Little did they dream that while, in the full exercise of their own free-will, they gave license to their thoughts of hatred, they were enacting as in a type the one great fact of the universe, the world’s one important history, the tragedy of all creation, when he who, though in his human nature he is the younger born of God’s children, holds, and for ever shall hold, sacerdotal rank over the elder and fallen Adam. They who said, “See whether it be thy son’s coat or not,”[65] were the forefathers of those who exclaimed, “Let Christ the king of Israel come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.”[66] They mocked at the father who claimed to have made his younger son the priest of his house, and their descendants declared of the great Priest of our race that “he ought to die because he made himself the Son of God.” In both cases their pretensions were turned into ridicule and treated as a crime. They dipped the sacerdotal coat of Joseph in the blood of a kid; but the great High-Priest they covered with his own blood, in derision of his claim to be their King and their God. And through it all, through the good and the evil, the adaptive government of God worked out his ultimate designs, turning the wickedness of men to his own glory and hiding the secrets of his providence beneath the course of events, the incidents of common life, the history of a people, of a tribe, of a family. We look back on the long-drawn-out story and understand somewhat of the underlying mystery. But while it was going on it was but little even guessed at. God is unchangeable, the same for ever and ever. What he did then does he not do now?—for his church, his bride, above all, but also for all humanity, all the wide universe according to its measure, as it can bear it, when it can receive it; leading on by degrees so slow that to us they seem almost imperceptible, but which widen and spread like the rings on the surface of the water when a stone has been flung into its depths.