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"God started to laugh, a slow, gentle rising laugh, and then all ofHeaven joined in it irresistibly. And God said to the Fallen ones, theWatchers, 'Stand up, my sons, or we will all be here until the End ofTime.'
" 'Mockery, Lord, I deserve it,' I said. 'But I thank you.'
"In a great shuffling of wings and gowns, I heard them rising behindme to stand at least as tall and as straight as brave humans couldstand on the earth below.
" 'Lord, my case is simple,' I said, 'but surely you cannot ignore it.
And I shall state it as simply and as finely as I can.
" 'Up until a point in his development, the primate below was partof Nature, and bound by all its laws. And with his larger brain, hegrew ever more cunning, and his battles with other animals becameas fierce and bloody as the Heavenly Court has ever seen. This is alltrue. And with this intelligence there came also an increase in theways and means that Humankind could inflict upon its own greatpain.
" 'But never in all that I have Watched in war, and execution, andeven the laying waste of whole settlements and villages have I seenanything to surpass the sheer violence of the insect Kingdom or theKingdom of the Reptiles, or of the Lower Mammals, who blindly andsenselessly struggle to do only two things梥urvive and make more oftheir own kind.'
"I stopped, out of courtesy and also for effect. The Lord saidnothing. I went on.
" 'Then there came a point, however, when these primates, whohad, by then, come to strongly resemble Your Own Image as weperceive it in Ourselves, diverged from the rest of Nature, in a markedway. And it was no mere moment of Self Awareness, Lord, when thelogic of Life and Death became apparent to them. It was nothing assimple as that. On the contrary, the Self Awareness grew from a newand totally unnatural capacity to love.
" 'And it was then that humankind broke itself into tight familiesand clans and tribes, bound together by intimate knowledge of theindividuality of each other, rather than sheer recognition of species,and were held together, through suffering and happiness, by thebond of love.
" 'Lord, the human family is beyond Nature. If you were to godown and?
" 'Memnoch, take care!' God whispered.
" 'Yes, Lord,' I said, nodding, and clasped my hands behind me soas not to make ferocious gestures. 'What I should have said was thatwhen I went down and I looked into the family, here and there and allover the World which you have Created, which you have allowed tounfold magnificently, I saw the family as a new and unprecedentedflower, Lord, a blossom of emotion and intellect that in its tendernesswas cut loose from the stems of Nature from which it had takenits nourishment, and was now at the mercy of the wind. Love, Lord, Isaw it, I felt Love of Men and Women for one another and for theirChildren, and the willingness to sacrifice for one another, and togrieve for those who were dead, and to seek for their souls in thehereafter, and to think, Lord, of a hereafter where they might bereconciled with those souls again.
" 'It was out of this love and the family, it was out of this rare andunprecedented bloom梥o Creative, Lord, that it seemed in yourImage of your Creations梩hat the souls of these beings remainedalive after death! What else in Nature can do this, Lord? All givesback to the Earth what it has taken. Your Wisdom is Manifestthroughout; and all those that suffer and die beneath the canopy ofyour heavens are mercifully bathed in brutal ignorance of the schemewhich ultimately involved their own deaths.
" 'Man, not so! Woman, not so! And in their hearts, loving oneanother as they do, mate with mate, and family with family, they haveimagined Heaven, Lord. They have imagined it; the time of thereunion of souls when their kin will be restored to them and to eachother, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity becausetheir love demands it, Lord. They have conceived of these ideas asthey conceive of fleshly children! This I, the Watcher, have seen.'
"Another silence. All of heaven was so still that the only soundscame from the earth below, the purring of the wind, and the dimstirring of the seas, and the cries, the pale faraway cries of souls onearth as well as souls in Sheol.
" 'Lord,' I said, 'they long for Heaven. And imagining eternity, orimmortality, I know not which, they suffer injustice, separation,disease, and death, as no other animal could possibly suffer it. And theirsouls are great. And in Sheol they reach out beyond the love of selfand the service of self in the name of Love. Love goes back and forthbetween Earth and Sheol eternally. Lord, they have made a lower tierof the invisible court! Lord, they seek to propitiate your wrath, be-cause they know You are Here! And Lord, they want to knoweverything about You. And about themselves. They know and they want toknow!'
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