The other little work, which is about the same length--that is to say, about twenty pages--is called _The Book of Supreme Truth_, or, according to Surius, _Samuel_. He adds:--“Qui alias de alta contemplatione dicitur, verius autem apologice quorumdam sancti hujus viri dictorum sublimium inscribi possit.” But this book is so marvellous that one would need to translate the whole. At present I shall make no extract from it, since we can no more divide it than we can divide that essence whose perpetual effusion is displayed in its unique and awful mirror. I come, therefore, to _The Book of the Kingdom of Lovers_, the strangest and most abstract work of the sage of the Green Valley, in the midst of which the soul stretches itself, and is filled with terror in a spiritual void which is doubtless normal, and which for the mind that does not follow it is like some dark glass bell, in which there is neither air, nor image, nor anything that can be exactly conceived, except uninterrupted stars in the eternal spaces. The work is founded on that verse in Wisdom, “Justum deduxit per vias rectas et ostendit illi regnum Dei,” and includes the three virtues of theology and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost I proceed at once to translate, and more fully than ever. Let us look first at this passage on the deserts of being:-- “The soul of man being made of nothing, which God took from nowhere, man has followed this nothingness, which is nowhere, and he has gone out of his ego into wanderings, by immersion in the simple essence of God, as in his own ultimate source; and he has died in God. To die in God is to be blessed; and, for each one according to his own merits, it involves a great difference both in grace and glory. This blessedness is to understand God and to be understood by God, in the joyful unity of the divine persons, and to have flowed by this unity into the super-essence of God. Now this unity brings joy when we look inward, and bears fruit in our outward life, and so the fountain of unity flows; that is to say, the Father begets the Son, the eternal truth, who is the image of the Father, in which He sees Himself and all things. This image is the life and cause of all creatures, for in this image is everything, according to the divine mode of being; and by this image all things are perfectly made, and all things are wisely ruled upon that model; and according to this image everything is set apart for its own end, so far as it is possible for God to do so; for every creature has received the means of attaining blessedness. But the reasonable creature is not the image of the Father, according to the effluence of his created mode of being, for that effluence flows forth in as far as it is a creature, and that is why it enjoys and loves with measure in the light of grace or of glory. For no one possesses the divine nature actively according to the divine mode, except the divine persons themselves, since no creature can work according to an infinite