power of God.  The quickness of the Spirit becomes yours; in an instant you may pass from region to region; like the Word itself, you are transported from the ends of the world to other worlds.  Harmony exists, and you are part of it!  Light is there and your eyes possess it!  Melody is heard and you 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  They are withdrawn from those who must die to live; they hear the language of such beings, but they no longer understand their ideas; they wonder at their movements, at what the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 compass you about with songs of praise; then, tearless, uncomplaining, must you watch them as they reascent the skies!  To murmur is to forfeit all.  Resignation is a fruit that ripens at the gates of heaven.  How powerful, how glorious the calm smile, the pure brow of the resigned human creature.  Radiant is the light of that brow.  They who live in its atmosphere grow purer.  That calm glance penetrates and softens.  More eloquent by silence than the prophet by speech, such beings triumph by their simple presence.  Their ears are quick to hear as a faithful dog listening for his master.  Brighter than hope, stronger than love, higher than faith, that creature of resignation is the virgin standing on the earth, who holds for a moment the conquered palm, then, rising heavenward,