experience. The soul is silent in the state of death, but its stillness is
prayer returns with it, and accompanied by a marvellous ease; and as God takes possession of the senses and faculties, its devotion becomes sweet, gentle, and very spiritual, but always to God. Its former devotion caused it to sink within itself, that it might enjoy God, but what it now has draws it out of self, that it may be more and more lost and changed in God. 60. This difference is quite remarkable, and can only be gained by experience. The soul is silent in the state of death, but its stillness is barren, and accompanied by a frantic rambling which leaves no mark of silence save the impossibility of addressing God, either with the lips or the heart. But after the resurrection, its silence is fruitful and attended by a pure and refined anointing, which is deliciously diffused over the senses, but with such a purity, that it causes no stay and contracts no taint. 61. It is now impossible for the soul to take what it has not, or to put off what it has. It receives willingly whatever impressions are made on it. Its state, however overwhelming, would be free from suffering, if God, who moves it towards certain free things, gave them the necessary capacity. But as their state will not bear it, it becomes necessary that what God wills they should have, should be given by means of suffering. 62. It would be wrong for such people to say that they do not want these means; that they desire God only. He is anxious that they should die to a certain interior support of self, which causes them to say that they desire God only; and if they were to reject these means they would withdraw themselves from the order of God, and arrest their progress. But, being given simply as means, though fruitful in grace and virtue, however secret and concealed, they finally disappear when the soul finds itself united with the means in God, and He communicates Himself directly. Then God withdraws the means, on which he no longer impresses any movement in the direction of the person to whom they are attached; because it might then serve as a support, its utility being at least recognized. The soul can then no longer have what it had, and remains in its first death in respect to them, though still very closely united. 63. In this state of resurrection comes that indescribable silence, by which we not only exist in God, but commune with Him. In a soul thus dead to its own working, and general and fundamental selfappropriation, it becomes a flux and reflux of divine communion, with nothing to sully its purity; for there is nothing to hinder it.