How blessed is he who reaches the fourth degree of love, wherein one loves himself only in God! Thy righteousness standeth like the strong mountains, O God. Such love as this is God’s hill, in the which it pleaseth Him to dwell. “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?” “O that I had wings like a dove; for then would I flee away and be at rest.” “At Salem is His tabernacle; and His dwelling in Sion.” “Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech!” ( Psalm 24:3; 55:6; 76:2; <19C005> 120:5).

When shall this flesh and blood, this earthen vessel which is my soul’s tabernacle, attain thereto? When shall my soul, rapt with divine love and altogether self- forgetting, yea, become like a broken vessel, yearn wholly for God, and, joined unto the Lord, be one spirit with Him? When shall she exclaim, “My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever” ( Psalm 73:26).

I would count him blessed and holy to whom such rapture has been vouchsafed in this mortal life, for even an instant to lose thyself, as if thou wert emptied and lost and swallowed up in God, is no human love; it is celestial. But if sometimes a poor mortal feels that heavenly joy for a rapturous moment, then this wretched life envies his happiness, the malice of daily trifles disturbs him, this body of death weighs him down, the needs of the flesh are imperative, the weakness of corruption fails him, and above all brotherly love calls him back to duty. Alas! that voice summons him to re-enter his own round of existence; and he must ever cry out lamentably, “O Lord, I am oppressed: undertake for me” ( Isaiah 38:14); and again, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” ( Romans 7:24).

Seeing that the Scripture saith, God has made all for His own glory ( Isaiah 43:7), surely His creatures ought to conform themselves, as much as they can, to His will. In Him should all our affections center, so that in all things we should seek only to do His will, not to please ourselves. And real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining transient pleasures, but in accomplishing God’s will for us: even as we pray every day: “Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven” ( Matthew 6:10). O chaste and holy love! O sweet and gracious affection! O pure and cleansed purpose, thoroughly washed and purged from any admixture of selfishness, and sweetened by contact with the divine will! To reach this state is to become godlike. As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sunbeams, seems not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God. For how could God be all in all, if anything merely human remained in man? The substance will endure, but in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory. When will that be? Who will see, who possess it? “When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?” ( Psalm 42:2). “My heart hath talked of Thee, Seek ye My face:

Thy face, Lord, will I seek” ( Psalm 27:8).

Lord, thinkest Thou that I even I shall see Thy holy temple?

In this life, I think, we cannot fully and perfectly obey that precept, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind” ( Luke 10:27).