Where the office of thought ends, there the office of will and feeling begins: “Where intellect must stay without,” says Ruysbroeck, “these may enter in.” Desire and intention are the most dynamic of our faculties; they do work. They are the true explorers of the Infinite, the instruments of our ascents to God. Reason comes to the foot of the mountain; it is the industrious will urged by the passionate heart which climbs the slope. It is the “blind intent stretching towards Him,” says the _Cloud of Unknowing_, “the true lovely will of the heart,” which succeeds at last; the tense determination, the effort, the hard work, the definite, eager, humble, outward thrust of the whole personality towards a Reality which is felt rather than known. “We are nothing else but wills,” said St. Augustine. “The will,” said William Law, “maketh the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything. It is the only workman in nature, and everything is its work.” Experience endorses this emphasis on will and desire as the central facts of our personality, the part of us which is supremely our own. In turning that will and desire towards Spiritual Reality, we are doing all that we can of ourselves; are selecting one out of the sheaf-like tendencies of our complex nature, and deliberately concentrating upon it our passion and our power. Also, we are giving consciously, whole-heartedly, with intention, that with which we are free to deal; and self-donation is, we know, an essential part of prayer, as of all true intercourse. Now, intellect and feeling are not wholly ours to give. A rich mental or emotional life is not possessed of all men; some are naturally stupid, some temperamentally cold. Even those who are greatly endowed with the powers of understanding or of love have not got these powers entirely under their own control. Both feeling and intellect often insist on taking their own line with us. Moreover, they fluctuate from day to day, from hour to hour; they are dependent on many delicate adjustments. Sometimes we are mentally dull, sometimes we are emotionally flat: and this happens more often, perhaps, in regard to spiritual than in regard to merely human affairs. On such occasions it is notoriously useless to try to beat ourselves up to a froth: to make ourselves think more deeply or make ourselves care more intensely. Did the worth of man’s prayerful life depend on the maintenance of a constant high level of feeling or understanding, he were in a parlous case. But, though these often seem to fail him—and with them all the joy of spiritual intercourse fails him too—the regnant will remains. Even when his heart is cold and his mind is dim, the “blind intent stretching to God” is still possible to him. “Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.”