Jesus is our father, our brother, our friend, our master, and our spouse. These titles are taken from our common life. But the abstract idea which these titles express by subdivision and restriction dwelt for ever in the mind of God as the form and fashion he would give to human life in his foreknowledge of the divine Incarnation, for which end _solely_ do all things exist. What further thoughts can we need to make us tender over our own duties and our own condition? What a noble origin there is to all that we are apt to look upon as an encumbrance, a failure, a mere unfortunate accident! Our ties enchain us; then let us hug our chains, and find in wearing them “the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free.” All our life is a God-directed education of our souls; and the fashion of our human life is the mould which God has prepared for us each as individuals, save always where there is sin or its proximate occasion, or where a higher vocation—that sublime infringement of the common law—comes to impel the soul to forsake all and follow the divine Spouse. Then all else melts before the furnace of divine love; the intermediate, ordinary steps which lead others to God through the sanctities of common life are cleared at one bound, and God puts in his claim to do what he will with his own. To resume all in a few words: all we see around us, from the soil beneath our feet, through the vegetable and animal worlds, even to ourselves, is the working out of the first law of increase and multiply. Consequently, this being, as we have already said, the representative idea of the creation, its sacredness lies in that very fact, and dates not merely from the new dispensation nor from the old, but from the Eternal Mind before creation was. We have arrived at the facts which prove this representative idea by the aid of natural science, of which the old spiritual writers knew next to nothing, and who consequently, looking at nature through the black mists of man’s defilement, sometimes took distorted views of laws and facts the exquisite harmony of which come out in the deductions of modern research, and so establish the claim we are now making to the absolute beauty and sanctity of all the fashion of human existence as leading up by typical forms to spiritual truths. The witness of this like a golden thread in the dim web of patriarchal times may be found in the fact that it was the eldest son who officiated as the priest of the family, thus blending the natural and spiritual by making the former the basis of the latter. This was the reason of the envy and malice of Joseph’s brethren. He was not the first-born; and yet it was for him that his father made the sacerdotal coat of many colors. Therefore did they dip the coat in the blood of a kid, as in mockery of his sacerdotal character, given him by his father, but not acknowledged by his brethren.