was not the purpose of the Creator since he made it.  ’God is transformed in man,’ says Augustine, ‘not man in God.’  Thus mysticism should be only a fire-trial which steels the soul but does not evaporate it like boiling water in a kettle.  He who has recognized the nothingness of self ought to recognize this self as a reflection of the actual divine.  The ‘German Theology’ says: 

["Was nu us geflossen ist, das ist nicht war wesen, und hat kein wesen anders dan in dem volkomen, sunder es ist ein zufal oder ein glast und ein schin, der nicht wesen ist oder nicht wesen hat anders, dan in dem sewer, da der glast us flusset, als in der sunnen oder in einem liechte.”]

“What has flown out is not real substance and has no other reality except in the perfect; but it is an incident or a glare or a shimmer, which is no substance, and has no other reality, except in the fire from which a glare proceeds, as in the sun or a light.”

“What is emitted from the divine, though it be only like the reflection from the fire, still has the divine reality in itself, and one might almost ask what were the fire without glow, the sun without light, or the Creator without the creature?  These are questions of which it is said very truthfully: 

["Welch mensche und welche creatur begert zu erfaren und zu wissen den heimlichen rat und willen gottes, der begert nicht anders denne als Adam tet und der boese geist.”]

“What man or creature desires to learn and to know the secret counsel and will of God—­desires nothing else but what Adam did and the evil spirit.

“For this reason, it should be enough for us to feel and to appear that we are a reflection of the divine until we are divine.  No one should place under a bushel or extinguish the divine light which illuminates us, but let it beam out, that it may brighten and warm all about it.  Then one feels a living fire in his veins, and a higher consecration for the struggle of life.  The most trivial duties remind us of God.  The earthly becomes divine, the temporal eternal, and our entire life a life in God.  God is not eternal repose.  He is everlasting life, which Angelus Silesius forgets when he says:  ‘God is without will.’

  “’We pray:  ‘Thy will my Lord and God be done,’
  And lo, He has no will!  He is an eternal silence.’”

She listened to me quietly, and, after a moment’s reflection, said:  “Health and strength belong to your faith; but there are life-weary souls, who long for rest and sleep, and feel so lonely that when they fall asleep in God, they miss the world as little as the world misses them.  It is a foretaste of divine rest to them when they can wrap themselves in the divine; and this they can do, since no tie binds them fast to earth, and no wish troubles their hearts except the wish for rest.

  “’Rest is the highest good, and were God not rest,
  Then would I avert my gaze even from Him.’