“He must run before the crowd, that is to say the multiplicity of created things; for these make us so little and low that we cannot perceive God. And he must climb up on the Tree of Faith, which grows from above downwards, for its root is in the Godhead. This tree has twelve branches, which are the twelve articles of the Creed. The lower branches speak of the Humanity of God; ... the upper branches, however, speak of the Godhead: of the Trinity of Persons and the Unity of the Divine Nature. Man must cling to the Unity which is at the top of the tree, for it is here that Jesus will pass by with all His gifts. And now Jesus comes, and He sees man, and shows him in the light of faith that He is, according to His Divinity, unmeasured and incomprehensible, inaccessible and fathomless, and that He overpasses all created light and all finite comprehension. This is the highest knowledge of God which man can acquire in the Active Life: thus to recognise by the light of faith that God is inconceivable and unknowable. In this light God says to the desire of man: “Come down quickly, for I would dwell in your house to-day.” And this quick descent, to which God invites him, is nought else but a descent, by love and desire, into the Abyss of the Godhead, to which no intellect can attain by its created light. But here, where intellect must rest without, love and desire may enter in. When the soul thus leans upon God by intention and love, above all that she understands, then she rests and dwells in God, and God in her. When the soul mounts up by desire, above the multiplicity of things, above the activities of the senses and above the light of external nature, then she encounters Christ by the light of faith, and is illuminated; and she recognises that God is unknowable and inconceivable. Finally, stretching by desire towards this incomprehensible God, she meets Christ and is fulfilled with His gifts. And loving and resting above all gifts, above herself and above all things, she dwells in God and God in her. According to this manner Christ may be encountered upon the summit of the Active Life.”[33] This, then, is the completion of the first stage in the mystic way; this showing to the purified consciousness of the helplessness of the analytic intellect, the dynamic power of self-surrendered love. “Where intellect must rest without, love and desire may enter in.” The human creature, turning towards Reality, has pressed up to the very edge of the ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ in which the goal of transcendence is hid. If it is to go further it must bring to the adventure not knowledge but divine ignorance, not riches but poverty; above all, an eager and industrious love.