The emotion of love does not shrink back into itself because in the confused pell-mell of human life the alien souls which destiny has chosen for its companions do not satisfy, in this detail or the other detail, the desire of its heart. The emotion of love is always centrifugal, always outflowing. It concentrates itself upon this person or the other person, as the unaccountable attractions of likeness and difference dictate or as destiny dictates; but the deepest loyalty of love is always directed to the eternal vision; for in the eternal vision it not only becomes one with all living souls but it also becomes one--though this is a high and difficult mystery--with all the dead that have ever loved and with all the unborn that will ever love. For the apprehension of the eternal vision is at once the supreme creation and the supreme discovery of the soul of man; and not of the soul of man alone, but of all souls, whether of beasts or plants or demi-gods or gods, who fill the unfathomable circle of space.
The secret of this kind of love, when it comes to the matter of human relationships, may perhaps best be expressed in those words of William Blake which imply the difficulty which love finds in overcoming the murderous exactions of the possessive instinct and the cruel clairvoyance of malice. "And throughout all eternity, I forgive you: you forgive me: As our dear Redeemer said--This is the wine: this is the bread."
This "forgiveness" of love does not imply that love, as the old saying runs, is "blind." Love sees deeper than malice; for malice can only recognize its own likeness in everything it approaches. It must be remembered too that this process of laying bare the faults of others is not a pure process of discovery. Like all other forms of apprehension it is also a reproduction of itself. The situation, in fact, is never a static one. These "faults" which malice, in its reproductive "discoveries" lays bare, are not fixed, immobile, dead. They are organic and psychic conditions of a living soul. They are themselves in a perpetual state of change, of growth, of increase, of withering, of fading. They are affected at every moment by the will and by the emotion of the subject of them. They project themselves; they withdraw themselves. They dilate; they diminish. Thus it happens that at the very touch of this "discovering," the malice which is thus "discovered" dilates with immediate reciprocity to meet its "discoverer"; and this can occur--such is the curious telepathic vibration between living things--without any articulate act of consciousness.