We think of Man, the soul, as a child of God, or a god-child. Therefore, he is worthy of his brother's highest esteem, and his Father's tenderest affection. He is a very son of the infinite God; and all created spirits, being his brothers, are members of one family. Again we say, "O god-child, how wonderful you are, and what a pity it would be if you failed to recognize your divinity, or allowed anything to drag you down from your divine possibilities!" Man must know himself if he would attain unto the goal of life.
Though man is a soul, yet without the body he cannot so much as come to self-consciousness. Just how or when a soul begins, we do not know; but it does not appear until some time after the body is born. A new-born babe can neither see, feel, nor hear, with any intelligent meaning of the words. It will stare into the most glaring light without intelligence enough to shut its eyes. It does not recognize objects for some time, and when it does, misses the object for which it reaches. The infant is likewise slow in distinguishing sounds or names. If the soul exists when the body is born, it is only a latent personality which has not yet come to self-realization. Personality is self-conscious will, and this the child has not yet achieved.
Let us here consider the relation of a new-born body to God and the universe. God begins His creative activities in what the scientists call stellar ether, where His energies combine and recombine in a more and more complex world, until the solar system appears with planets in the condition of our earth. After more combinations and recombinations, out on the surface of all things His activities blossom in the finest bit of organism, the sensitized thing which we call the human body. This body, the flower of all God's activities in nature, requires all nature for its support. Furthermore, the chemical energies constituting the body itself are what God is thinking, and feeling, and doing. Strictly speaking, it is His body, the first instrument in the whole order of development, the only body on earth capable of articulate speech and loving deed. If God did not continually will the body and all the supporting energies of the universe, the body would cease to be. Before the man soul appears at all, we have God's world culminating in what we call the human body. When a man soul awakes, it is in God's own bosom, in His own body. Man awakens in God's enfolding energies, and not outside them; for outside of God he could not exist.
It is amusing to hear a little boy speak of his father's automobile as "my car"; but it isn't his, even though the father is pleased to see the little fellow spread himself in it and claim ownership. Yet it is his too, in the sense that the father gladly shares it with him. And some day when the child is too big to be a little boy, and too little to be a big boy, he may take his father's car and run it into the ditch. But even the wreck is his father's wreck. In the same way, if we live at all it is in our Father's enfolding instrument. His body is ours because He gladly shares it with us. However, if we do not use it in harmony with His will, we wreck it in the ditch.
God wakes His child to consciousness in His own body, by making all kinds of impressions upon the sense organs. There are many rappings on the door, and flashes of light through the windows until the soul wakes. And when the soul becomes conscious, God may not cease beating upon the instrument with myriad forces, lest His child fall asleep.
Some morning when a loved form bends over the infant body, the baby smiles, and the soul begins to appear. That is a wonderful day when the baby gives its first smile. Little by little the child becomes aware of itself and of its mother. Should the baby be fortunate enough to have two or three brothers and sisters, he will learn some day, when he is a little older, that they all want the same thing at the same time. Then he will be very conscious of other wills.
We know that other wills exist because they live in our enveloping world, and constantly use it in a way that we approve or resent. If they did not know and disturb our world, we should not be aware of them even if they existed. We know that other wills exist because they sell us coats that they have made, and cut down trees in our forests, and shape them into things that have meaning for us and them. They modulate the atmosphere in which we live, producing sounds that stand for objects with which we are familiar. They learn our words and facial expressions, and use them to make us feel happy or uncomfortable. Nature is the common instrument of all wills.
As we cannot come to the consciousness of ourselves, nor of other wills, except through the body and its environments, neither can we develop the soul without cultivating the physical instrument and that which surrounds it. There is always a corresponding development between soul and body. As Browning says,
"We know not whether soul helps body more than body helps soul."
We simply know that soul and body develop together, and that if either is injured the other is harmed. A physical change in our bodies takes place with every thought. We cannot silently love without disturbing the gray matter. We make paths through our nervous system with every thought and deed. If we had a means of photographing all the muscular and nervous conditions wrought in our bodies by our thoughts and actions, they would correspond to every growth of spirit. The face becomes beautiful with a beautiful soul, and the body becomes refined by every improvement of the spirit.