“It came to me quite suddenly one morning in my room upstairs.  I was very miserable indeed, missing my dear husband at every turn, quite unable to face life, shuddering and shrinking through the days.  I threw it all aside, and spoke to God Himself.  I said, ’You made me, You put me here, You sent me love, You sent me prosperity.  I have cared for the wrong things, I have loved in the wrong way.  Now I throw everything else aside, and claim strength and light.  I will sorrow no more and desire no more; I will take every day just what You send me, I will say and do what You bid me.  I will make no pretences and no complaints.  Do with me what You will.’

“I cannot tell you what happened to me, but a great tide of strength and even joy flowed into my whole being; it was the water of life, clear as crystal; and yet it was myself all the time!  I was not different, but I was one with something pure and wise and loving and eternal.

“That has never left me.  You will ask why I have not done more, bestirred myself more; because that is just what one cannot do.  All that matters nothing.  The activities which one makes for oneself, they are the delusions which hide God from us.  One must not strive or rebuke or arrange; one must simply love and be.  Let me tell you one thing.  I was haunted all my early life with a fear of death.  I liked life so well, every moment of it, every incident, that I could not bear to think it should ever cease; now, though I shrink from pain as much as ever, I have no shrinking whatever from death.  It is the perfectly natural and simple change, and one is with God there as here.  The soul and God—­those are the two imperishable things; one has not either to know or to act—­one has only to feel.”

She ceased speaking, and sat for a moment upright in her chair.  Then she went on.  “Now the moment I saw you, my dear boy, I loved you—­indeed I have always loved you, I think, and I have always felt that some day in His good time God would bring us together.  But I see too that you have not found the strength of God.  You are not at peace.  Your life is full and active and kind; you are faithful and pure; but your self is still unbroken, like a crystal wall all round you.  I think you will have to suffer; but you will believe, will you not, that you have not seen a half of the wonder of life?  You are full of happy experience, but you have begun to feel the larger need.  And I knew that when you began to feel that need, you would be brought to me, not to be given it, but to be shown it.  That is all I can say to you now, but you will know the fulness of life.  It is not experience, action, curiosity, ambition, desire, as many think, that is fulness of life; those are delusions, things through which the soul has to pass, just that it may learn not to rest in them.  The fulness of life is the stillest, quietest, inner joy, which nothing can trouble or shadow; love is a part of it, but not quite all—­for there is a shadow even in love; and this is the larger peace.”