know, while the good man lives on earth his soul is progressing in eternity. Hence the good like living.’—‘ True daughter,’ he observed. ‘One master says: Suppose there lay at point to die two men equally pleasant in the eyes of God, and that both died, the one before the other but just long enough to give that other time to breathe one sigh for God, to cast one thought to the least martyr that God ever led, the lightest word God ever spoke, this would entitle him to precedence over the other who died first, while God remains eternal.’—‘ That is so,’ she said. ‘ Know also, as the good shall rise so fall the wicked who are in sin.’
_ ‘Now prithee, daughter, tell me. We speak of heaven and hell and purgatory and read a vast amount about them. We also read that God is in everything and everything in God.’—‘ And so it is,’ she said.—“ Then, for God’s sake,’ quoth he, ‘ acquaint me with the rightful view of it.—* Gladly, so far as I can put it into words,’ she said. ‘ Hell is nothing but a state or being, Our being here is our eternal being ; we are as it were grounded init. Many people fondly imagine here to have creaturely being and divine being yonder. That is not so. It is a popular delusion. Purgatory is a thing assumed, like penance, and comes to an end. Look at it like this. Some souls so reverence God and the friends of God that God is constrained to have mercy on them, be it only at their end that true repentance comes to them in love and knowledge and they rise out of themselves and everything created. Then true love is their being and did they go on living they would sin no more but suffer for true love’s sake all our Lord Jesus Christ suffered, and his beloved. These rise in grace. But people who
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go hence in their state of creaturehood are in that state eternally which is called hell. Likewise, theré%remains their state to those - who suffer naught but God to be in them : God is their being and remains their being eternally.
‘ Again, touching the last day, people say, God shall judge. So he shall, but not as they think. Each man is his own judge in this sense : the state he then appears in he is ig eternally. People frequently assert : The body shall rise with the soul. So it shall. But not as they think. ‘The being of the body and the being of the soul go to form one being. Those souls who all their days have spent their time in God till God has come to be their being, to them God stays their being, body and soul eternally. Not so the wicked who have squandered their time on creatures ; what their state is it continues to be, and this eternal lapsing from God and from his friends is called hell. Yet bear in mind that these same persons get their being from God or they would not be at all. So they are in God and God is in them. You see, they have the being of God. Take it like this. They are in God as ’twere a man with his life forfeit to some righteous lord whose honour he has stolen. and whose friends, and plotted frequently against his life; and now his lord, who showed him only kindness in hopes of his reform, is vexed to find that he declines to mend. Holding him in the grip of justice, his lord forbears to kill. He punishes the outrage on himself. First, bound hand and foot, the man is cast into the lowest donjon among toads and reptiles and the foul water which is wont to lie in deepest donjon-keeps. Fetched up from thence, he is disgraced before the world, that they may see his open shame and he their joy. So much the more his torment. Insult after insult do they heap upon him, shame unthinkable ; he is ever.cast back into his donjon, ever in dread of execution. Even so it is permissible to say that man is at the court, for the donjon is the royal court as much as the hall is where the king stays with his friends; but conditions, you see, are different. Though not with that celestial race we spoke of. Know that grief endures eternally. I marvel that anyone who hears these words should dare to sin. Purgatory is so grievous in itself that anyone who knows the rights of it would stay no time in sin. Purgatory you must know is temporal and notional. A soul which leaves the body, as I said, in faith and love and will to do all for God’s sake and eschew sin for God, that soul is in dire distress, unable to do anything but wait till God shall deign to take compassion on her. And though this happen not till doomsday, the hope is her life. Doomsday past, this is over. But souls in the divine condition are not affected in this sense: on quitting the body such a soul remains in a condition of divinity determined by her knowledge