one more fundamental doctrine which we must not omit.
Purification removes the obstacles to our union with God, but our
guide on the upward path, _the true hierophant of the mysteries of
God, is love_[10]. Love has been defined as "interest in its highest
power";[11] while others have said that "it is of the essence of love
to be disinterested." The contradiction is merely a verbal one. The
two definitions mark different starting-points, but the two "ways of
love" should bring us to the same goal. The possibility of
disinterested love, in the ordinary sense, ought never to have been
called in question. "Love is not love" when it asks for a reward. Nor
is the love of man to God any exception. He who tries to be holy in
order to be happy will assuredly be neither. In the words of the
_Theologia Germanica_, "So long as a man seeketh his own highest good
_because_ it is his, he will never find it." The mystics here are
unanimous, though some, like St. Bernard, doubt whether perfect love
of God can ever be attained, pure and without alloy, while we are in
this life.[12] The controversy between Fenelon and Bossuet on this
subject is well known, and few will deny that Fenelon was mainly in
the right. Certainly he had an easy task in justifying his statements
from the writings of the saints. But we need not trouble ourselves
with the "mystic paradox," that it would be better to be with Christ
in hell than without Him in heaven--a statement which Thomas a Kempis
once wrote and then erased in his manuscript. For wherever Christ is,
there is heaven: nor should we regard eternal happiness as anything
distinct from "a true conjunction of the mind with God.[13]" "God is
not without or above law: He _could_ not make men either sinful or
miserable.[14]" To believe otherwise is to suppose an irrational
universe, the one thing which a rational man cannot believe in.

The mystic, as we have seen, makes it his life's aim to be transformed
into the likeness of Him in whose image he was created.[15] He l