But as the dialogue advances love is traced to a higher source. It is discovered to be a passion for the eternal, a passion which rises in the soul at the sight of an object which suggests the eternal, from which the soul has come into the temporal. The soul is alien here and its chief joy in the midst of the shows of sense is joy at the sight of something which reminds it of its old divine home. Thus, again, Plato tells us that love has its birth in the division of what was once a whole. We yearn for that from which we have come. “Though inland far we be Our souls have sight of that immortal sea That brought us hither.” We may ignorantly stop at some mid-way good and miss the homeward path, but our real search, our master passion, is for that divine Other to whom we belong. So at last Plato poetizes. We have discovered through other lips, what he could not tell us, that the search is a double search. We have learned that the Divine Other whom we seek is also seeking us. The myth, told at the beginning, is more suggestive than it seemed. It may perhaps do for a parable of the finite and the Infinite, the soul and its Father. May they not once have been in union? May not our birth in time be a drawing away into individuality from the Divine whole? And then may not the goal of the entire drama of personal life be the restoration of that union on a higher spiritual level? May it not be, that we are never again to fuse the skirts of self and merge into a union of oblivion, but rather that we are to rise to a love-union in which His will becomes our will--a union of conscious co-operation? So at any rate I believe. But this little book is not a book of speculation. It is not written to urge some fond belief. We have learned, I say, that life reveals a double search. Man’s search for God is as plain a fact as his search for food. He has, beyond question, blundered at it and frequently missed the trail, but that man in all lands and in all times has maintained some kind of search for an invisible Companion is a momentous fact.