Having submitted to all that Christ esteems necessary for our regeneration, what does He set us to? Service. Glad, happy service to all who may need it. He has wonderful ways of making us acquainted with His especial friends, and it pleases Him to make us the means of answering the prayers of His poor for help, to their great wonder and joy and to the increase of their faith in Him. Also He uses us as a human spark, to ignite the fires of another man's heart: when He uses us in this way, it will seem to one like the opening of a window--to another a magnetism. One will see it as a light flashed on dark places, another receives it as the finding of a track where before was no track. But however many times we may be used in this way, the working remains a mystery to us. What is our reward whilst still in this world for our patient obediences and renunciations? This--that all becomes well with us the moment the process is brought to the stage where the aim of our life ceases to be the enjoyment of worldly life and becomes fixed upon the Invisible and upon God: and all this by and because of love, for it is love alone which can make us genuinely glad to give up our own will and which can keep us from sinning. We commence by qualifying through our human love, meagre and fluctuating as it is, for God's gift of holy love--of divine reciprocity, and with the presentation of this divine gift immediately we find ourselves in possession of _a new set of desires,_ which for the first time in our experience of living prove themselves completely satisfying in fruition. God does not leave us in an arid waste, because He would have us to be holy, and nowhere are there such ardent desires as in heaven; but He transposes and transfigures the carnal desires into the spiritual by means of this gift of divine reciprocity which is at once access to and union with Himself. Now, and only now do we find the sting pulled out of every adverse happening and every woe of life, and out of death also. And the whole process is to be gone through just where and how and as we find ourselves--in our own home or in the home of another, married or single, rich or poor,--with these three watchwords, Obedience, Patience and Simplicity. But it is not sufficient to have once achieved this union with God: to rest in happiness the soul must continually achieve it. It follows then that our need is not an isolated event but a _life,_ a life lived with God, and in experience we find that this alone can satisfy us. A life in which we receive hourly the breath of His tenderness and pity, His infinite solace to a pardoned soul. _Of the Interchange of Thought without Sound_