A Study of Ecstasy

In the first days of his conversion it happened upon the Feast of St. Agnes, when the Convent had breakfasted at midday, that the Servitor went into the choir. He was alone, and he placed himself in the last stall on the prior’s side. And he was in much suffering, for a heavy trouble weighed upon his heart. And being there alone, and devoid of all consolations—no one by his side, no one near him—of a sudden his soul was rapt in his body, or out of his body.

Then did he see and hear that which no tongue can express. That which the Servitor saw had no form neither any manner of being; yet he had of it a joy such as he might have known in the seeing of the shapes and substances of all joyful things. His heart was hungry, yet satisfied, his soul was full of contentment and joy: his prayers and hopes were all fulfilled. And the Friar could do nought but contemplate this Shining Brightness; and he altogether forgot himself and all other things. Was it day or night? He knew not. It was, as it were, a manifestation of the sweetness of Eternal Life in the sensations of silence and of rest.

Then he said, “If that which I see and feel be not the Kingdom of Heaven, I know not what it can be: for it is very sure that the endurance of all possible pains were but a small price to pay for the eternal possession of so great a joy.” This ecstasy lasted from half an hour to an hour, and whether his soul were in the body or out of the body he could not tell.

But when he came to his senses it seemed to him that he returned from another world. And so greatly did his body suffer in this short rapture that it seemed to him that none, even in dying, could suffer so greatly in so short a time. The Servitor came to himself moaning, and he fell down upon the ground like a man who swoons. And he cried inwardly, heaving great sighs from the depth of his soul and saying, “Oh, my God, where was I and where am I?” And again, “Oh, my heart’s joy, never shall my soul forget this hour!”

He walked, but it was but his body that walked, as a machine might do. None knew from his demeanour that which was taking place within. But his soul and his spirit were full of marvels; heavenly lightnings passed and repassed in the deeps of his being, and it seemed to him that he walked on air. And all the powers of his soul were full of these heavenly delights. He was like a vase from which one has taken a precious ointment, but in which the perfume long remains.

As he was going to pay his devotions at the Church of St. Paul, about a mile out of the town of Manresa, and was sitting on the banks of the Cardenero, or as some say of the Rubricato, his mind was suddenly filled with a new and strange illumination, so that in one moment, and without any sensible image or appearance, certain things pertaining to the mysteries of the Faith, together with other truths of natural science, were revealed to him, and this so abundantly and so clearly, that he himself said, that if all the spiritual light which his spirit had received from God up to the time when he was more than sixty-two years old, could be collected into one, it seemed to him that all this knowledge would not equal what was at that moment conveyed to his soul.

In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the divine wisdom.

I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth.

So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to explicate the same.

The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld the plenitude of God, wherein I did comprehend the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and ocean and all things. In all these things I beheld naught save the divine power, in a manner assuredly undescribable; so that through excess of marvelling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying “This whole world is full of God!”

Wherefore I now comprehended how small a thing is the whole world, that is to say both here and beyond the seas, the abyss, the ocean, and all things; and that the Power of God exceeds and fills all. Then He said unto me: “I have shown thee something of My Power,” and I understood, that after this I should better understand the rest. He then said “Behold now My humility.” Then was I given an insight into the deep humility of God towards man. And comprehending that unspeakable power and beholding that deep humility, my soul marvelled greatly, and did esteem itself to be nothing at all.

“Whilst I was questioning her,” says her secretary, “Christ’s faithful one was suddenly rapt in spirit and seemed not to understand my words. And then was given her a wondrous grace. After a short time . . . she began to tell me what follows. ‘My soul has just been rapt to a state in which I tasted unspeakable joy. I knew all I longed to know, possessed all I longed to possess. I saw all Good.’

She said further: ‘In this state the soul cannot believe that this Good will ever depart from her, or that she will depart from it, or that she will again be separated from it. But she delights herself in that Sovereign Good. My soul sees nothing whatever that can be told of the lips or the heart, she sees nothing and she sees All . . . No good that can be described or conceived is now the object of my hope; for I have put all my hope in a secret Good, most hid and secret, which I apprehend in great darkness.’

And as I, the brother, could not receive or understand this dark, Christ’s faithful one wishing to explain said: ‘If I see it in the dark, it is because it surpasses all good. All, all the rest is but darkness. All which the soul or heart can reach is inferior to this Good. That which I have told hitherto, namely, all the soul grasps when she sees all creatures filled with God, when she sees the divine power, and when she sees the divine will, is inferior to this most secret Good; because this Good which I see in the darkness is the All, and all other things are but parts.’

And she added, ‘Though inexpressible, these other things bring delight; but this vision of God in darkness brings no smile to the lips, no devotion or fervour of love to the soul . . . All the countless and unspeakable favours God has done to me, all the words He has said to me, all you have written are, I know, so far below the Good I see in that great darkness that I do not put in them my hope’ . . . Christ’s faithful one told me that her mind has been uplifted but three times to this most high and ineffable mode of beholding God in great darkness, and in a vision so marvellous and complete. Certainly she had seen the Sovereign Good countless times and always darkly; yet never in such a high manner and through such great dark.”

I was made as truly sensible of this inwardly, as the eye is sensible of the light, or the ear of the outward sound. I was suddenly struck dead to all my wonted enjoyment... I then had a clear discovery in my spirit, how far all my former enjoyments came short of that true rest which my soul had all along aimed at. Here I stood for a season weeping with Mary at the sepulchre...

When my three dayes (or set time) was expired, I begann to feele some quickening comfort within me... out came with a most serene and cheerfull countenance, and (as one inspired with a supernaturall life) sprang up farr above my earthly center, into a most heavenly and divine enjoyment. Wrapt up in the embraces of such pure love and peace, as that I knew not oft-times whether I were in or out of this fading forme. Here I saw heaven opened upon me, and the new Jerusalem... all my former enjoyments being nothing in appearance to that glory which now rested on my spirit.

Time would faile to tell what joy unspeakable, peace inconceivable, what soul-ravishing delights, and most divinely infatuating pleasures my soul was here possest with... In a word, I can give you no perfect account of that glory which then covered me; the lisps and slipps of my tongue will but render that imperfect, whose pure perfection surmounts the reach of the most strenuous and high-flown expression.

I appeared to myselfe as one confounded into the abyss of eternitie, nonentitized into the being of beings, my soul spilt and emptied into the fountaine and ocean of divine fulness, expired into the aspires of pure life. In briefe, the Lord so much appeared, that I was little or nothing seen, but walked at an orderly distance from myself, treading and tripping over the pleasant mountains of the heavenly land, where I walked with the Lord and was not... I have been exalted into the bosome of the eternall Almightiness, where I have seene and heard things unlawful (I say unlawful) to be uttered amongst men.

I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind.

All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe.

Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain.

The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone, but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost.

I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep—the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His.

The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion.

The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.

My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit... My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found God; I am aware that it may justly be called mystical...

We had been set to learn a passage from one of Paul’s Epistles by heart. I had already got this, and I sat turning the dreary-looking pages of the school edition of the Bible, covered in shiny black. One hand was thrust into my inside pocket, clasping the tiny silver watch as a talisman. The other stopped at the page opening on the Fourth Gospel.

I saw the phrase, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I felt the hair on my head tingling, and a curtain of red blood appeared to fall before my eyes. I leaned forward, clasping myself close, while the world rocked around me. And as this earthquake subsided, I saw a new skyline defined. It was a landscape in which objects and words were fused. All was one, with the word as the verbal reality brought to material life by Mind, by man. It was therefore the very obvious, tangible presence of the Creator.

Sitting in Surrey Lane School...I received a philosophy which I have never lost, a working faith in the oneness of all life. My fears of evil, the old Satanic dreads due to the division between the flesh and the spirit, vanished in that moment of revelation. Everything was now contained, for me, in the power of the Word.

...on this sharp and concise symbolism I was to build a concept of universal singleness that gave me authority over the horrors, the divisions, the guilt complexes, that beset us all as we go through life, in a world supposedly split into two, the flesh and the spirit, where civil war rages eternally, in sombre Miltonic gloom and hopelessness.

in my own case it is accompanied by an ideated tingling on and in my own skin corresponding to eye movement, both retinal and muscular, but...the feeling as a whole is one of aesthetic identification, as if there were nothing in me that was not living the life of the contour... This direct contact with an otherness, but for the circumstance that it need have no touch of “uplift”, is in essence a mystical experience, no more common perhaps than other mystical experience.

I recall when it first came to me. I had already published two books. For years I had been inquiring, excavating, dredging my inner self, and searching in my conscious experience for a satisfying test. I needed a test to apply to the artifacts that I thought I admired but could not hypnotize or habituate myself to enjoy with complete abandon, while the worm of doubt kept gnawing at the felicity of the ideal paradise.

Then one morning as I was gazing at the leafy scrolls carved on the door jambs of S. Pietro outside Spoleto, suddenly stem, tendril and foliage became alive and, in becoming alive, made me feel as if I had emerged into the light after long groping in the darkness of an initiation. I felt as one illumined, and beheld a world where every outline, every edge, and every surface was in a living relation to me and not, as hitherto, in a merely cognitive one.

Since that morning, nothing visible has been indifferent or even dull. Everywhere I feel the ideated pulsation of vitality, I mean energy and radiance, as if it all served to enhance my own functioning. The machine alone can turn out artifacts […] to be nonconductors of a vitalizing spark.

The revelation that came to me while looking at the facade of a church at Spoleto fifty years ago did various things for me. In the first place, it emancipated me from the need for art, for I had become my own artist, as it were, and saw in terms of art... ..this revelation increased my enjoyment of the work of art, and the greater the confidence I felt in my own sensations and perceptions, or, to speak more accurately, in the genuineness of the successive ecstasies I was experiencing, the more I was relieved of uncertainty about their subjective reality and reliability. In other words, as is the case in all mystical experience, I acquired faith in my vision and its revelation of values. This faith has never abandoned me, although often enough one has moments of dryness when, as to the religious mystic, God is out of reach.

Finally this same revelation led me to perceive that while the feeling for movement is perhaps not quite the same as the feeling for quality, the two are nearly the same, in fact quite identical when on the same path, the path, namely, of lines and curves and linear figures... If the feeling for movement or the feeling for “functional line”...is almost identical with the feeling for quality, and if it is psychologically a condition of ecstasy, it may be as rare as the mystically religious experience and as unintelligible to those who have not had it.

[From the letters to the BBC, pp. 139 and 143]

“glorious exultation”; “overwhelming feeling of elation”; “At the moment of my daughter’s birth I would have given all I had away.”

“Never before or since have I experienced the wonderful feeling of spiritual freedom which followed the birth of my first child”.

“the miracle of seeing my two babies born and the satisfaction of the days after were on a plane far above the level of normal life”.

[Q 5’s later account, p. 141, footnote 1]

I can still remember the moment when my son was born—when all the stress was over, and they put him in my arms. It was a moment of incomparable elation, and has lost none of its quality over the years, so that when I pass the nursing-home now, my heart fills with the same emotion. It wasn’t anything like the same quality when the second child was born.

As to ecstasies, I have experienced one, among others, which I remember perfectly. I will try to tell you when and how it happened and what it was like. I was thirty-six years old. I was climbing with some young fellows from Forclaz to the Croix de Bovine in order to reach Champex. We were following a road bordered by blooming oleanders and looking down over a stretch of country dotted here and there with clumps of firs. The wind scattered the clouds above and below us, sending them down or driving them up in whirling eddies. Now and then, one escaped and floated over the valley of the Rhone.

I was in perfect health; we were on our sixth day of tramping, and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to Trent by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forclaz good news from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium.

When, all at once, I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it—as if His goodness and power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life He had taught me to know Him...

Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes, my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me. The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Bovine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty minutes to join them; for, as well as I can remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an hour.

The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly the slope, I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God. But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images.

There is no sense of anything: only fruition, without understanding what that may be the fruition of which is granted. It is understood that the fruition is of a certain good, containing in itself all good together at once; but this good is not comprehended. The senses are all occupied in this fruition in such a way, that not one of them is at liberty so as to be able to attend to anything else, whether outward or inward . . .

But this state of complete absorption, together with the utter rest of the imagination—for I believe that the imagination is then wholly at rest—lasts only for a short time; though the faculties do not so completely recover themselves as not to be for some hours afterwards as if in disorder . . .

He who has had experience of this will understand it in some measure, for it cannot be more clearly described, because what then takes place is so obscure. All I am able to say is, that the soul is represented as being close to God; and that there abides a conviction thereof so certain and strong that it cannot possibly help believing so. All the faculties fail now, and are suspended in such a way that, as I said before, their operations cannot be traced . . . The will must be fully occupied in loving, but it understands not how it loves; the understanding, if it understands, does not understand how it understands. It does not understand, as it seems to me, because, as I said just now, this is a matter which cannot be understood.

Do not imagine that this orison, like that which went before, is a sort of drowsiness: (I call it drowsiness, because the soul seems to slumber, being neither thoroughly asleep, nor thoroughly awake). In the prayer of union the soul is asleep; fast asleep as regards herself and earthly things. In fact, during the short time that this state lasts she is deprived of all feeling, and though she wishes it, she can think of nothing. Thus she needs no effort in order to suspend her thoughts; if the soul can love—she knows not how or when she loves, nor what she desires . . . she is, as it were, entirely dead to the world, the better to live in God...

The soul neither sees, hears, nor understands anything while this state lasts; but this is usually a very short time, and seems to the soul even shorter than it really is. God visits the soul in a way that prevents it doubting when it comes to itself that it has been in God and God in it; and so firmly is it convinced of this truth that, though years may pass before this state recurs, the soul can never forget it nor doubt its reality . . .

But you will say, how can the soul see and comprehend that she is in God and God in her, if during this union she is not able either to see or understand? I reply, that she does not see it at the time, but that afterwards she perceives it clearly: not by a vision, but by a certitude which remains in the heart which God alone can give.

[1. Do you know a sensation of transcendent ecstasy?] Yes.

[2. How would you describe it?] An electric sensation in the chest, spreading over your whole body— the centre of your being is there—always accompanied by intense physical well-being—immediately after one has the sensation of understanding almost everything one puts one’s mind to—I frequently don’t sleep afterwards and have a feeling it doesn’t matter.

[3. What has induced it?] Going for a walk on a November afternoon, then taking down John Davidson’s poems and reading ‘St. Valentine’s Eve’—it’s not a very good poem, but it produced this and it went on for a day or two— whenever I’m […] affected by something beautiful, it produces this state in which you have the sensation you understand everything to which you turn your mind, but any good poem would have done.

[4. How many times have you felt it: units, tens or hundreds?] Units.

[5. What is your religion?] C of E, but I’ve not always been.

[6. Do you believe in God?] I think I do.

[7. If you do creative work, what does creating feel like?] Similar to an urgent need to get something off your chest, similar to the urgent need of women to give birth.

[8. Do you see a connection between creation and ecstasy?] One flows from the other.

I stood upon the Mountain which o’erlooks The narrow seas...

...Then I raised My voice and cried, “Wide Afric, doth thy Sun Lighten, thy hills enfold a City as fair As those which starr’d the night o’ the elder World? Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo A dream as frail as those of ancient Time?” A curve of whitening, flashing, ebbing light! A rustling of white wings! the bright descent Of a young Seraph! and he stood beside me There on the ridge, and look’d into my face With his unutterable, shining orbs. So that with hasty motion I did veil My vision with both hands, and saw before me Such colour’d spots as dance athwart the eyes Of those, that gaze upon the noonday Sun...

[The Seraph says “Open thine eyes and see”]

I look’d, but not Upon his face, for it was wonderful With its exceeding brightness, and the light Of the great Angel Mind which look’d from out The starry glowing of his restless eyes. I felt my soul grow mighty, and my spirit With supernatural excitation bound Within me, and my mental eye grew large With such a vast circumference of thought, That in my vanity I seem’d to stand Upon the outward verge and bound alone Of full beatitude. Each failing sense, As with a momentary flash of light Grew thrillingly distinct and keen. I saw The smallest grain that dappled the dark Earth, The indistinctest atom in deep air, The Moon’s white cities, and the opal width Of her small glowing lakes, her silver heights Unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud, And the unsounded, undescended depth Of her black hollows. The clear Galaxy Shorn of its hoary lustre, wonderful, Distinct and vivid with sharp points of light, Blaze within blaze, an unimagin’d depth And harmony of planet-girded suns And moon-encircled planets, wheel in wheel, Arch’d the wan sapphire. Nay—the hum of men, Or other things talking in unknown tongues, And notes of busy life in distant worlds Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear. A maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling thoughts, Involving and embracing each with each, Rapid as fire, inextricably link’d, Expanding momently with every sight And sound which struck the palpitating sense, The issue of strong impulse, hurried through The riv’n rapt brain...

...I know not if I shape These things with accurate similitude From visible objects, for but dimly now, Less vivid than a half-forgotten dream, The memory of that mental excellence Comes o’er me, and it may be I entwine The indecision of my present mind With its past clearness, yet it seems to me As even then the torrent of quick thought Absorbed me from the nature of itself With its own fleetness...

My thoughts which long had grovell’d in the slime Of this dull world, like dusky worms which house Beneath unshaken waters, but at once Upon some Earth-awakening day of Spring Do pass from gloom to glory...

Ev’n so my thoughts, erewhile so low, now felt Unutterable buoyancy and strength To bear them upward through the trackless fields Of undefin’d existence far and free...

...my human brain Stagger’d beneath the vision, and thick night Came down upon my eyelids, and I fell. With ministering hand he rais’d me up: Then with a mournful and ineffable smile, Which but to look on for a moment fill’d My eyes with irresistible sweet tears...

...thus he spake: “There is no mightier Spirit than I to sway The heart of man: and teach him to attain By shadowing forth the Unattainable...”

Last night as I was walking home from the station I had one of those strange experiences of “rising up within oneself”, of “coming inwardly alive”. As it happens, I can remember the comparatively trivial beginnings of it. A minute or so after I had left the station, I was attacked, though not severely, by the indigestion which is always liable to recur when I have been working particularly hard. I thought to myself, though I suppose not in so many words, “I could separate myself from this pain; it belongs only to my body and is real only to the physical not-self. There is no need for the self to feel it.” Even as I thought this the pain disappeared; that is, it was in some way left behind because I, or the self, had gone somewhere where it was not; and the sensation of “rising up within” began. (Although I had not yet walked more than a couple of hundred yards, I have the impression that movement encouraged this sensation. It is as if movement has some kind of integrative effect...)

First there is the indescribable sensation in the spine, as of something mounting up, a sensation which is partly pleasure and partly awe, a physical sensation and yet one which, if it makes sense to say so, is beginning to be not physical. This was accompanied by an extraordinary feeling of bodily lightness, of well-being and effortlessness, as if one’s limbs had no weight and one’s flesh had been suddenly transmuted into some rarer substance. But it was also, somehow, a feeling of living more in the upper part of one’s body than in the lower, a certain rather peculiar awareness of one’s head as, appropriately no doubt, the most important and intelligent of one’s members. There was also a realization that one’s facial expression was changing; the eyes were wider open than usual; the lips were involuntarily smiling. Everything was becoming “more”, everything was going up on to another level. (What exactly is happening at such a time to one’s nervous system, one’s endocrine glands, the cells of one’s brain; how much a sudden access of adrenalin to the blood stream is involved; whether areas of one’s brain which are normally “dark” are being “lighted”, neurologists and others might or might not be able to say.)...

I found that I could think in a new way. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that I could think-and-feel in a new way, for it was hard to distinguish between thought and feeling, since both happened at once and in association. This was like becoming possessed of a new faculty...it was not exactly that [things] were trivial; they had simply got into their proper proportions... This, I realized, was the real meaning of “being at peace with the world”... I noticed in regard to this thinking-and-feeling in a new way that certain thoughts-and-feelings were dangerous. If I allowed any suggestion of dislike, distrust, fear or contempt to approach, it had to be deliberately put away, or the “rising up” began to be a “falling down”; but once these kinds of thoughts-and-feelings had been put away, then the “rising up” was continued...

It was now (I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile) that I found myself looking at a certain house, one with which I am very familiar, as if I had never seen it before. There was a cloudy moon, and the house, some of its windows lighted, was outlined against the night sky. According to one’s ordinary perceptions, it is rather an ugly little suburban villa; but now it appeared to be quite otherwise. In fact the proper way of putting it is to say that it did not merely appear to be anything: it simply was. And the “is-ness” of it was all I knew and all I needed to know. I stood and stared at it, and the mere sight of it filled me with an indescribable joy... It was another house, and yet I knew that it was the ugly little villa I pass nearly every day. I realized that, could one always live on the different psychological level on which I was living at this moment, then the whole world would be changed; it would be another world in which there could be nothing which we habitually call ugly or evil, and nothing which we habitually call beautiful or good either, since the truth of things is beyond these contradictions, and somehow takes them up into itself.

...Time had very little significance, but I must have been in this different state, sometimes more, sometimes less, for rather over half an hour. Not only did the realization of the truth, the astonishing new reality, of everything that I saw persist; everything I saw was mysterious and wonderful... My ability to see, my actual and physical eyesight, was greatly sharpened. Even distant things, the cloud-formations, the moon, were miraculously clear. The sheer joy I experienced in all this is beyond expression. I felt that the world of nature was utterly right and literally an act of God’s, and that to know this, and to be permitted to appreciate so much of the wonderful and the adorable, was nothing less than bliss. And this was reality. That is the whole point. The feelings and the thoughts we usually have are not real by comparison with this new condition of being into which I had moved. My knowledge of this reality which lies beyond where we normally are was undeniable and irrefutable...

At one point in this walk, it flashed upon me with the same effect of irrefutable conviction, Of course there is God...God was here; he was in everything that I looked at and in me who looked...I was in God’s presence... ...the idea of death came to me more than once during this half hour, but it had then quite a different meaning from the one we usually give it. It was not merely that it was not in itself evil and to be […] more positively, death was “Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just”...

As I have indicated, the intensity of this new state fluctuated during the half hour or so that it took me to go from the station to my house. At times I felt that it was “dying down”; but then some other thought or feeling, a fresh access of awe and wonder at the marvels I perceived in the outward world or understood in the world within, would again renew the peculiar sense of “rising within myself”, the sensation of bodily insubstantiality, the extraordinary speed and exactitude of perception.

On one of the crests of these waves of renewed intensity, when the aperture of consciousness was at its widest, I heard, vividly, shockingly, and as instantaneously as one might see a flash of lightning, what I can only call an inward voice which said, “There is something perfect”. The phrase conveys nothing of the meaning it bore at that moment, for it had unbelievable depths of significance. The voice seemed to be telling me in those four words everything that it is important and necessary to know. “There is something perfect” was a summary of what it is to be in the presence of God who is perfection’s self... I stood still in the road, filled to the brim with this wonderful and joyous realization, that whatever we may have to endure of pain, sickness, grief and man’s inhumanity to man, there is still something perfect within all created things, that ultimately they live by it, and that nothing else matters. Tears fell from my eyes. I had an impulse to go on my knees, there in the road beneath the stars...

[1. Do you know a sensation of transcendent ecstasy?] Yes.

[2. How would you describe it?] When you suddenly discover a faculty working with effortless efficiency which enables you to hold in the forefront of conscious feeling both knowledge of the smallest bacteria in the field, how the blade of grass works, and the universe, in the same detail—all you know about nature, the whole thing, you can think about them all simultaneously and not in parts, that knowledge is almost limitless —one’s aware objectively of what one’s doing but not aware of anything else, not aware of yesterday or tomorrow, just of the moment, doing this now.

[3. What has induced it?] Introspection—on a troopship in the harbour at Naples, and Vesuvius had a red light glowing and in only twelve hours one would be in battle for the first time—in [a foreign country] in the evening in autumn, the fields were flooded, the sun low, sloshing through the fields, and the grass and water had a peculiar colour— sometimes here [in a London office] because the sky is blue and the building is white, you look at it and feel that life is worthwhile, the same kind of feeling, but much less—when I was about eighteen or nineteen [we] drove to a fantastic temple outside High Wycombe, I used to write poetry, I wrote “Evening sunlight on a blade of grass”, if I say that to myself, I can recapture it.

[4. How many times have you felt it: units, tens or hundreds?] Units.

[5. What is your religion?] I can’t put it in a word—I believe in God.

[6. Do you believe in God?] Yes.

[7. If you do creative work, what does creating feel like?] Sense of certainty—things couldn’t be otherwise than as they present themselves to you in that instant.

[8. Do you see a connection between creation and ecstasy?] Yes.

[1. Do you know a sensation of transcendent ecstasy?] Yes.

[2. How would you describe it?] Double realization of perfection with life, but life isn’t perfect, so it’s a contradiction.

[3. What has induced it?] Contemplation of art—Chartres cathedral—the Bodhisatta in the British Museum—being alone in a very lonely place—the beginning of King’s College Chapel carols with “Once in royal David’s city”.

[4. How many times have you felt it: units, tens or hundreds?] Something under a hundred times, say between fifty and a hundred, but really intensely, real spiritual ecstasy, say twenty to thirty times.

[5. What is your religion?] Christian.

[6. Do you believe in God?] Yes.

[7. If you do creative work, what does creating feel like?] Something wells up in one, prompted apparently by nothing, grows like a spring.

[8. Do you see a connection between creation and ecstasy?] Yes, with inspiration one can have ecstasy.

Note: I see this friend seldom owing to distance. The first time I met her after she gave me these answers, some three years later, she said spontaneously that she had often been thinking about ecstasy since then and made the following remarks which, with her permission, I took down: ‘Does it seem to you possible that it could be the same feeling, whether it’s being in love or going downhill on skis or creating a piece of sculpture? I think it is. Or swimming. You feel you’re literally in another world, outside everything. When it’s greatest, you’re entirely unaware, you realize it only when you come back; if you’re conscious of the state when you’re in it, it’s not so terrific. But with the great ones, you don’t realize till you come back that you were in heaven.’

I lay in the high bed, which was like a theatre-box suspended in mid-air. Hung on the walls all around me were the bodies of newly killed foxes; I could smell their gamey odour and see their sharp muzzles outlined against the flickering red flames. I had only to […] out my hands to touch the skin, which had something of woods and caves about them.

Through the door I could hear the dying man’s continuous wailing, like an endless litany of pain: “Jesus, help me; Doctor, help me; Jesus, help me; Doctor, help me,” and the whispered prayers of the women. I looked at the dancing flames, the long, wavering shadows and the dark figures of the three hunters with their hats on their heads, motionless in front of the fire.

Death was in the house: I loved these peasants and I was sad and humiliated by my powerlessness against it. Why, then, at the same time, did a great feeling of peace pervade me? I felt detached from every earthly thing and place, lost in a no-man’s-land far from time and reality. I was hidden, like a shoot under the bark of a tree, beyond the reach of man. I listened to the silence of the night and I felt as if I had all of a sudden penetrated the very heart of the universe. An immense happiness, such as I had never known, swept over me with a flow of fulfilment.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs.

One night when the land was still fresh from the rain, I was wandering near our camp enjoying the moonlight when an immense exaltation took possession of me. It was as though the White Goddess of the moon had thrown some bewitching power into her rays. It seemed to me that our arid satellite was itself a living presence bounding in the sky—I do not myself understand this use of the word “bounding”, but it comes insistently, and I cannot but use it to express some deeply felt vitality. Indeed, the whole night was dancing about me. […] it appeared that the moonlight had ceased to be a physical thing and now represented a state of illumination in my own mind. As here in the night landscape the steady white light threw every olive leaf and pebble into sharp relief, so it seemed that my thoughts and feelings had been given an extraordinary clarity and truth.

So powerfully was I moved by this sense of possession that I climbed up on to a high outcrop of rock against the mouth of the wadi and knelt down there. The moonlight swam round, and in, my head as I knelt looking across the plain to the shining silver bar of the Mediterranean. From far behind me, still muffled in the folds of the mountain, I heard the bronze sound of camel-bells. To my sharpened but converging senses they seemed like a row of brown flowers blooming in the moonlight. In truth the sound of bells came from nothing more remarkable than a caravan, perhaps twenty camels with packs and riders, coming down the wadi on its way northward to Haifa. But even now I cannot recognise that caravan in such everyday terms; my memory of it is dreamlike, yet embodies one of the most intense sensuous and emotional experiences of my life.

For those minutes, and I have no notion how many they were, I had the heightened sensibility of one passionately in love and with it the power to transmute all that the senses perceived into symbols of burning significance. This surely is one of the best rewards of humanity. To be filled with comprehension of the beauty and marvellous complexity of the physical world, and for this happy excitement of the senses to lead directly into an awareness of spiritual significance. The fact that such experience comes most surely with love, with possession by the creative eros, suggests that it belongs near the root of our mystery. Certainly it grants man a state of mind in which I believe he must come more and more to live: a mood of intensely conscious individuality which serves only to strengthen an intense consciousness of unity with all being. His mind is one infinitesimal node in the mind present throughout all being, just as his body shares in the unity of matter.

The bells came nearer and another sound mingled with theirs; a low, monotonous chanting. I looked behind me for a moment and saw the dark procession swaying out from behind the last bend in the wadi, then I turned back so that the column should pass me and enter my world of vision from behind. I found myself comprehending every physical fact of their passage as though it were a part of my own existence. I knew how the big soft feet of the camels pressed down upon and embraced the rough stones of the path; I knew the warm depth of their fur and the friction upon it of leather harness and the legs of the riders; I knew the blood flowing through the bodies of men and beasts and thought of it as echoing the life of the anemones which now showed black among the rocks around me. The sound of bells and the chanting seemed rich and glowing as the stuff of the caravan itself.

So the swaying line came from behind, went past, and moved away across the plain. It was a procession of life moving through the icy moonlight. It was coming from the mountain and going towards the sea. That was all I knew, but as the moon leapt and bounded in the sky I took full possession of a love and confidence that have not yet forsaken me.

Then I was carried beyond pleasure. I have tried to show something of the high moments that science gave to me; the night my father talked about the stars, Luard’s lesson, Austin’s opening lecture, the end of my first research. But this was different from any of them, different altogether, different in kind. It was further from myself. My own triumph and delight and success were there, but they seemed insignificant beside this tranquil ecstasy.

It was as though I had looked for a truth outside myself, and finding it had become for a moment part of the truth I sought; as though the world, the atoms and the stars, were wonderfully clear and close to me, and I to them, so that we were part of a lucidity more tremendous than any mystery.

I had never known that such a moment could exist. Some of its quality, perhaps, I had captured in the delight which came when I brought joy to Audrey, being myself content; or in the times among friends, when for some rare moment, maybe twice in my life, I had lost myself in a common purpose; but these moments had, as it were, the tone of the experience without the experience itself.

Since then I have never quite regained it. But one effect will stay with me as long as I live; once, when I was young, I used to sneer at the mystics who have described the experience of being at one with God and part of the unity of things. After that afternoon, I did not want to laugh again; for though I should have interpreted the experience differently, I thought I knew what they meant.

The juvenile quest for the secret of infinity, split into two simultaneous and in all respects contradictory pursuits. I can remember fairly clearly the moment when the arrow split and the two halves began to lead their independent existence. It was on a spring morning in 1924. I was sitting on a bench in the Volksgarten, one of Vienna’s enchanted parks, with a pile of books beside me. On top lay a pamphlet about the latest Arab riots in Palestine, with appalling details of children put to the sword as in the days of Herod, of Jewish pioneers being killed after having been blinded and castrated, of the passivity of the Mandatory Administration and their refusal to allow the Jews to arm in self-defence.

While I was reading the pamphlet, I felt myself choke and seethe with impotent anger. Moral indignation did and still does affect me in a direct physical manner. Like most people who suffer from Chronic Indignation—as others do from chronic indigestion—I can feel, during an attack, the infusion of adrenalin into the bloodstream, the craving of the muscles, flooded with blood-sugar, for violent action. As the case may be, you begin to tremble, or throw a choleric fit, or write a revolutionary tract, or start growing an ulcer. When I had finished reading the pamphlet and had calmed down a little, I fell into one of my habitual reveries about devoting my life to the cause of the persecuted as a fighter and writer of books which would shake the conscience of the world. I must have used up since then tons of adrenalin on that job.

While still in the grip of that dream, and all geared for action, I opened the next book in the pile at its marked page. It was Weyl’s introduction to Einstein’s theory of Relativity. A phrase suddenly struck me and has remained in my memory ever since. It said that the theory of General Relativity led the human imagination “across the peaks of glaciers never before explored by any human being.” This cliché had an unexpectedly strong effect. I saw Einstein’s world-shaking formula—Energy equals Mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light—hovering in a kind of rarified haze over the glaciers, and this image carried a sensation of infinite tranquillity and peace.

The martyred infants and castrated pioneers of the Holy Land shrank to microscopic insignificance. Beast had fed on beast in sea and jungle since the beginnings of organic life; it was a law of Nature and of history; there was nothing to get excited about. The fate of these unfortunates had to be viewed with the same serene, detached, meditative eye as that of stars bursting into novae, of sunspots erupting, of rocks decaying into swamps, and primeval forests being transformed into coal. This change in perspective was accompanied by an equally pronounced physiological change. The sensation of choking with indignation was succeeded by the relaxed quietude and self-dissolving stillness of the “oceanic feeling.”

I have often since experienced both of these opposite states of mind, but never in such close proximity as on that occasion. They are opposites in every respect—in their physiological mechanism, emotional tone, intellectual outlook, and in the social attitudes which they produce. Moral indignation may be compared to a sudden, or continuous implosion which provides the heat and pressure required for action. The effect of the “oceanic feeling,” on the other hand, is an expansion of consciousness, its liberation from any pressure and itch, its temporary dissolution in Nirvana.

Though the two states are mutually exclusive at any given moment, they may alternate in time. They may succeed each other in quick oscillation of mood and outlook within a single day, or there may be periods of several years in an individual’s life when one or the other is dominant. The institution of the “retreat” known in various forms to all civilisations, was obviously developed under the influence of this duality... the “oceanic experience” to a large extent eludes verbal communication...

I remember a moment [in childhood] when I stood barefoot on firm dry sand by the sea. The air had a special quality as if it had a life of its own. The sound of breakers on the shore shut out all others. I looked up at the clouds, like great white-sailed galleons, chasing proudly […] I looked down at the regular ripples on the sand, and could not absorb so much beauty. I was taken aback—each of the myriad particles of sand was perfect in its way... there was nothing to detract from all this beauty.

In this supreme moment I leapt in sheer joy. I was startled, and frightened, by the tremendous excitement that so few steps could create... A few more steps—self-consciously now and firmly gripping the original excitement. The earth seemed almost to move with me. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body. No longer conscious of my movement I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.

From intense moments like this, love of running can grow.

…found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide... An instant later, the communion had ceased.

Standing on a little hill in the East African plains, I saw herds of thousands of wild beasts, grazing in soundless peace, beneath the breath of the primaeval world, as they had done for unimaginable ages of time, and I had the feeling of being the first man, the first being to know that all this is. The whole world around me was still in the primitive silence and knew not that it was. In this very moment in which I knew it the world came into existence, and without this moment it would never have been.

My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But, at the distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation.

There is a type of legend in which the ecstatic obliteration of time results in literal translation into the future. In one version, a monk goes out into the fields in spring, hears a lark sing and is transported. When he returns to the monastery no one knows him, and at last his name is found in the records of a hundred years past. ‘Time had been blotted out while he listened to the lark.’

This legend, which I first met as a child in Arthur Mee’s One Thousand Beautiful Things, was the direct inspiration of my novel, The Victorian Chaise-Longue which, in its turn, gave rise to this book.

Yet, tell them, Julian, all, I am not doomed to wear Year after year in gloom and desolate despair; A messenger of Hope comes every night to me, And offers, for short life, eternal liberty.

He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars; Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise and change which kill me with desire—

Desire for nothing known in my maturer years When joy grew mad with awe at counting future tears; When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm, I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunderstorm;

But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony That I could never dream till earth was lost to me.

Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels— Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found; Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!

Oh, dreadful is the check—intense the agony When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!

Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; The more that anguish racks the earlier it will bless; And robed in fires of Hell, or bright with heavenly shine, If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.

“Whilst under the anaesthetic for a short operation, I had a complete revelation about the ultimate truth of everything. I understood the “entire works”. It was a tremendous illumination. I was filled with unspeakable joy... When I came round I told the Doctor I understood the meaning of everything. He...said “Well, what is it?” and I faltered out, “Well, it’s a sort of green light.’”

The lady’s ‘sort of green light’ recalls the professor who was determined to read the riddle of the world, took chloroform, and with tremendous mental effort just before unconsciousness overtook him, managed to write “A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole’.

‘Pat had a second stroke a year later... It seemed that, according to the doctors, he had actually died during this attack for a time, but had managed to pull himself back into life because he felt he had one more message to deliver. Death, he told us, was nothing to fear. It was a natural culmination to life as we know it and was an experience of indescribable happiness. The release from the bondage of life—even from the bondage of love—brought with it an ecstasy and an understanding beyond anything known to living man.’

“All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the utterance of my heart was, ‘I want to pour my whole soul out to God.’ The rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back room of the front office, to pray. There was no fire and no light in the room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was wholly a mental state. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as I would see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in such a manner as to break me right down at his feet. I have always since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it seemed to me a reality that he stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect.

I must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind was too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and found that the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly burned out. But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings.

“No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, ‘I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’ I said, ‘Lord, I cannot bear any more;’ yet I had no fear of death.

“How long I continued in this state, with this baptism continuing to roll over me and go through me, I do not know. But I know it was late in the evening when a member of my choir—for I was the leader of the choir—came into the office to see me. He was a member of the church. He found me in this state of loud weeping, and said to me, ‘Mr. Finney, what ails you?’ I could make him no answer for some time. He then said, ‘Are you in pain?’ I gathered myself up as best I could, and replied, ‘No, but so happy that I cannot live.’ ”

“Last night,” Mrs. Edwards writes, “was the sweetest night I ever had in my life. I never before, for so long a time together, enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of heaven in my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole time. Part of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ’s excellent love, of his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my heart in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the window.

I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my whole life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting, or any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost in; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. There was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if there was any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was asleep.

As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me that I had entirely done with myself. I felt that the opinions of the world concerning me were nothing, and that I had no more to do with any outward interest of my own than with that of a person whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish and desire of my heart....

After retiring to rest and sleeping a little while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God’s mercy to me, in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die; and after that, in making me willing to live, that I might do and suffer whatever he called me to here. I also thought how God had graciously given me an entire resignation to his will, with respect to the kind and manner of death that I should die; having been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and if it were God’s will, to die in darkness.

But now it occurred to me, I used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man. Upon this I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be kept out of heaven even longer; and my whole heart seemed immediately to reply: Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my body being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment of my mind being vastly greater. And it seemed to me that I found a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soul in consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory of God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my mind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of the night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on Monday in the forenoon, without interruption or abatement.”

[A separate passage, quoted by James later in the same discussion:]

“When,” says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from which I made quotation a moment ago, “I arose on the morning of the Sabbath, I felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its strength and sweetness, far beyond all that I had ever felt before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought, if I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love, and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I never before felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I did that morning. I realized also, in an unusual and very lively manner, how great a part of Christianity lies in the performance of our social and relative duties to one another. The same joyful sense continued throughout the day—a sweet love to God and all mankind.”

“I will now relate my experience of the power of the Holy Spirit which took place on the same night. Had any person told me previous to this that I could have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in the manner which I did, I could not have believed it, and should have thought the person deluded that told me so. I went directly home after the meeting, and when I got home I wondered what made me feel so stupid. I retired to rest soon after I got home, and felt indifferent to the things of religion until I began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit, which began in about five minutes after, in the following manner:—

“At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me. I began to feel exceedingly happy and humble, and such a sense of unworthiness as I never felt before. I could not very well help speaking out, which I did, and said, Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling air in feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible manner than that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I could judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause of such a palpitation of my heart. It took complete possession of my soul, and I am certain that I desired the Lord, while in the midst of it, not to give me any more happiness, for it seemed as if I could not contain what I had got. My heart seemed as if it would burst, but it did not stop until I felt as if I was unutterably full of the love and grace of God.

In the mean time while thus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what can it mean? and all at once, as if to answer it, my memory became exceedingly clear, and it appeared to me just as if the New Testament was placed open before me, eighth chapter of Romans, and as light as if some candle lighted was held for me to read the 26th and 27th verses of that chapter, and I read these words: ‘The Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings which cannot be uttered.’

And all the time that my heart was a‐beating, it made me groan like a person in distress, which was not very easy to stop, though I was in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed in another room came and opened the door, and asked me if I had got the toothache. I told him no, and that he might get to sleep. I tried to stop. I felt unwilling to go to sleep myself, I was so happy, fearing I should lose it—thinking within myself

‘My willing soul would stay In such a frame as this.’

And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stopped beating, feeling as if my soul was full of the Holy Spirit, I thought that perhaps there might be angels hovering round my bed. I felt just as if I wanted to converse with them, and finally I spoke, saying, ‘O ye affectionate angels! how is it that ye can take so much interest in our welfare, and we take so little interest in our own.’ After this, with difficulty I got to sleep; and when I awoke in the morning my first thoughts were: What has become of my happiness? and, feeling a degree of it in my heart, I asked for more, which was given to me as quick as thought.

I then got up to dress myself, and found to my surprise that I could but just stand. It appeared to me as if it was a little heaven upon earth. My soul felt as completely raised above the fears of death as of going to sleep; and like a bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it was the will of God, to get released from my body and to dwell with Christ, though willing to live to do good to others, and to warn sinners to repent.

I went downstairs feeling as solemn as if I had lost all my friends, and thinking with myself, that I would not let my parents know it until I had first looked into the Testament. I went directly to the shelf and looked into it, at the eighth chapter of Romans, and every verse seemed to almost speak and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if my feelings corresponded with the meaning of the word.

I then told my parents of it, and told them that I thought that they must see that when I spoke, that it was not my own voice, for it appeared so to me. My speech seemed entirely under the control of the Spirit within me; I do not mean that the words which I spoke were not my own, for they were. I thought that I was influenced similar to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost (with the exception of having power to give it to others, and doing what they did).

After breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion, which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at their request I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in public before.

“I now feel as if I had discharged my duty by telling the truth, and hope by the blessing of God, it may do some good to all who shall read it. He has fulfilled his promise in sending the Holy Spirit down into our hearts, or mine at least, and I now defy all the Deists and Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ.”

As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my miserable lost and undone condition, and almost ready to sink under my burden, I thought I was in such a miserable case as never any man was before. I returned to the house, and when I got to the door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following impressions came into my mind like a powerful but small still voice. You have been seeking, praying, reforming, laboring, reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have you done by it towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or fitter to appear before the impartial bar of God, than when you first began to seek?

It brought such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I did not think I was one step nearer than at first, but as much condemned, as much exposed, and as miserable as before. I cried out within myself, O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord, dost not find out some new way, I know nothing of, I shall never be saved, for the ways and methods I have prescribed to myself have all failed me, and I am willing they should fail. O Lord, have mercy! O Lord, have mercy!

These discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat down. After I sat down, being all in confusion, like a drowning man that was just giving up to sink, and almost in an agony, I turned very suddenly round in my chair, and seeing part of an old Bible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it in great haste; and opening it without any premeditation, cast my eyes on the 38th Psalm, which was the first time I ever saw the word of God: it took hold of me with such power that it seemed to go through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God was praying in, with, and for me. About this time my father called the family to attend prayers; I attended, but paid no regard to what he said in his prayer, but continued praying in those words of the Psalm. Oh, help me, help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or I am gone forever; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with one drop of thy blood atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of an angry God. At that instant of time when I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed to be melted down with love; the burden of guilt and condemnation was gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help, was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith, freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My Lord and my God; thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and my high tower, my life, my joy, my present and my everlasting portion. Looking up, I thought I saw that same light [he had on more than one previous occasion seen subjectively a bright blaze of light], though it appeared different; and as soon as I saw it, the design was opened to me, according to his promise, and I was obliged to cry out: Enough, enough, O blessed God! The work of conversion, the change, and the manifestations of it are no more disputable than that light which I see, or anything that ever I saw.

In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my soul was set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my labor in the ministry and call to preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord, I’ll go; send me, send me. I spent the greatest part of the night in ecstasies of joy, praising and adoring the Ancient of Days for his free and unbounded grace. After I had been so long in this transport and heavenly frame that my nature seemed to require sleep, I thought to close my eyes for a few moments; then the devil stepped in, and told me that if I went to sleep, I should lose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would find it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried out, O Lord God, if I am deceived, undeceive me.

I then closed my eyes for a few minutes, and seemed to be refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was, Where is my God? And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake in and with God, and surrounded by the arms of everlasting love. About sunrise I arose with joy to relate to my parents what God had done for my soul, and declared to them the miracle of God’s unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show them the words that were impressed by God on my soul the evening before; but when I came to open the Bible, it appeared all new to me.

I so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, in preaching the gospel, that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but go I must and tell the wonders of redeeming love. I lost all taste for carnal pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake them.

One morning, while I was walking in a solitary place as usual, I at once saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or procure deliverance and salvation for myself were utterly in vain; I was brought quite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I saw that it was forever impossible for me to do anything towards helping or delivering myself, that I had made all the pleas I ever could have made to all eternity; and that all my pleas were vain, for I saw that self‐interest had led me to pray, and that I had never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. I saw that there was no necessary connection between my prayers and the bestowment of divine mercy; that they laid not the least obligation upon God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there was no more virtue or goodness in them than there would be in my paddling with my hand in the water. I saw that I had been heaping up my devotions before God, fasting, praying, etc., pretending, and indeed really thinking sometimes that I was aiming at the glory of God; whereas I never once truly intended it, but only my own happiness. I saw that as I had never done anything for God, I had no claim on anything from him but perdition, on account of my hypocrisy and mockery. When I saw evidently that I had regard to nothing but self‐interest, then my duties appeared a vile mockery and a continual course of lies, for the whole was nothing but self‐worship, and an horrid abuse of God.

I continued, as I remember, in this state of mind, from Friday morning till the Sabbath evening following (July 12, 1739), when I was walking again in the same solitary place. Here, in a mournful melancholy state I was attempting to pray; but found no heart to engage in that or any other duty; my former concern, exercise, and religious affections were now gone. I thought that the Spirit of God had quite left me; but still was not distressed; yet disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray—though, as I thought, very stupid and senseless—for near half an hour; then, as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never had before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. I had no particular apprehension of any one person in the Trinity, either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to be Divine glory. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and I was inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all for ever and ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency of God that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that degree that I had no thought about my own salvation, and scarce reflected that there was such a creature as myself. I continued in this state of inward joy, peace, and astonishing, till near dark without any sensible abatement; and then began to think and examine what I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all the evening following. I felt myself in a new world, and everything about me appeared with a different aspect from what it was wont to do. At this time, the way of salvation opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation; was amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. If I could have been saved by my own duties or any other way that I had formerly contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I wondered that all the world did not see and comply with this way of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ.

If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: ‘Alphonse, in a quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce the world and its pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteem of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his cross till death;’—if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be more mad than he,—whosoever, namely, might believe in the possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.

Coming out of the café I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [the proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning before me as I mused. In an instant the dog had disappeared, the whole church had vanished, I no longer saw anything, ... or more truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.

Heavens, how can I speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain to expressing the inexpressible. Any description, however sublime it might be, could be but a profanation of the unspeakable truth.

I was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my heart beside itself, when M. B. called me back to life. I could not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the other. But finally I took the medal which I had on my breast, and with all the effusion of my soul I kissed the image of the Virgin, radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed, it was She! It was indeed She! [What he had seen had been a vision of the Virgin.]

I did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse or another. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself. In the bottom of my soul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; I could not speak; I had no wish to reveal what had happened. But I felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a priest. I was led to one; and there, alone, after he had given me the positive order, I spoke as best I could, kneeling, and with my heart still trembling. I could give no account to myself of the truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and a faith. All that I can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen from my eyes; and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages in which I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappear under the rays of the burning sun.

I came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness; and I was living, perfectly living. But I wept, for at the bottom of that gulf I saw the extreme of misery from which I had been saved by an infinite mercy; and I shuddered at the sight of my iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and with gratitude. You may ask me how I came to this new insight, for truly I had never opened a book of religion nor even read a single page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either entirely denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of to‐day, so that I had thought so little about it that I doubt whether I ever knew its name. But how came I, then, to this perception of it? I can answer nothing save this, that on entering that church I was in darkness altogether, and on coming out of it I saw the fullness of the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define the light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how can we explain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I remain within the limits of veracity when I say that without having any knowledge of the letter of religious doctrine, I now intuitively perceived its sense and spirit. Better than if I saw them, I felt those hidden things; I felt them by the inexplicable effects they produced in me. It all happened in my interior mind; and those impressions, more rapid than thought, shook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in another direction, towards other aims, by other paths. I express myself badly. But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose in poor and barren words sentiments which the heart alone can understand?

After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.

I said to the Lord: ‘Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith to believe it.’ In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my whole heart.... I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord.

I can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say ‘Glory’; and I lift up the other, and it seems to say ‘Amen’; and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking.

I was taken to a camp‐meeting, mother and religious friends seeking and praying for my conversion. My emotional nature was stirred to its depths; confessions of depravity and pleading with God for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all surroundings. I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and renewal of my nature. When rising from my knees I exclaimed, ‘Old things have passed away, all things have become new.’ It was like entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music; my soul exulted in the love of God, and I wanted everybody to share in my joy.

Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never darkened the door of my father’s church, although I lived with him for eight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and spending it in high carousal with any one who would sit with me and drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week together, and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a drop for a whole month.

In all this period, that is, up to thirty‐three years of age, I never had a desire to reform on religious grounds. But all my pangs were due to some terrible remorse I used to feel after a heavy carousal, the remorse taking the shape of regret after my folly in wasting my life in such a way—a man of superior talents and education. This terrible remorse turned me gray in one night, and whenever it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the next morning. What I suffered in this way is beyond the expression of words. It was hell‐fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Often did I vow that if I got over ‘this time’ I would reform. Alas, in about three days I fully recovered, and was as happy as ever. So it went on for years, but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I always recovered, and as long as I let drink alone, no man was as capable of enjoying life as I was.

I was converted in my own bedroom in my father’s rectory house at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July 13, 1886). I was in perfect health, having been off from the drink for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. In fact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A young lady friend sent me a copy of Professor Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, asking me my opinion of it as a literary work only. Being proud of my critical talents and wishing to enhance myself in my new friend’s esteem, I took the book to my bedroom for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and then write her what I thought of it. It was here that God met me face to face, and I shall never forget the meeting. ‘He that hath the Son hath life eternal, he that hath not the Son hath not life.’ I had read this scores of times before, but this made all the difference. I was now in God’s presence and my attention was absolutely ‘soldered’ on to this verse, and I was not allowed to proceed with the book till I had fairly considered what these words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed, feeling all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt supremely happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and that if I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as well as I now know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I felt God’s love so powerfully upon me that only a mighty sorrow crept over me that I had lost all through my own folly; and what was I to do? What could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent. All I felt was ‘I am undone,’ and God cannot help it, although he loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was supremely happy: I felt like a little child before his father. I had done wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty, and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under it, but deep sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had lost, took hold upon me, and my soul thrilled within me to think it was all over. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way: ‘There is no name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ No words were spoken to me; my soul seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked upon me that afternoon in July, both differently, and both in the most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in less than twenty‐four hours.

But a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my conversion I went into the hay‐field to lend a hand with the harvest, and not having made any promise to God to abstain or drink in moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My poor sister was heart‐broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got to my bedroom at once, where she followed me, weeping copiously. She said I had been converted and fallen away instantly. But although I was quite full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew that God’s work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being a regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at once, and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways, but never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life.

One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them—as though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my sense of sadness and regret.

For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the ‘Cat and Fiddle,’ and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven—an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect—a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time after, only gradually passing away.

“The spiritual life,” he writes, “justifies itself to those who live it; but what can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test.

These highest experiences that I have had of God’s presence have been rare and brief—flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with surprise—God is here!—or conditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be building my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to-day as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching significance are ever becoming more clear and evident.

When they came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I was not seeking them. What I was seeking, with resolute determination, was to live more intensely my own life, as against what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God.”

Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way;—such grand and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite!

Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament; ... instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one’s self great as the universe, and calm as a god.... What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost.

I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite.

I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable.

Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.’

I believe in you, my Soul ... Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;... Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.

“I know,” writes Mr. Trine, “an officer on our police force who has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide.”

“The Science of the Sufis,” says the Moslem author, “aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul.

How great, for example, is the difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists,—as being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach,—and being drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence, and being abstinent or having one’s soul detached from the world.—Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the ears, but solely by giving one’s self up to ecstasy and leading a pious life.

“Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a multitude of bonds—temptations on every side. Considering my teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my name. [Here follows an account of his six months’ hesitation to break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then, feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will, I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him. My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory, wealth, and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, and reserving from my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence, I distributed the rest. I went to Syria, where I remained about two years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare my heart for meditating on God—all according to the methods of the Sufis, as I had read of them.

“This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to complete the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation. But the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the need of subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive resolve, and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life. I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few single hours; nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this state. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to return; and in this situation I spent ten years. During this solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source.

The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only the threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them, whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an account of without his words involving sin.

“Whoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be sure of its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the Sufis say. As there are men endowed only with the sensitive faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal characters. This state is sleep.

If you were to tell a man who was himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who [in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it [and give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be refuted by actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport, by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature, since one knows only what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one’s hand.”

“finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes home so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul.

Fancy a man seeing a certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both inner and outer, and impose silence upon them....

The soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert, desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of the comprehension of love, ... and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by their means.”