Page:Candle of Vision.djvu/38

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hurries along nerve, artery, and every highway of the body to beset the soul. The beautiful face of one we love, more alluring than life, glows before us to enchant us from our task. Old sins, enmities, vanities and desires beleaguer and beseech us. If we do not heed them then they change, they seem to be with us, they open up vistas of all we and they will do, when this new power we strive for is attained. If we are tempted down that vista we find with shame after an hour of vain musing that we were lured away, had deserted our task and forgotten that stern fixity of the will we set out to achieve. Let us persevere in our daily ritual and the turmoil increases; our whole being becomes vitalised, the bad as well as the good. The heat of this fervent concentration acts like fire under a pot, and everything in our being boils up madly. We learn our own hitherto unknown character. We did not know we could feel such fierce desires, never imagined such passionate enmities as now awaken. We have created in ourselves a centre of power and grow real to ourselves. It is dangerous, too, for we have flung ourselves into the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, and find ourselves where the battle is