138 THE GREAT SECRET
we love imparts to us divine grandeur and bliss.
When we love, we see the infinite in the finite. We find the Creator in the creature. When we are the objects of love, we are representatives of God; His ambassadors to a certain soul, fully empowered to grant it paradise on earth.
Souls live by truth and love; without love and truth, they suffer and pine away like the body when it is deprived of light and heat.
‘What is truth?’ Tiberius’s representative asked scornfully when faced with Jesus Christ, and Tiberius himself posed a question with more insolent disdain and bitter irony: ‘What is love?
The rage at being unable to understand and believe anything, the frenzy at being incapable of love, this is the true definition of Hell; and how many men and how many women arc delivered after this life to the tortures of this appalling damnation? How many are delivered to the passionate mania for falsehood; to the deceptions of love which consign the soul to fatal insanity? The need to know being always outstripped by the unknown and the need for iove being always betrayed by the impotence of the heart?
Don Juan went on from crime to crime in the pursuit of love and was finally crushed to death in the embrace of a stone statue. Faust, when prompted by the emptiness of knowledge without faith, amused himself with the over-credulous Margaret, and was left with nothing but remorse after he had lost her. Perhaps Margaret will save him, because she, poor child, was really in love, and it is not God’s will surely that she should be parted for ever from the one she adored.
Do you want to enter into the secrets of love? Study the mysteries of jealousy. Jealousy is inseparable from love, because love is an absolute preference which cries out to be reciprocated; but it cannot exist without that absolute trust which common jealousy naturally tends to destroy. The reason is that common jealousy is an egotistical sentiment, the usual result of which is to substitute hatred for affection. ft is a secret calumny against the loved object, a doubt which insults it; often it is a frenzy which vents itself in ill-usage and destruction.
Therefore, judge love according to its works: if it elevates the soul, it will inspire devotion and heroic actions; if it is only jealous of the perfection and well-being of the one it loves, if it is
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