For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God!

At the head of one of his poems, Henry Vaughan has this Latin translation of the verse:  I do not know whether he found or made it, but it is closer to its sense than ours:—­

’Etenim res creatae exerto capite observantes expectant revelationem filiorum Dei.’—­’For the things created, watching with head thrust out, await the revelation of the sons of God.’

Why?

Because God has subjected the creation to vanity, in the hope that the creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.  For this double deliverance—­from corruption and the consequent subjection to vanity, the creation is eagerly watching.

The bondage of corruption God encounters and counteracts by subjection to vanity.  Corruption is the breaking up of the essential idea; the falling away from the original indwelling and life-causing thought.  It is met by the suffering which itself causes.  That suffering is for redemption, for deliverance.  It is the life in the corrupting thing that makes the suffering possible; it is the live part, not the corrupted part that suffers; it is the redeemable, not the doomed thing, that is subjected to vanity.  The race in which evil—­that is, corruption, is at work, needs, as the one means for its rescue, subjection to vanity; it is the one hope against the supremacy of corruption; and the whole encircling, harboring, and helping creation must, for the sake of man, its head, and for its own further sake too, share in this subjection to vanity with its hope of deliverance.

Corruption brings in vanity, causes empty aching gaps in vitality.  This aching is what most people regard as evil:  it is the unpleasant cure of evil.  It takes all shapes of suffering—­of the body, of the mind, of the heart, of the spirit.  It is altogether beneficent:  without this ever invading vanity, what hope would there be for the rich and powerful, accustomed to, and set upon their own way? what hope for the self-indulgent, the conceited, the greedy, the miserly?  The more things men seek, the more varied the things they imagine they need, the more are they subject to vanity—­all the forms of which may be summed in the word disappointment.  He who would not house with disappointment, must seek the incorruptible, the true.  He must break the bondage of havings and shows; of rumours, and praises, and pretences, and selfish pleasures.  He must come out of the false into the real; out of the darkness into the light; out of the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.  To bring men to break with corruption, the gulf of the inane yawns before them.  Aghast in soul, they cry, ‘Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!’ and beyond the abyss begin to espy the eternal world of truth.