A Demand For Constant Light

He did not torture himself with vain attempts to hold his brain as a mirror to his heart, that he might read his heart there. The heart is deaf and dumb and blind, but it has more in it — more life and blessedness, more torture and death — than any poor knowledge-machine of a brain can understand, or even delude itself into the fancy of understanding.

 

George MacDonald in Alec Forbes of Howglen

 

You want to grow in virtue, to serve God, to love Christ? Well, you will grow in and attain to these things if you will make them a slow and sure, an utterly real, a mountain step-plod and ascent, willing to have to camp for weeks or months in spiritual desolation, darkness and emptiness at different stages in your march and growth. All demand for constant light, for ever the best – the best to your own feeling, all the attempt at eliminating or minimizing the cross and trial, is so much soft folly and puerile trifling.

Friedrich von Hügel in  Letters to a Niece

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