VII. SIGNS OF THE TRUE GROUND

According to one master, many people arrive at specific understanding, at formal, notional knowledge. There are few who get beyond the science and the theory; yet one man whose mind is free from notions and from forms is more dear to God than the hundred thousand who have the habit of discursive, roving reason. God cannot enter in and do his work in them owing to the restlessness of their imagination. If they were free from pictures they could be caught and carried up beyond all rational concepts. As St. Dionysius says, and also have the super-rational light of faith at its starting point, where God finds his rest and peace to dwell and work in as he will and when he will and what he will. God is unhindered in his work in these so he can do in them his most precious work of all, working them up in faith into himself. These people no one can make out; their life is an enigma, and their ways, to all that do not live the same. To this truth and to this blessed life, to this high and perfect consummation no on can attain except in abstract knowledge and pure understanding.
     Many a lofty intellect, angels not excepting (for in life and nature an angel is nothing but pure mind), has erred and lapsed eternally from the eternal truth. This may happen also to those who, like the angels, preserve their idiosyncrasy and find satisfaction in the exercise of their own intelligence. For that reason the masters urge, and the saints as well, the use and the necessity of careful observation and close scrutiny to test the light which flashes in the light of understanding and of vision which man has here in time, unless he is the subject of hallucination. If you would know and recognize the really sane and genuine seers of God, whom nothing can deceive or misinform, four and twenty signs can detect them.
     The first sign is told to us by the chief exponent of knowledge and wisdom and transcendental understanding, who is himself the truth, our Lord Jesus Christ. He says, "Thereby ye shall know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another and keep my commandment. What is my commandment? That ye love one another as I have loved you," as though to say, you may be my disciples in knowledge and in wisdom and high understanding but without true love it shall avail you little if anything at all. Balaam was so clever he understood what God for many hundred years had been trying to reveal. This was but little help to him because he lacked true love. Moreover, Lucifer, the angel, who is in hell, had perfectly pure intellect and to this day knows much. He has the more hell pain and all because he failed to cleave with love and faith to what he knew. -- The second sign is selflessness: they empty themselves out of themselves giving free furlough to things. -- The third sign: they have wholly abandoned themselves to God: God works in them undisturbed. -- The fourth sign: wherever they still find themselves they leave themselves; sure method of advancement. -- The fifth sign: they are free from all self-seeking: this gives them a clear conscience. -- The sixth sign: they wait unceasingly upon God's will and do it to their utmost. -- The seventh sign: they bend their will to God's will until their will coincides with God's. -- The eighth sign: so closely do they fit and bind themselves to God and God to them in the power of love, that God does nothing without them and they do nothing without God. -- The ninth sign: they do not think of themselves and make use of God in all their works and in all places and all things. -- The tenth sign: they take no single thing from any creature, neither good nor bad, but all from God along, albeit God effects it through his creature. -- The eleventh sign: they are not snared by any pleasure or physical enjoyment or by any creature. -- The twelfth sign: they are not forced or driven by insubordination: they are steadfast for the truth. -- The thirteenth sign: they are not misled by any spurious light or by the look of any creature: they go by the intrinsic merit. -- The fourteenth sign: armed and arrayed with all the virtues they emerge victorious from every fight with vice. -- The fifteenth sign: they see and know the naked truth and praise God without ceasing for this gnosis, this knowledge of spiritual truth. -- The sixteenth sign: perfect and just, they hold themselves in poor esteem. -- The seventeenth sign: they are careful of words and prodigal of works. -- The eighteenth sign: they preach to the world by right practice. -- The nineteenth sign: they are always seeking God's glory and nothing at all besides. -- The twentieth sign: if any man fight them, they will let him prevail before accepting help of any sort but God's. -- The twenty-first sign: they desire neither comfort nor possessions, of the least of which they view themselves all undeserving. -- The twenty-second sign: they look upon themselves as the most unworthy of all humankind on earth; their humbleness is therefore never failing. -- The twenty-third sign: they take the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ for the perfect model of their lives and in the light of this are always examining themselves with the sole intention of removing all unlikeness to their high ideal. -- The twenty-fourth sign: to outward appearance they do little who are working all the time at the virtuous life, thus the disesteem of many people, which, however, they prefer to vulgar approval.
     These are the signs of the true ground wherein lives the image of the perfect truth and he who does not find them in himself may account his knowledge vain and so may other people.

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