The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX one must pronounce them with a complete intelligence, with a will that nothing checks, an activity that nothing daunts. In magic, to have said is to have done; the word begins with letters, it ends with acts. One does not really will a thing unless one wills it with all one’s heart, to the point of breaking for it one’s dearest affections ; and with all one’s forces, to the point of risking one’s health, one’s fortune, and one’s life. It is by absolute devotion that faith proves itself and constitutes itself. But the man armed with such a faith will be able to move mountains. The most fatal enemy of our souls is idleness. Inertia intoxicates us and sends us to sleep; but the sleep of inertia is corruption and death. The faculties of the human soul are like the waves of the ocean. To keep them sweet, they need the salt and bitterness of tears: they need the whirlwinds of Heaven : they need to be shaken by the storm. When, instead of marching upon the path of progress, we wish to have ourselves carried, we are sleeping in the arms of death. It is to us that it is spoken, as to the paralytic man in the Gospel, ‘Take up thy bed and walk!” It is for us to carry death away, to plunge it into life. Consider the magnificent and terrible metaphor of St. John; Hell isa sleeping fire. It is a life without activity and without progress; it is sulphur in stagnation: stagnum ignis et sulphuris. The sleeping life is like the idle word, and it is of that that men will have to give an account in the Day of Judgment. Intelligence speaks, and matter stirs. It will not rest until it has taken the form given to it by the word. Behold the Christian word, how for these nineteen centuries it has put 242