When the sons, then, are free, when their bodies are redeemed, they will lift up with them the lower creation into their liberty.  St Paul seems to believe that perfection in their kind awaits also the humbler inhabitants of our world, its advent to follow immediately on the manifestation of the sons of God:  for our sakes and their own they have been made subject to vanity; for our sakes and their own they shall be restored and glorified, that is, raised higher with us.

Has the question no interest for you?  It would have much, had you now what you must one day have—­a heart big enough to love any life God has thought fit to create.  Had the Lord cared no more for what of his father’s was lower than himself, than you do for what of your father’s is lower than you, you would not now be looking for any sort of redemption.

I have omitted in my quotations the word adoption used in both English versions:  it is no translation of the Greek word for which it stands.  It is used 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.