“Next comes the third method, which we attribute to our heavenly Father--that in which He empties the memory of forms and images, and lifts up our naked thought to the ultimate source, which is Himself. There man is fixed firmly at his beginning, which is God, and is united to Him. And there is given to him strength and freedom to work inwardly and outwardly by means of all the virtues. And he receives knowledge and understanding in all exercises which are according to reason. And he learns how to receive the inward working of God and the transformation of the divine methods, which are above reason, even as we have already said. And above all divine limits, he will understand by the same boundless intuition, the boundless essence of God, whose being is without limitation. For one cannot express it by words, nor by works, nor by methods, nor signs, nor similitudes, but it manifests itself spontaneously to the simple intuition of pure and naked thought. “But we may place on the road signs and similitudes which prepare man for the sight of the Kingdom of God, and you shall imagine this essence like the glow of a boundless fire, in which everything is silently consumed--a red and motionless conflagration. And so it is with the calm of essential love, which is the enjoyment of God and of all the saints, above all limitations, and above all the works and all the practices of virtue. This love is a wave, boundless and calmed, of riches and joys, in which all the saints are swallowed up with God in an unlimited enjoyment. And this joy is wild and lonely like a wandering, for it has neither limit, nor road, nor path, nor rest, nor measure, nor end, nor beginning, nor anything which one can show or express by words. And this is the pure blessedness of all of us, this divine essence, and our super-essence, above reason and without reason. If we desire to experience it, our spirit must go forth into it, above our created essence, towards that eternal centre in which all our lines begin and end. And in this centre these lines lose their name and all distinction, and are united to this centre, and become that same unity which the centre itself is; and nevertheless in themselves they always remain as converging lines. “See, then, how we shall thus always remain what we are in our created essence, and yet by the ascent of our spirit we shall continually pass into our super-essence. In it we shall be above ourselves, below ourselves, beyond our breadth, beyond our length, in an eternal wandering which has no return.” I shall say little of the small work entitled _Four Temptations_, which deals with the very subtle dangers which threaten the contemplative mind, the most formidable of them all being quietism. With the exception of certain discoveries in the unknown psychology of prayer, this work, which, as I have said, is very short, does not present any very exceptionally lofty summit to our souls.