REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE
Here are convictions that the Cause of love, felt within, "must be Jesus' Good Spirit"; comfort in discovering of death's unreality (for if only the body, not the spirit, dies, "Oh, then it is only pretending-dying!"); a flash of discernment, perhaps, as to the passing away of lifeless evil since although, to the child, indeed "it is a pity that some one did not come and kill the devil; and then he would be dead," yet he has his own eschatology: "Well, when we are all dead, the devil will be dead too." More significant is a sudden overawed realisation of the great universe (setting pause to his own run round in play), one door to a quick perception in the child's devout spirit of analogy binding truths unseen by sense: "Is this world always going round, now?" ('Yes.') "It stays still! still!—Jesus is looking down now: we don't see Him."—Here, too, are habitual references to the things that are meant to be,—musings over the goodness and knowledge, the braveness and courtesy "meant to be" in a man; and here is a grateful, trusting sense of the real 'kindness' of 'wild' creatures and of hurting remedies. Many of those simple utterances, careless yet arresting like a blackbird's song, and personal with the ardent love and clear reason of a child faithfully living and bravely dying, seem to attest a kinship with seers of truth to whom longer trial has offered a sterner strength of complex thinking, for wider service here, but who, although they may have learnt thus 'more' in the knowledge of love, "shall never know nor learn other thing without end."—"I understood none higher stature in this life than childhood." "It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be. *************** A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night, It was the plant and flower of Light." For all of the Company of saints have the sight of One Vision, and be it in the steadfast fulfilment of labour, or from out of the merriment of play,—through the strong, bright peace of endurance, or the silent acquiescence of the will, led along valleys of darkness,—or again in some swift rush of prayer into the morning light,—all of the saints, the babe and the ancient, beholding "the Blissful Countenance" say "with one xxxi