ality; it belongs to the eternal world and yet it is a Root of God
within, a point in the soul's abyss (or apex) unsevered from God, so that
one who knew the soul to its depths would know God.[50] Beneath all the
wreck and ruin and havoc of sin it is still there, with its "glimpses of
immortal Beauty." The prodigal who would return "home" must first return
to himself, to that divine Seed, "hid deep beneath the soil and dung,
beneath the darkness, deformity and deadness of its Winter-Season and
rise up in its proper Spring into pleasant flowers and fruits, as a
Garden of God."[51] There is thus "a golden thread" which is always
there to guide the soul back home, through all the mazes of the world,
or, to use another of his figures, "Thou hast but to follow the stream of
Love, the Fountain of the Soul, if thou {284} wouldst be led to that Sea
which is the confluence of all the waters of Life, of all Truth, of all
Goodness, of all Joy, of all Beauty and Blessedness."[52]

The _Fullness_ of the juncture of God and Man is seen only in Christ. In
Him, "God and Man are one, one Love, one Life, one Likeness."[53] He is
the Pattern, the unspoiled Image, the Eternal Word, and He is, too, the
Head of our race. In Him the Divine Spirit and the human spirit "are
twined into one." "If you want to see God, then see Christ."[54] If you
want to see what the Seed in us can blossom into when it is unhampered by
sin, again, see Christ.[55] He is a Life-giving Spirit who can penetrate
other spirits, who broods over the soul as the creative Spirit brooded
over the waters, and who, when received, makes us radiant with _Love,
which is the only truth of religion_.

Sin is the mark and brand of our failure--it is our aberration from the
normal type as it is fully revealed in Christ. "Nothing is so unnatural
as sin,"[56] nothing is so irrational, nothing so abnormal--it is always
a break from the unity of the divine Life, a movement towards isolation
and self-solitariness, a pursuit of narrowing desires, a missing of the
potential beauty and harmony of the Soul.[57] But in every case, whether
it be Adam's or that of the last man who sinned, it is always an act of
free-will--"even in its most haggish shapes sin is the act of free-will."
Some strange contrary principle in us, something from a root alien to the
divine Root, makes civil war within us,[58] and though the Word of God's
eternal Love is ringing in our ears and though the gleams