the true prayer of contemplation, to the search for God, whether in the cloister or the world—whose "little secret love" is at once the energising cause of all action, and the hidden sweet savour of life—that he addresses himself. These he instructs in that simple yet difficult art of recollection, the necessary preliminary of any true communion with the spiritual order, in which all sensual images, all memories and thoughts, are as he says, "trodden down under the cloud of forgetting" until "nothing lives in the working mind but a naked intent stretching to God." This "intent stretching"—this loving and vigorous determination of the will—he regards as the central fact of the mystical life; the very heart of effective prayer. Only by its exercise can the spirit, freed from the distractions of memory and sense, focus itself upon Reality and ascend with "a privy love pressed" to that "Cloud of Unknowing"—the Divine Ignorance of the Neoplatonists—
