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 of divine Beauty are shining in our eyes, we still walk away into "the barren dessert of the world and forsake our proper habitation in the paradise of God."[59] There is no way back from the "barren dessert," without a complete reversal of direction, a conversion: "He that will pass {285} from the dismal depths of sin to the heights of strength and holiness must make his first motion a conversion, a change from a descent to an ascent, from going outward toward the circle to go inward towards the centre"; there must be an _awakening_ so that the soul comes to see all things in the light of their first Principle; a Birth through the Spirit and a newness of life through the bubbling of the eternal Spring.[60] The mighty event of re-birth is described by Sterry very much after the manner of Schwenckfeld. The new Seed, Christ Jesus, the divine Life itself, comes into operation within the man, and the new-made man, raised with Christ, is joined in Spirit with Him and lives henceforth not after Adam but after Christ the Head of the spiritual Race.[61] The shift of direction, the complete reversal, however, does not mean "parting with delights," or "putting on a sad and sour conversation"--on the contrary, it means enlargement of soul and "a gainful addition of joy," the discovery within of another world and a new kingdom.[62]