anticipate this objection to such created and too-favoured shapes:  more; in every case, but one, he would be quite at a loss to look for some type, clearly apt and probable.  That one case he might discern to be this.  Known unto God are all things from the beginning to the end:  and, in His fore-knowledge, Reason might have been enlightened to prophesy (as we shall hereafter see) that for certain wise and good ends one great family out of the myriads who rejoice in being called God’s children, would in a most marked manner fall away from Him through disobedience; and should thereby earn, if not the annihilation of their being, at least its endless separation from the Blessed.  Manifestly, the wisdom and benevolence of God would be eager and swift to devise a plan for the redemption of so lost a race.  Why He should permit their fall at all will be reverentially descanted on in its proper section; meanwhile, how is it probable that God, first, by any theory consistently with truth and justice, could, and next by power and contrivance actually would, lift up again this sinful family from the pit of condemnation?  Reason is to search the question well:  and after much thought, you will arrive at the truth that there was but one way probable.  Rebellion against the Great and Self-existent Author of all things, must needfully involve infinite punishment; if only because He is infinite, and his laws of an eternal sanction.  The problem then was, how to inflict the unbounded punishment thus claimed by justice for a transgressional condition, and yet at love’s demand to set the prisoner free:  how to be just, and simultaneously justifier of the guilty.  That was a question magnificently solved by God alone:  magnificently about to be solved, as according to our argument seemed probable, by God Triune, in wondrous self-involving council.  The solution would be rationally this.  Himself, in his character of filial obedience, should pay the utter penalty to Himself in his character of paternal authority, whilst Himself in the character of quickening spirit, should restore the ransomed family from death to life, from the power of evil unto good.  Was not this a most probable, a most reasonably probable scheme? was it not altogether wise and philosophical, as well as entirely generous and kind to wretched men?

And (returning to our present topic), was it not antecedently to have been expected that God the Son (so to put it) should, in the shape He was thereafter to assume upon earth, appear upon the eternal throne of heaven?  In a shape, however glorified and etherealized, with glistening countenance and raiment bright as the light, nevertheless resembling that more humble form, the Son of Man, who was afterwards thus by a circle of probabilities to be made in the form of God; in a shape, not liable, from its very sinfulness, to the deification either of other worlds or of this [hero-worship is another and a lower thing altogether; we speak here