by St Paul as meaning the same thing with the phrase, 'the
redemption of the body'--a fact to bring the interpretation given it at
once into question. Falser translation, if we look at the importance of
the thing signified, and its utter loss in the word used to represent
it, not to mention the substitution for that of the apostle, of an idea
not only untrue but actively mischievous, was never made. The thing St
Paul means in the word he uses, has simply nothing to do with
adoption--nothing whatever. In the beginning of the fourth chapter of
his epistle to the Galatians, he makes perfectly clear what he intends
by it. His unusual word means the father's recognition, when he comes of
age, of the child's relation to him, by giving him his fitting place of
dignity in the house; and here the deliverance of the body is the act of
this recognition by the great Father, completing and crowning and
declaring the freedom of the man, the perfecting of the last lingering
remnant of his deliverance. St Paul's word, I repeat, has nothing to do
with _adoption_; it means the manifestation of the grown-up sons of God;
the showing of those as sons, who have always been his children; the
bringing of them out before the universe in such suitable attire and
with such fit attendance, that to look at them is to see what they are,
the sons of the house--such to whom their elder brother applied the
words: 'I said ye are Gods.'

If then the sons groan within themselves, looking to be lifted up, and
the other inhabitants of the same world groan with them and cry, shall
they not also be lifted up? Have they not also a faithful creator? He
must be a selfish man indeed who does not desire that it should be so.

It appears then, that, in the expectation of the apostle, the new
heavens and the new earth in which dwell the sons of God, are to be
inhabited by blessed animals also--inferior, but risen--and I think, yet
to rise in continuous development.

Here let me revert a moment, and say a little more clearly and strongly
a thing I have already said:--

When the apostle speaks of the whole creation, is it possible he should
have dismissed the animals from his thoughts, to regard the trees and
flowers bearing their part in the groaning and travailing of the sore
burdened world? Or could he, animals and trees and flowers forgotten,
have intended by the creation that groaned and travailed, only the bulk
of the earth, its mountains and valleys, plains