What is a living soul?

God has endowed you a living soul—

Suppose God had made you perfect in the beginning and avoided for you all this effort and stumbling—

What greater thing would you then have been than a flower, a beast, a world?

You would have simply been such a thing as God made you, nothing more, no virtue in yourself, no possibility of ever becoming greater than the thing, which you were at first created.

But God endowed you a living soul, endowed you the offspring of His own undying spirit!—endowed you, too, with all the possibilities necessary to develop to a comprehension of Himself.

Made you spiritually in His own image in that He gave you personal freedom and free will and the inherent power of evolution outwardly from His own individual life-germ.