Submission is a difficult attitude to acquire; but it is such a happy attitude when once one has acquired it. The critics of it wholly mistake it and confound it with fatalism. It is not fatalism, or passive acquiescence in another's will--a will that we have no part in forming and cannot reject. Submission is the acceptance of God's will as the expression of the highest wisdom for us. It is not true that we have no part in forming it; it is at any time an expression of God's will for us which is determined by the way in which we hitherto have corresponded to that will. Submission means that we have put ourselves in a position of active co-operation with that will, that we have made it ours: because it is the expression of a divine wisdom and love we make it wholly ours. And we have found in the acceptance of it not bondage but liberty. It is wonderful how our preconceived notion of God and religion vanishes before the first gleams of experience. To the unregenerate the service of God is utter bondage; to the regenerate it is perfect freedom. And the difference seems to be accounted for by the reversal of ideals, by a new direction of affections. "I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou hast set my heart at liberty," A true conversion is, perhaps, signified, more than in any other way, by the liberty of the heart,--by this change in the object of our love. That has been the constant exhortation to us, to love that which is worthy of love. "Set your affection on things above." "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world." And we, loving the world and the things that are in the world, listen impatiently. But there is no possibility of a sincere conversion without a change of love. "A change of heart" conversion is often called, and so inevitably it is. And as we go through our self-examination one of the most profitable questions we can ask is, "What do I love?" That will commonly tell the whole story of the life, for "where a man's treasure is, there will his heart be also." Richard Rolle said: "Truly he who is stirred with busy love, and is continually with Jesu in thought, full soon perceives his own faults, the which correcting, henceforward he is ware of them; and so he brings righteousness busily to birth, until he is led to God and may sit with heavenly citizens in everlasting seats. Therefore he stands clear in conscience and is steadfast in all good ways the which is never noyed with worldly heaviness nor gladdened with vainglory." CANA I