It is said that one's deepest and most intimate spiritual experiences should never be discussed or related. This is fundamentally true and no true "experiencer" is the least interested in such discussions. The deeper and more vital the experience, the less temptation is there to tell it. Only beginners with a theoretical, imaginative event in their [41] consciousness claim such experiences. But with deliberation I have related the two above subjective events (or was the first subjective?) because it is time that people of standing and who are recognized as sane and intelligent should add their testimony to that of the frequently discredited mystic and occultist. I have a good standing as an intelligent, normal woman, an effective executive and creative writer and I choose to add my certain knowledge and conviction to the witness of many others down the ages.

All this time, I was given to good works. I was an ardent Y.W.C.A. worker. I was present (on sufferance on account of my youth) at the meetings of the heads of the organization, because my aunt was the president. I spent much time visiting at large house parties where I was welcome because I was Alice La Trobe-Bateman and where I wrestled with the souls of my contemporaries in order to get them saved. I was very good at saving souls, but I wonder now - from the angle of more worldly wisdom - if they did not get saved with rapidity in order to get rid of me, so pertinacious and earnest was I. At the same time, the mystical trend of my life was steadily deepening; Christ was an ever-present reality to me. I would go off on to the moors in Scotland or wander away alone in the orange groves of Mentone in the south of France or the hillsides of Montreux on Lake Geneva and try to feel God. I would lie on my back in a field or by a rock and try to listen to the silence all around me and to hear the Voice - after the many voices of nature and within myself were stilled. I knew that behind all that I could see and touch there was a Something that could not be seen but which could be felt and which was more real and more truly essential than the tangible. I had been brought up to believe in a God Transcendent, outside His created world, inscrutable, unpredictable, [42] often cruel (to judge from what The Old Testament reports), loving only those who recognized Him and accepted Him, and slaying His only Son so that people like me could be saved and not perish everlastingly. Innately I criticized this presentation of a loving God, but automatically accepted it. But He was far away, distant and unapproachable.