“And it was with these that our best work was done; unless when they dispatched them from their prison they wrought in them a gift. And then the task was well-nigh hopeless. For they felt the presence of the Godhead in themselves and were blinded by the mist. They longed for something higher to respond to themselves, and on the dull cramped earth could find nothing, because the gift had not come from us. But if they sought and strove to find the light we ne’er withheld from any, then they became our truest servants, and the gift given in hell came to heaven and distinguished good from evil as it were, and dwelt with us. “The first souls that came to heaven capable of bearing life-forming seeds had undergone this pre-experience. They were few, very few, as you will understand, and not often those which the world would think would arrive there. They were the weak and helpless, the suffering and the patient, who had learnt from the past and present to stand what others could never tamely undergo. They needed above all the spirit of endurance, and all these things are wonderfully well learnt in hell—they are remembered even when forgotten, in the hour of need. My wife Ursula was one these. A noble spirit with great faults tamed in hell and sent again on to earth to suffer in the hour of need. She was one of our first children. I remember the great rejoicing when she was born, and how all gathered round to see a result which all had striven for from time scarce countable. And as I stooped to kiss the baby fingers I felt them clasp unconsciously around my own, and ever afterwards I stood by her through the great weakness and the after-strength that ends the long journey. “But our progress on the earth was very slow. We had no bribes to offer, nothing to give but a purity and simplicity they could not understand. For, as you know, the earth is tawdry and gaudy, and the devils who tempted it understood its littleness and mediocrity well. And here you will understand that those tempting devils are not the great powers of Evil. I do not know that those great powers have ever once put temptation in the way of man. They punish and give pain, but for the rest, knowing well man’s nature, they leave things to his weakness and ignorance and the slave spirits that work to ruin him for their own ends. And man, left to himself, understands the powers of Evil no better than those of Good. By a remarkably whimsical reasoning, which is his chief characteristic, he put Evil one lower than Good, because somehow, by a very muddled yet ironically truthful process, he has come blindly to understand that Good will help and Evil hinder him. And as, with natural conceit, he imagined all things were made for him to pick and choose, he lauded his benefactor, and spoke of the Rival Power as inferior, and grovelling under a fairly long and loose chain of thraldom. But God is God, whether of Evil or of Good—like action and re-action—equal and opposite.