Although this blessed condition of Awareness of God is a gift, and at first the mind and soul are maintained in it without effort on their part, it being accomplished for them solely by the power of the Grace of God, yet later--and somewhat to their dismay after receiving such favours--they discover that it must be worked for in order to be maintained. The heart must give, the mind must give, the soul must give: when they neither work nor give they may find themselves receiving nothing: God ceases to be present to them. Generosity on our part is required. It works out in experience to be always the same thing that is needed for our perfect health and happiness--reciprocity. Without we maintain this reciprocity we shall experience _extraordinary disappointment._ IV The soul is now blind: we know this by experience; but do we know that she ever had sight? If she did not, but was created imperfect, and was so created in order that only by work and merit she should arrive at completion and perfection and Behold God (instead of merely, as now in this world, being able only to apprehend Him by the retrospect of His effect upon her), then she was always below angels. If through work and obedience she becomes so raised that she merits sight and the actual Beholding of God, then she becomes equal to angels because of this Beholding; and so Christ tells us that she does as the Child of the Resurrection. It is the inability of the soul to comprehend, after experiencing the bliss of Union with God, how she came to embark upon this wandering and separation, which so presses the Reason for an explanation of the fall of the soul. It may be that not all souls are fallen, but that some are merely in process of progressing to sight. These are Righteous Souls. But there are more souls also created sightless, who are fallen by curiosity, by infidelity or plain self-will and forgetfulness--these it is who need the Redeemer: "I come not to call the Righteous, but sinners to repentance." From this it would seem that there are souls who, though they are in this world, are yet fundamentally righteous: not fallen, but working to receive sight. It is inconceivable to the soul that, had she ever Beheld God, she could have left Him, but not inconceivable to her that, having never Beheld Him, she may have been unfaithful on her road to Sight. She understands this awful possibility after coming to Union with Him from this earth, because then she learns the immense difficulties of maintaining this sightless Union. She knows the terrible solitude and testing it entails, and the innumerable temptations when low-spirited and lonely to turn to interests and consolations apart from God; for God will frequently, in the later stages of progress, withhold every consolation and comfort from the soul, leaving her solitary. Will she stay? Will she go? V