The Hidden Words is conspicuously one of those works that can only be interpreted through personal, and indeed, communal, experience. We of the spiritual twilight’s darker edge, we who inherit a general tradition of doubt and mammon-worship, cannot pierce the deeper meaning of these
Hidden Words nor attain that outlook on life and the universe which it enjoins. Years and generations must pass before man can shake off the fetters he has bound upon his soul and regain that keenness of insight which he has lost through long disuse.
In its opening verse
Hidden Words states the true and supreme aim of man’s life on earth and sets forth the means by which it is to be fulfilled—the right disipline of the will and the emotions. The same goal and end were referred to by Christ in the Parable of the Talents, when the Lord said to His dutiful servant, “thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things”.
1 Elsewhere in
Hidden Words,
2 man’s aim and hope is said to be: “to attain God’s everlasting dominion and become worthy of His invisible gifts;” “to clothe the soul with that divine unity and eternity which God has made for men and thus to be for all eternity the revelation of His everlasting being;” “to recognize that man is made for God; that is, his tongue for the mention of God, his heart for God’s descent upon it, his spirit to be the place of God’s revelation;” “to love God that God’s love may reach him;
3 that God may name his name and fill his soul with the spirit of life;” “and to enter without delay the
Paradise” of God’s love, the heavenly home of reunion with Him.” All of these goals are inward, spiritual, consisting of a particular relationship to God, and once