On Man and his destiny he is no less clear, and he has many fertile suggestions to offer. His main thesis in this connection we have already seen as determining in his own life its central point. Man he regards as literally the fellow-worker with God. Up till his appearance upon the earth, nature had been remarkable only for what it was, but not for what it became. The advent of man marks the improver of creation--God made manifest in the flesh. Between his intellect and that of his Creator there is a relation, since we find creature and Creator working by the same methods. Precisely as we see China arriving at the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass without any connection with the West, so we see the works of the Creator in the palæozoic period repeated by the tiny creature-worker, without any idea that he had been anticipated. Thus Creation is not merely a scheme adapted to the nature of man, but one specially adapted to the pattern nature of God. Man made in the image of God is a real and fitting preparation for God's subsequent assumption of the form of man. 'Stock and graft had the necessary affinity,' and were finally united in the one person. History is, therefore, no mere finite record dating from a human act in Eden, but is the real result of a decree, 'in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme.' The problem of the origin of evil is of course a difficulty viewed in relation to the decrees of God, in whom no evil can exist. In the present state of things he regards evil as due to man himself. The deputed head of creation has voluntarily and of his own free will _not_ chosen to be a fellow-worker with God, who, while binding him fast in the chain of events, has yet left his will free. To ordain sin would be a self-contradiction of the idea of God; He but creates the being that in turn creates sin. 'Fore-knowledge,' as Milton says, 'had no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain unforeseen.' Perhaps this is as near as we are ever likely to get. But the Fall in its theological aspect, while it must be fully apprehended by faith, has nothing to fear from science, which teaches, if it can be said emphatically to teach one thing, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. With Coleridge, therefore, he regards the Fall as a necessary stage in the history of thought and of man. The creation of the non-absolute gives a pivot without which all subsequent events would be inexplicable. It gives the true means of colligating the phenomena: Man, if at the Fall he lost Eden, gained a conscience and a moral sense.