re able to perceive: that the mystery of
Separation is equal in degree with the mystery of Union, and that the
child of separation is Pain.

How did the soul ever become so separated from God? To my
feeling, in curiosity of loves we may find the answer, and know the
"fall" to be not that of the animal man but of the soul, which, once
living in perpetual beatitude--knowing nothing of pain because of
the unity with God, not understanding or being even grateful for her
bliss because of its invariable presence, and given free-will,--in
curiosity went out in search of newer and yet newer loves. And this
is the retribution of the soul for her unfaithful wanderings--that as
separation grows greater she commences to know pain, and,
becoming anxious therefrom to return to the source of her
remembered joys, she finds herself unable to accomplish this
because of the weight and grossness of the nature of the loves to
which she has hired herself, and from which _she is totally unable to
free herself,_ and yet which she must by some means overcome that
she may rise again to sanctity and return to God.

Now comes the marvellous, the pitiful, the universal Christ to her
aid--the Mighty Lover; and we may see in the whole scheme of
Creation, as we know it here, from jelly-fish to man, a plan by
which the soul may bring her wanderings to a term in time
conditions instead of timeless sons. When all this earth is evolved
for her great need, at last by the mercy of God she is interned in the
body of finite man, and must clothe herself in the heart and mind of
the human and take upon herself the nature of this creature man,
made and fashioned to be a suitable instrument and habitation for
her. To counterbalance the grossness and ineptitude of the creature's
material body with its appetites, man is imbued with the knowledge
of right, and with a secret longing for a _happiness which is not that
of the beast._

The soul must raise the brute in him, with all its appetites, to
purity,--a mighty task, accomplished with much pain, yet in infinitely
shorter duration of pain than if left in disembodied spirit-life; and,
indeed, we may come to look upon pain in this world as one of our
best privileges because of its powers of purification within a time-limit,
and to know that by the mercy of the God of Love we may take our hell
of cleansing in this world rather than in those worlds of disembodied
spirits where progress is of infinite slowness--revo