The parable is designed to apply to the condition of men on earth on the supposition, that their education—in the largest sense of the word—is the main work held in view: all depends on the hypothesis that man is placed on earth to develop his powers. The need of freedom for members of the imagined family depends on their being in a state of growth. The parable would not apply to spiritual beings, if we could conceive such, whose qualities and character were unalterable. _Perfected_ beings have done with growth and struggle, and have attained to the highest condition, viz. existence in unison with God. But for _imperfect_ beings, struggling on to their goal, freedom is required and the opposition of evil is indispensable, in order that the moral thews and sinews may harden. Whenever we come upon an objection to the ways of God’s ordering of the world, which is put in the form of a question, such as “Why was not the world made in this way or that?” we shall find it a good plan, to follow out the line indicated in the complaint, and see what would have come about, supposing that God _had_ made the world in the way which is suggested. From the imaginary case here put, we see to what the common child’s question leads us—the question “Why did not God make all people good and keep them so?”—If people had been “made good and kept good,” that is to say if they had been constructed by God so as always to act as His will prompted, then they would not in the proper sense of the word have been people at all; they would have been mechanisms worked by God, and so they could not have been “good” in the sense in which we use the word of a man, but only in that in which we apply it to a watch. There could be no moral life without freedom; there could be no growth of character without temptations and difficulties to overcome; no heroism, no self-denial, no sympathising tenderness, no forgiving love, without suffering or wrongdoing to call them forth. Moreover if not only people on earth, but all created intelligences had, in like manner, been constrained to respond to every motion of the Divine will, God would have been the one spiritual being in the world and would therefore have been absolutely _alone_.