When at last the soul reaches union with Him, she is for a while so caressed, so held in a perpetual contact and nearness, that we may think ourselves already permanently entered into Paradise! But this is not the plan; and, our education being exceedingly incomplete, we return to our schooling. We commence to experience profound and even terrible longings to leave the world and all creatures, for we cannot bear either the sight or the sound of them, and seek all day long to be alone with the Beloved God. To conquer this last selfishness and weakness of the soul, we must go again--as in the beginning--to Jesus. He teaches us to go to and fro _willingly,_ gladly, from the highest to the lowest. To pick up our daily life and duties, our obligations to a physical world, in all humility, sweet reasonableness, and submission. He teaches us to willingly accept incessant interruptions, and with smiling face and perfect inward smoothness to descend from a high contemplation of God (and only those who know high contemplation can judge of the immensity of what I say) to listen and _attend to_ some most trivial want of a fellow-creature! Reader, it is the hardest thing of all. No sooner have we learnt the hard and difficult way of ascent than we must willingly come down it, even remain altogether in the valley below, and that with a smiling face and, if possible, no thought of impatience! This is the true sacrifice of the soul. Now, the sacrifices of the creature are the giving up of the near and visible joys and prides of the world to follow Christ, and are not real but seeming sacrifices, for, if done heartily and with courage, an exchange between these joys and the joys of the invisible is rapidly effected, and there remains no sacrifice, but "the hidden treasure" is ours! But the sacrifice of the soul is real and long; for having at last re-found God, she must resign her full joy of Him till the death of the body--and this willingly, thankfully, without complaint, not asking favours but pouring up her gratitude. In joy or in pain, in happiness or in tribulation--gratitude! gratitude!--and this not by her own strength but by strength of the Holy Ghost. * * * Because of this new way of living, the mind acquires a great increase of capacity and strength and clearness: being able to deal quickly and correctly with all matters brought before it with an ease previously altogether unknown to its owner. It is no exaggeration to say that the sagacity, scope, and grasp of the mind feels to be more than doubled from that which it previously was, and this not because of any study, but by an involuntary alteration. So that, though the mind and attention are now given almost exclusively to the things of God, yet when the things of the world have to be dealt with, this is accomplished with extraordinary efficiency and quickness, though very distasteful to the mind. * * *