echo it! Under such conditions, you feel your perceptions developing,
widening; the eyes of your mind reach to vast distances. There is, in
truth, neither time nor place to the Spirit; space and duration are
proportions created for Matter; spirit and matter have naught in
common.

"Though these things take place in stillness, in silence, without
agitation, without external movement, yet Prayer is all action; but it
is spiritual action, stripped of substantiality, and reduced, like the
motion of the worlds, to an invisible pure force. It penetrates
everywhere like light; it gives vitality to souls that come beneath
its rays, as Nature beneath the sun. It resuscitates virtue, purifies
and sanctifies all actions, peoples solitude, and gives a foretaste of
eternal joys. When you have once felt the delights of the divine
intoxication which comes of this internal travail, then all is yours!
once take the lute on which we sing to God within your hands, and you
will never part with it. Hence the solitude in which Angelic Spirits
live; hence their disdain of human joys. They are withdrawn from those
who must die to live; they hear the language of such beings, but they
no longer understand their ideas; they wonder at their movements, at
what the world terms policies, material laws, societies. For them all
mysteries are over; truth, and truth alone, is theirs. They who have
reached the point where their eyes discern the Sacred Portals, who,
not looking back, not uttering one regret, contemplate worlds and
comprehend their destinies, such as they keep silence, wait, and bear
their final struggles. The worst of all those struggles is the last;
at the zenith of all virtue is Resignation,--to be an exile and not
lament, no longer to delight in earthly things and yet to smile, to
belong to God and yet to stay with men! You hear the voice that cries
to you, 'Advance!' Often celestial visions of descending Angels