God, he says, who is the eternal and only goodness, has always been going out of Himself into forms of self-expression. His highest expression is made in a heavenly and purely spiritual order of angelic beings. Through these spiritual beings He objectifies Himself, mirrors Himself, knows Himself, and becomes revealed.[5] He has also poured Himself out in a lower order of manifestation in the visible creation where spirit often finds itself in opposition and contrast to that which is not spirit. The highest being in this second order is man, who in inward essence is made in the image and likeness of God, but binds together in one personal life both sensuous elements and divine and spiritual elements which are always in collision and warfare with each other. Man has full freedom of choice and can swing his will over to either side--he can live upward toward the divine goodness, or he can live downward toward the poor, thin, limiting isolation of individual selfhood. But {36} through the shifting drama of our human destiny God never leaves us. He is always within us, as near to the heart of our being as the Light is to the eye. Conscience is the witness of His continued Presence; the drawing which we feel toward higher things is born in the unlost image of God which is planted in our nature "like the tree of Life in Eden." He pleads in our hearts by His inner Word; He reveals the goodness of Himself in His vocal opposition to all that would harm and spoil us, and He labours unceasingly to be born in us and to bring forth His love and His spiritual kingdom in the domain of our own spirits. The way of life is to die to the flesh and to the narrow will of the self, and to become alive to the Spirit and Word of God in the soul, to enter into and participate in that eternal love with which God loves us. This central idea of the double nature of man--an upper self indissolubly linked with God and a lower self rooted in fleshly and selfish desires--runs through all his writings, and in his view all the processes of revelation are to further the liberation and development of the higher and to weaken the gravitation of the lower self.