Chapter VII.
What constitutes our end and perfect bliss.
For
then will be
perfectly fulfilled in our case that prayer of our Saviour in which He
prayed for His disciples to the Father saying “that the love
wherewith Thou lovedst Me may be in them and they in us;” and
again: “that they all may be one as Thou, Father, in Me and I in
Thee, that they also may be one in us,”
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when that perfect love of God, wherewith “He first loved
us”
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has passed into
the feelings of our heart as well, by the fulfilment of this prayer of
the Lord which we believe cannot possibly be ineffectual. And this will
come to pass when God shall be all our love, and every desire and wish
and effort, every thought of ours, and all our life and words and
breath, and that unity which already exists between the Father and the
Son, and the Son and the Father, has been shed abroad in our hearts and
minds, so that as He loves us with a pure and unfeigned and
indissoluble love, so we also may be joined to Him by a lasting and
inseparable affection, since we are so united to Him that whatever we
breathe or think, or speak is God, since, as I say, we attain to that
end of which we spoke before, which the same Lord in His prayer hopes
may be fulfilled in us: “that they all may be one as we are one,
I in them and Thou in Me, that they also may be made perfect in
one;” and again: “Father, those whom Thou hast given Me, I
will that where I am, they may also be with Me.”
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This then ought to be the destination of
the solitary, this should be all his aim that it may be vouchsafed to
him to possess even in the body an image of future bliss, and that he
may begin in this world to have a foretaste of a sort of earnest of
that celestial life and glory. This, I say, is the end of all
perfection, that the mind purged from all carnal desires may daily be
lifted towards spiritual things, until the whole life and all the
thoughts of the heart become one continuous prayer.
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S.
John xvii. 26, 21
.
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1 John iv. 16
.
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S.
John xvii. 22–24
.