第50章

"Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a human creature or sought some secret of human science.Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no mysteries.Be anxious for nothing, He will give you all.Yes, in His heart are treasures with which the petty joys you lose on earth are not to be compared.What I tell you is true; you shall possess His power; you may use it as you would use the gifts of lover or mistress.

Alas! men doubt, they lack faith, and will, and persistence.If some set their feet in the path, they look behind them and presently turn back.Few decide between the two extremes,--to go or stay, heaven or the mire.All hesitate.Weakness leads astray, passion allures into dangerous paths, vice becomes habitual, man flounders in the mud and makes no progress towards a better state.

"All human beings go through a previous life in the sphere of Instinct, where they are brought to see the worthlessness of earthly treasures, to amass which they gave themselves such untold pains! Who can tell how many times the human being lives in the sphere of Instinct before he is prepared to enter the sphere of Abstractions, where thought expends itself on erring science, where mind wearies at last of human language? for, when Matter is exhausted, Spirit enters.

Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude whose starry plains are but the vestibule of Spiritual Worlds? He feels his way amid the void, makes trial of nothingness, and then at last his eyes revert upon the Path.Then follow other existences,--all to be lived to reach the place where Light effulgent shines.Death is the post-house of the journey.A lifetime may be needed merely to gain the virtues which annul the errors of man's preceding life.First comes the life of suffering, whose tortures create a thirst for love.

Next the life of love and devotion to the creature, teaching devotion to the Creator,--a life where the virtues of love, its martyrdoms, its joys followed by sorrows, its angelic hopes, its patience, its resignation, excite an appetite for things divine.Then follows the life which seeks in silence the traces of the Word; in which the soul grows humble and charitable.Next the life of longing; and lastly, the life of prayer.In that is the noonday sun; there are the flowers, there the harvest!

"The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others,--existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone life.The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.Some receive the gift of form, some the gift of numbers, others the gift of harmony.All these gifts are steps of progress in the Path of Light.Yes, he who possesses a single one of them touches at that point the Infinite.Earth has divided the Word--of which I here reveal some syllables--into particles, she has reduced it to dust and has scattered it through her works, her dogmas, her poems.If some impalpable grain shines like a diamond in a human work, men cry: 'How grand! how true! how glorious!' That fragment vibrates in their souls and wakes a presentiment of heaven: to some, a melody that weans from earth; to others, the solitude that draws to God.To all, whatsoever sends us back upon ourselves, whatsoever strikes us down and crushes us, lifts or abases us,--THAT is but a syllable of the Divine Word.

"When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.One thought borne inward, one prayer uplifted, one suffering endured, one echo of the Word within us, and our souls are forever changed.All ends in God; and many are the ways to find Him by walking straight before us.When the happy day arrives in which you set your feet upon the Path and begin your pilgrimage, the world will know nothing of it; earth no longer understands you; you no longer understand each other.Men who attain a knowledge of these things, who lisp a few syllables of the Word, often have not where to lay their head; hunted like beasts they perish on the scaffold, to the joy of assembled peoples, while Angels open to them the gates of heaven.

Therefore, your destiny is a secret between yourself and God, just as love is a secret between two hearts.You may be the buried treasure, trodden under the feet of men thirsting for gold yet all-unknowing that you are there beneath them.

"Henceforth your existence becomes a thing of ceaseless activity; each act has a meaning which connects you with God, just as in love your actions and your thoughts are filled with the loved one.But love and its joys, love and its pleasures limited by the senses, are but the imperfect image of the love which unites you to your celestial Spouse.