beautiful flower with all its rich coloring is like this bulb?  Oh, no!  But let the sun of God shine long enough on this bulb, put it where it belongs, subject it to the conditions of life, and this bulb will become like this flower.  Man is made in the image of God.  All that is in man that is not in God’s image does not belong to man’s nature.  Natural depravity?  There is no natural depravity.  Depravity is unnatural.  Depravity is contra-natural.  It is against the whole law of man’s being.  It is never wrong for any creature God has made to act out the nature which God endowed him with.  It is not wicked for a tiger to be ravening.  It is not wicked for a snake to be sinuous.  It is wicked for man to be ravening or sinuous, because it is against the divine nature that God has put in man.  He made man for better things.

God made man in His own image, God coming through successive stages, manifesting Himself in successive relations of Himself in human experience, God at last disclosing Himself in one pure, sinless, typical man in order that man through that humanity might know who and what God is—­and is that the end?  Oh, no!  That is the beginning, only the beginning.  For what did God come in Christ?  Simply to show Himself?  Here is a hospital—­all manner of sick; the paralytic, the fever-stricken, the consumptive.  Is it good news to these hospital bedridden ones if an athlete come in and show them his life, his muscles, the purity of his lungs, the health of his constitution, and then goes out?  But if he comes in and says, “My friends, if you will follow my directions I will put into you consumptive ones some of the strength of my lungs, into you fever-stricken ones some of the purity of my blood; into you paralytic ones some of the sinew and muscle I possess—­you can become like me,” then there is good news in the message.  If God came into the world simply to tell us what God is and what the ideal of humanity is, the gospel would be the saddest message that could be conceived, as delivered to the human race.  It would add gloom to the gloom, darkness to the darkness, chains to the chains, despair to despair.  He comes not merely to show divinity to us, but to impart divinity to us; rather, to evolve the latent divinity which He first implanted in us.  As God has entered into Christ, He will enter into me.  Christ says to me:  As I am patient, you can become patient; as I am strong, you can become strong; as I am pure, you can become pure; as I am the Son of God, you can become the Son of God.  Therefore His message is the gospel that it is.

Christ is not a man like other men.  I can find in the biography of Jesus no trace of sin.  In every other biography, oh, how many traces!  There is no trace of repentance.  The Hebrew Psalmist laments his iniquity.  Paul confesses himself to be the chief of sinners.  Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Edwards—­go where I will, in the biography of all the saints there are signs of sin and iniquity.