This is not the first time that this appeal has been made to the heart of man. Satan said in the Garden: “You will be as gods.” Jehovah said to His judges: “Be gods, be just as God is just.” But now there is no question of being wise like God, nor is it even enough to be just, like God. God is now more than wisdom and justice. With Jesus, He becomes our Father, becomes love. His earth gives bread and flowers even to the homicide; he who takes His name in vain sees the glorious sun every morning, the same sun which warms the clasped hands of the laborer praying in the field. A true father loves the son who turns from him as he loves the son who seeks him out; a father cherishes the child who obeys him in his house, or who vomits him out with his wine. A father can be saddened, can suffer, can mourn, but no sinning man is capable of making a father become like to himself. No one can induce a father to take revenge. And we who are so much lower than God, poor finite creatures, who are scarcely capable of remembering yesterday, who do not know to-morrow, we unfortunate, inferior creatures, have we not many more motives to feel for our brothers in wretchedness what God feels for us? God is the supreme substance of our ideal. To draw away from Him, not to be as we pray that He may be with us, is this not to draw away from our unique destination, to keep perpetually and despairingly out of our reach that happiness for which we are created, which we believe to be the aim of our lives, imagined by us, dreamed of by us, longed-for, invoked and followed in vain through all the false felicities which are not of God? “Let us be Gods,” cries Bossuet. “Let us be Gods. He permits it, that we may imitate His holiness.” Who will refuse to be like God? Dii estis. Divinity is in us; animality hampers and constricts it, stunting our growth. Who would not wish to be God? Oh, men, are you in very truth content to be only men? Men as you are to-day, half-men, half-beasts? Centaurs without robustness, sirens without sweetness, demons with fauns’ muzzles and goats’ feet? Are you so satisfied with your bastard and imperfect humanity, with your animality scarcely held in leash, taking no step to win holiness save to desire it? Does it seem to you that the life of men as it has been in the past, as it is to-day, is so dear, so happy, so contented that there should be no effort to make it otherwise, entirely different, the opposite of what it is, more like that which for thousands of years we have imagined in the future and in Heaven? Is it not possible to make another life out of this life, to change this world to a world more divine, at last to bring down Heaven and the laws of Heaven upon earth?