Page:From Passion to Peace - Allen - 1910.djvu/50

Rh cares, troubles, and anxieties concerning the pleasure and fate of the personality are dispelled like the feverish dreams of a night.

Passion is blind and ignorant; it sees and knows only its own gratification. Self recognizes no law; its object is to get and to enjoy. The getting is a graduated scale varying from sensual greed, through many subtle vanities, up to the desire for a personal heaven or personal immortality, but it is self still; it is the old sensual craving coming out again in a more subtle and deceptive form; it is the longing for some personal delight, along with its accompanying dread lest that delight should be lost forever.

In the transcendent state desire and dread are ended; and the thirst for gain and the fear of loss are things that are no more; for where the universal order is seen, universal good is seen; and where perennial joy in that good is a normal condition, what is there left to desire, what remains to be feared?