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FOR then will be perfectly fulfilled in our case that prayer of our
Saviour in which He prayed for His disciples to the Father saying "that the
love wherewith Thou lovedst Me may be in them and they in us;" and again:
"that they all may be one as Thou, Father, in Me and I in Thee, that they
also may be one in us," when that perfect love of God, wherewith" He
first loved us" has passed into the feelings of our heart as well, by
the fulfilment of this prayer of the Lord which we believe cannot possibly
be ineffectual. And this will come to pass when God shall be all our love,
and every desire and wish and effort, every thought of ours, and all our
life and words and breath, and that unity which already exists between the
Father and the Son, and the Son and the Father, has been shed abroad in our
hearts and minds, so that as He loves us with a pure and unfeigned and
indissoluble love, so we also may be joined to Him by a lasting and
inseparable affection, since we are so united to Him that whatever we
breathe or think, or speak is God, since, as I say, we attain to that end
of which we spoke before, which the same Lord in His prayer hopes may be
fulfilled in us: "that they all may be one as we are one, I in them and
Thou in Me, that they also may be made perfect in one;" and again: "Father,
those whom Thou hast given Me, I will that where I am, they may also be
with Me." This then ought to be the destination of the solitary, this
should be all his aim that it may be vouchsafed to him to possess even in
the body an image of future bliss, and that he may begin in this world to
have a foretaste of a sort of earnest of that celestial life and glory.
This, I say, is the end of all perfection, that the mind purged from all
carnal desires may daily be lifted towards spiritual things, until the
whole life and all the thoughts of the heart become one continuous prayer.
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