In an Eastern Rose Garden

The Prophet has said, 'God is beautiful, and He loves beauty.' Now the word 'beautiful' does not refer to the form of God. God is formless. He has no personality until He manifests Himself to Himself. Therefore it is not His personality, which is beautiful, for God is beyond that which in the ordinary sense of the word is called personality.

What then is the source of God's beauty? God is beautiful because He has created beauty. If there were no beauty in God, there could have been none in His manifestation. If there were no beauty in the thought of the poet, he could not write beautiful verse. If there were no beauty in the thought of the artist, he could never have painted the picture. One cannot see the beauty in the heart of the painter except in the beauty of the picture he has made. It is not only the picture which is beautiful, the heart of the painter was beautiful first. Consequently we become able to see the beauty not only in manifestation, but also before it was manifested; and before it was manifested it existed in love. In other words, we can see that the beauty was hidden in love; beauty is hidden in love, and the beauty that love has before it to love is its own beauty. Therefore, to whatever extent beauty is beautiful, so is love beautiful; even more so, for the Creator is more beautiful than the thing He has created.

All things that we make are the work of our hands. We are their creator; and we are greater than our hands. So it is with love. Love is greater than beauty, because love is the creator of the beauty that love loves in its life.

No doubt by loving, love becomes limited, limited as beauty; but then that is the purpose of love. If there were no beauty, His love could not have realized the latent joy of its own nature. The joy of its existence would die out.

As soon as we can think in this way, we come to see that the lover is vaster, incomparably vaster than the object he loves. The real love, the real beauty, is in the lover. The object that he loves is much smaller, although for the moment the lover is not aware of the difference. The lover thinks, 'You are the object before which I bow.

You are the object of which I think day and night, before which I am helpless. You are the object that I admire, that I adore.'' Yet he does not realize the vastness of his love, and indeed, strictly speaking: love is vaster than the lover.