You will say to me: “The light is so beautiful, so beautiful! It adds luster to so many things that are dear to me. Have I any need to dream of other rays than these? My eyes have already so much to do that they are overcome by their delight. The beauty of sound and silence ceaselessly intoxicates my ear.” True! Your soul has active purveyors. They do not leave it idle. They come and heap at its feet riches that demand its enthusiasm and its solicitude. But often there is in your soul something your senses have not brought there, an exquisite joy, an inexpressible sadness. Do not forget that you live bathed in a multitude of rays to only some of which you are sensible. The others are perhaps not quite strange to you. What is passing, in contraband, across the frontiers of your being? Do not obstinately try to bring it under control. Submit, experience, be merely attentive and respectful to everything. Some day we shall perhaps know more things than we are able to divine now. XI One of the greatest delights of the religious faith is to abandon ourselves to gratitude, to be able to thank, from an overflowing heart, the moral being to whom we feel indebted for our wealth. Why then, since I have long lost this faith, do I still feel each day, and several times a day, the great need of singing the canticle of Francis of Assisi, the lovely canticle in which he says: Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, and unto all Thy creatures, especially our gracious brother the sun, who gives us the day and through whom Thou showest us Thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with a great splendor. He is the symbol of Thee, Most High. Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the moon and the stars, fashioned by Thee in the sky, clear, precious, and beautiful. Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the wind, and for the air and the clouds, for the pure sky, and for all the time during which Thou givest to thy creatures life and sustenance. Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the water, who is so useful, precious and clean. Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our brother the fire, through whom Thou illuminest the night. He is lovely and gay, courageous and strong. Praise unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the earth, who sustains us and nourishes us, and brings forth divers fruits and flowers of a thousand colors and the grass. A poet has transposed these divine strophes into the harmony of French verse and sings thus: I shall praise you, Lord, for having made so lovely and so bright This world where you wish us to await our life. Now, I know very well that in this world I am not awaiting life, I am living. I know very well that it is here I must live and lose no time about it. My gratitude is all the more pressing, all the more intense. What if it does rise to an empty heaven, that infinite gratitude!