specific permission to do so, not realising his inherent right, as his Father's son, to take whatever he wanted.

The one son took up a false idea of independence, thinking it consisted in separating himself and, to use an expressive vulgarism, in being entirely "on his own hook", while the other, in his recoil from this conception, went to the opposite extreme and believed himself to have no independence at all.

The younger son's return, so far from extinguishing the instinct for Liberty, gratified it to the full by placing him in a position of honour and command in his Father's house; and the elder son is rebuked with the simple words, "Why wait for me to give you what is yours already? All that I have is thine". It would be impossible to state the relation between the Individual Mind and the Universal Mind more clearly than in this parable, or the two classes of error which prevent us from understanding and utilising this relation.

From Limitation to Infinity

The younger brother is the man who, not realising his own spiritual nature, lives on the resources of the lower personality till their failure to meet his needs drives him to look for something which cannot thus be exhausted, and eventually he finds it in the recognition of his own spiritual being as his inalienable birthright, because he was made in the image and likeness of God and could not by any possibility have been created otherwise.