For many years before coming to Union with God, I found that it had become impossible to say more than a little prayer of some five or six words, and these were said very slowly: at times I was astonished at my inability, and ashamed that these pitiful shreds were all that I could offer, and always the same thing too; I tried to vary it--I could not. When I tried to say some fine sentence, when I tried even to ask for something, I could not; it all disappeared in a feeling of such sweet love for God, and I merely said again the same old words of every day. I loved. I could do nothing more than say so, and then stay there on my knees for a little while, very near Him, fascinated, adoring. But God is not vexed with a soul when she cannot say much. Is an earthly father vexed when his child, standing there before him, forgets the words upon its lips, forgets to ask, because it loves him so? Far from it.
This prayer is the commencement, the foretaste, of Contemplation. A distinguishing mark between this prayer and Contemplation is that in even the lowest degree of Contemplation God (if one may so express the inexpressible) is Localised. Hitherto His Presence has been near--but we cannot say how near, or where, and _we cannot be sure of finding it._ After Union we are certain of finding God's Presence everywhere, and at any time. He may at times be far away, or pay no attention to us; but we know whereabouts He is, and we can go and wait outside that place where He has hidden Himself and which is no place (but a figure of speech): He merely disappears from our consciousness, but not so entirely but that we can partly find Him. All this cannot be explained, but after Union God is as present to the soul in Contemplation (and far more so because of the great poignancy of it) as is a fellow-creature whom we actually see and touch, much more so because between ourself and a fellow-creature, however dear, is always a barrier: try as we may there is always a dividing line between two persons. We are two: we remain two. But when we meet God there is nothing between us and God, nothing whatever divides us, and yet we are not lost in God--that is to say, we do not disappear as a living individual consciousness, but our consciousness is increased to a prodigious degree, and we are One with God.