The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES that they have only drunk of muddy streams. To enjoy even the animal pleasures of life one must have the moral sense; and those who calumniate existence have certainly abused it. High magic, as we have proved, leads man back to the laws of the purest morality. Either he finds a thing holy or makes it holy, says an adept—Ve/ sanctum invenit, vel sanctum Jacit; because it makes us understand that in order to be happy, even in this world, one must be holy. To be holy! that is easy to say; but how give one’s self faith when one no longer believes? How re-discover a taste for virtue in a heart faded by vice? One must have recourse to the four words of science: to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silence. One must still one’s dislikes, study duty, and begin by practising it as though one loved it. You are an unbeliever, and you wish to make yourself a Christian ? Perform the exercises of a Christian, pray regularly, using the Christian formule; approach the sacraments as if you had faith, and faith will come. That is the secret of the Jesuits, contained in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. By similar exercises, a fool, if he willed it with perse- verance, would become a wise man. By changing the habits of the soul one certainly changes those of the body; we have already said so, and we have ex- plained the method. What contributes above all to age us by making us ugly? Hatred and bitterness, the unfavourable judgments which 1 If the fool would but persist in his folly, he would become wise—WILLIAM BLAKE. 277