" 'Then there came a point, however, when these primates, who had, by then, come to strongly resemble Your Own Image as we perceive it in Ourselves, diverged from the rest of Nature, in a marked way. And it was no mere moment of Self Awareness, Lord, when the logic of Life and Death became apparent to them. It was nothing as simple as that. On the contrary, the Self Awareness grew from a new and totally unnatural capacity to love.

" 'And it was then that humankind broke itself into tight families and clans and tribes, bound together by intimate knowledge of the individuality of each other, rather than sheer recognition of species, and were held together, through suffering and happiness, by the bond of love.

" 'Lord, the human family is beyond Nature. If you were to go down and—'

" 'Memnoch, take care!' God whispered.

" 'Yes, Lord,' I said, nodding, and clasped my hands behind me so as not to make ferocious gestures. 'What I should have said was that when I went down and I looked into the family, here and there and all over the World which you have Created, which you have allowed to unfold magnificently, I saw the family as a new and unprecedented flower, Lord, a blossom of emotion and intellect that in its tenderness was cut loose from the stems of Nature from which it had taken its nourishment, and was now at the mercy of the wind. Love, Lord, I saw it, I felt Love of Men and Women for one another and for their Children, and the willingness to sacrifice for one another, and to grieve for those who were dead, and to seek for their souls in the hereafter, and to think, Lord, of a hereafter where they might be reconciled with those souls again.

" 'It was out of this love and the family, it was out of this rare and unprecedented bloom—so Creative, Lord, that it seemed in your Image of your Creations—that the souls of these beings remained alive after death! What else in Nature can do this, Lord? All gives back to the Earth what it has taken. Your Wisdom is Manifest throughout; and all those that suffer and die beneath the canopy of your heavens are mercifully bathed in brutal ignorance of the scheme which ultimately involved their own deaths.

" 'Man, not so! Woman, not so! And in their hearts, loving one another as they do, mate with mate, and family with family, they have imagined Heaven, Lord. They have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kin will be restored to them and to each other, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity because their love demands it, Lord. They have conceived of these ideas as they conceive of fleshly children! This I, the Watcher, have seen.'