Finally, steps in the inner life are not, of course, for those to whom life means nothing else than eating and drinking and dying to-morrow. The steps of the inner life exist rather only for those who are resolved to struggle out of a merely natural existence common to many others, on through to a really spiritual life. For these, Thomas à Kempis points out the safest way in the following dialogue: MY SON, the perfect freedom of the spirit thou canst not win nor keep, if thou press not through to the complete renunciation of thyself. Slave-chains are borne by all who cling to something selfishly, who love themselves, who desire the outer world with eagerness and longing and curiosity, who seek the things that flatter the senses and not the things that further the Kingdom of Christ, who will always build and strengthen what yet hath no foundation; for everything falleth into nothingness that is not born of God. Hold thyself to this short saying, for it meaneth much: Forsake all, and thou findest all. Bid farewell to every desire; then enterest thou upon rest. Let this word never leave thy thoughts; bear it within thee day and night; and when thou hast brought it to fulfilment, then shalt thou understand all. But this, O LORD, is not the work of a single day, nor is it child’s play. In this shell lies the whole kernel of the perfection of those who seek God. SON, that must not frighten thee back, nor discourage thee, but rather draw thee to climb upward to the higher goal, or at the least to bear a longing thereto in thy heart. If thou wert already so far on the way that thou wert free from all blind love to thyself, and wert ready and prepared to obey every beck of thy fatherly superior whom I have set over thee, then might mine eye rest with pleasure upon thee, and thy whole life would flow along in peace and joy. For as soon as thou no longer wishest this or that in thine own self-conceit, but shalt have yielded thyself wholly to thy God without gainsay and from the innermost depth of thy heart, and shalt have laid down all thy wishes into the hand of God, from that moment onward shalt thou be at rest, and shalt find thyself at one with God, in that no other thing shall be to thee so agreeable and pleasing as God’s pleasure. Whoever hath thus, in simplicity of heart, swung his thoughts upward to God, and hath loosed himself from the inordinate love or hate of any created thing, he alone shall be fit and worthy to receive the gift of devotion. For where the Lord findeth empty vessels, there He layeth in his blessing. And the more completely any one looseneth his heart from the love of that which perisheth, and the more completely he maketh his own self to waste away under deepest disregard, by so much the quicker cometh this mercy, by so much the deeper it presseth in, and by so much the higher the free heart of man is lifted up.