Grace and Glory looked out over those Low Places for a long time, then she turned in silence and looked at the King. She was wondering why he had said no more to her about those many, many valleys and the multitudes of wandering and fainting people who lived in them. Now, as she looked up into his face, with the question in her eyes which her lips did not frame, he turned on her a most radiant smile and said, “It is nearly time, Grace and Glory, but the plan is not yet quite ready for fulfillment.”

She thought it sounded as though he were laughing to himself over some happy secret. But after a moment he changed the subject and said:

“The trees on this mountain are the Trees of Self-Controlled-by-Love. They are the most fully developed and most perfectly proportioned trees up here on the High Places, and the secret of their development lies in the fact that their great roots spread out underground far beyond the spread of their branches overhead. Each of these lovely giants sends at least some of its roots down into the waters of the River of Life which you see flowing through the valley and which has come down from the Very High Places above.”

“Self-Controlled-by-Love,” repeated Grace and Glory thoughtfully. “My Lord, I am always asking you questions which you answer so patiently and with such loving-kindness. May I ask another? What is a self?”

“A self or individual will is a marvelous mystery,” said the King, “for an individual will is really a part of the Will and Consciousness of the Creator himself, a part which he has made free so that it knows itself to be distinct in some lovely and mysterious way from all other individual wills, even from the Will of the Creator Who sent it forth. But it is so shaped and fashioned that it yearns back instinctively and with unquenchable longing for reunion with that from which it came forth. It is a capacity to love and is therefore a spark of the eternal fire of holy love, and so it can never find rest or real satisfaction until, like the leaping sparks which fall back into the fire apart from which they cannot continue to exist, it finds the way back to the heart of God from whom it came forth.