In the meantime it is well to remember a few very simple and self-evident facts.  One of these is that human souls must vary, at least as much as the bodies in which they dwell.  Individuality has to do with spirits.  We think, love, and choose in ways that differ quite as much as our bodily appearance.  There is no uniformity in the spiritual sphere;—­this we know from its manifestations in conduct and history.  One man is heroic and another tender, one a reformer and another a recluse, one conservative and another radical.  The same Bible has passages as widely contrasted as the twenty-third and the fifty-eighth Psalms, and characters as unlike as Jacob and Jesus.  Indeed, may it not be assumed that physical differences are but expressions of still more clearly marked differences in spirits?  If this is true it will follow that, as we move toward the goal of our being, while all will be under the same good care, we will move along different, though converging, paths.  There are many roads to the “Celestial City” and, possibly, some of them do not lead through the Slough of Despond, or go very near to the realms of Giant Despair.

I cannot leave this part of my subject without dwelling for a moment upon two thoughts which to me seem to be full of significance.

This wonderfully complex nature of ours,—­this power of thinking, choosing, loving, these mysterious inner depths out of which come strange suggestions, and within which, all the time, processes are carried on which may rise into consciousness and startle with their beauty or shame with their ugliness—­does no suggestion come from it concerning its origin and destiny?  Until they pass mid-life few men realize the terrible significance of the command of the oracle at Delphi, “Know Thyself.”  Who is not surprised every day at what he finds within himself?  It sometimes seems as if two beings dwelt in every body, one in the region of consciousness, and one down below consciousness steadily forging the material which, sooner or later, must be forced up for the conscious man to think about.

In proportion as we know ourselves more accurately it becomes increasingly evident that as spirits we are allied to the great Spirit.  Few who earnestly think can believe that their power of thought could have grown out of the earth; few when they love can believe that there is no fountain of love, unlimited and free; and few, when they choose one course and refuse another, would be willing to affirm that they are without the power of choice, and have no destiny but the grave.  In other words, is not the fact that we are spirits all the proof that we need to have of the Father of Spirits?  Is not a single ray of light all the evidence which any one needs of the reality of the sun?  Is not the presence of one spiritual being a demonstration of a greater Spirit somewhere?  Every soul indicates that, whatever the process by which it has reached its present development, it came originally from God.  “In the beginning God” is a phrase which applies to the spiritual as well as to the material universe.