Looking into herself, what does the soul perceive? Apart from sins and virtues she perceives two things--caprice and free-will. Neither are of her own creation, but are essentials of her being. It may be that in caprice and free-will she may find an answer to those two questions which stir her to her depths: What is she that God should so love her? and how comes she to be away from Him? Clothed in the body of either man or woman, the soul is predominantly feminine--the Feminine Principle beloved of, and returning to, the Eternal Masculine of God. Caprice is feminine; Caprice and Mystery are two enchanting sisters, and in Woman we see them as being irresistible to Man. Angels, though they are a glory of God's heaven, cannot alone satisfy all the needs of their Creator: they have neither sex nor caprice, nor the mystery which joins hands with it. So He creates the soul, and He gives her an heredity of Himself in the flash-point of the soul, and He gives her sex and caprice and free-will to deny herself to Him if she choose; and in her caprice she goes out and away from Him, and when she would return she cannot, because in infidelity she has dropped from perfection. Disillusioned by her unfaithful wanderings and horribly pained, the soul longs for Him, and He longs for her. He Himself must make her the way of return, which is the way of redemption, and at a terrible cost to Himself He shows her His Righteousness and the mode of her Return in the Face and the Ways of Jesus Christ; and in the Crucifixion He shows her the measure of His love, and in the Cross the necessary abandonment of all self-will--total surrender. And all this suffering to Himself He bears in order to make good the wilful sinning and the misery of the wayward soul. So He brings home the soul, not by force but by love--that love by which He is at once the Life of everything and everything is the life of Him. Absence from God is Pain, and everlastingly will be Pain in varying degrees. Are there souls who have never left Him? Undoubtedly, but they know nothing of this world. Are we perhaps distressed at this multiplicity of worlds and souls? We need not be, for they are a necessity both of God and of ourselves; for God to Be Himself He must give Himself, and who can receive Him? Not even the greatest of all the Angels can alone bear to endure Him? Only into a vast multiplicity of individuals can God pour and expend Himself to the fullness of His desire, the One to the many. Each individually receives from Him, and each individually and collectively--the many to the One--returns Him those burning favours which are in Celestial-living.