God is an infinite spirit.  That is, we cannot understand Him fully.  He is very close to us.  The relationship is most intimate, and tender, yet His fulness is ever beyond our grasp and our ken. Man is infinite in that he knows that God is infinite.  Only like can appreciate like.  He can appreciate that he cannot appreciate God, except in part.  He understands that he does not understand God save in smaller part.  He knows enough to love passionately.  And through loving as well as through knowing he knows that there is infinitely more that he does not know.  Only man of all earth’s creation knows this.  In this he is like God.  The difference between God and man here is in the degree of infinity.  That degree of difference is an infinite degree.  Yet this is the truth.  But more yet:  man has this same quality manward.  He is infinite in that he cannot be fully understood in his mental processes and motives.  He is beyond grasp fully by his fellow.  Even one’s most intimate friend who knows most and best must leave unknown more than is known.

God is an eternal spirit.  He has always lived.  He will live always.  He knows no end, at either end.  All time before there was time, and after the time-book is shut, is to Him a passing present. Man is an eternal spirit, because of God.  He will know no end.  He will live always because the breath of God is his very being.

God is love.  He yearns for love.  He loves.  And more, He is love.  Man is like God in his yearning for love, in his capacity for love, and in his lovableness.  Man must love.  He lives only as he loves.  True love, and only that, is the real life.  He will give up everything for love.  He is satisfied only as he loves and finds love.  To love is greater than to be loved.  One cannot always have both.  God does not.  But every one may love.  Every one does love.  And only as there is love, pure and true—­however overlaid with what is not so—­only so is there life.

God is holy.  That word seems to include purity and righteousness.  There is utter absence of all that should not be.  There is in Him all that should be, and that in fulness beyond our thinking.  Man was made holy.  There is in the Genesis picture of Eden a touch that for simplicity and yet for revealing the whole swing of moral action is most vivid.  In the presence of conditions where man commonly, universally, the world around, and time through, has been and is most sensitive to suggestion of evil there is with this first man the utter absence of any thought of evil.[1] In the light of after history there could be no subtler, stronger statement than this of his holiness, his purity, at this stage.

And in his capacity for holiness, in that intensest longing for purity, and loathing of all else, that comes as the Spirit of God is allowed sway, is revealed again the capacity for God-likeness.  It is the prophetic dawn within of that coming Eden when again we shall see His face, and have the original likeness fully restored.