 enjoy much inward peace .... Then shall all vain imaginations, evil
perturbations, and superfluous cares fly away; then shall immoderate fear leave
thee, and inordinate love shall die.«
    Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see a
sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable
her to renounce all other secrets - here was a sublime height to be reached
without the help of outward things - here was insight, and strength, and
conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a suppreme
Teacher was waiting to be heard. It flashed through her like the suddenly
apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had
come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central
necessity of the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of
shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own
desires - of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an
insignificant part of a divinely-guided whole. She read on and on in the old
book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with the invisible Teacher, the pattern of
sorrow, the source of all strength; returning to it after she had been called
away, and reading till the sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry
of an imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening
twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness; and, in the
ardour of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into that
satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had not perceived -
how could she until she had lived longer? - the inmost truth of the old monk's
outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found
the key to it. She knew nothing of doctrines and systems - of mysticism or
quietism; but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct
communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an
unquestioned message.
    I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which you
need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning
bitter waters into sweetness: while expensive sermons and treatises, newly
issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that
waited for the heart'
