God doth not need
    Either man’s work, or his own gifts; who best
    Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best:  his state
    Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
    And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
    They also serve who only stand and wait.

They also serve who only stand and wait—­yes, but it is when they wait for Him passionately, hungeringly, full of longing for immortality in Him.

And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by our patience.  “My cup is small, but I drink out of my cup,” said the egoistical poet of an avaricious people.[58] No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to drink out of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to the number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting it to their lips, leave in it something of their spirit.  And while they drink out of my cup, I also drink out of theirs.  For the more I belong to myself, and the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they enter into me.

“Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect,” we are bidden, and our Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of His children who live and move and have their being in Him.  And the end of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.  And this is to make the Universe consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society.  And then shall we be able confidently to call God Father.

I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has his own language and his own passion—­that is to say, each man who knows what passion is—­and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it avail him to know science.

And the passion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees of ethical science call egotism.  But this egotism is the only true remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving oneself.

“Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is,” said Fr. Juan de los Angeles in one of his Dialogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios (Dial., iii., 8); but what does this “Be not” mean?  May it not mean paradoxically—­and such a mode of expression is common with the mystics—­the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it would appear to mean?  Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction?  Is not the monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity?  And by the monastic ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who flees from the world—­perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless—­in order that he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as himself; not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of Albigensian hearts to burn.