But if this be the Body of Christ here in its state of humiliation, during which it repeats the passion of its Head, if these be the grains of wheat now scattered among the chaff,(89) what is that one mass to be which these shall make when the threshing-floor is winnowed out? We see the Body in its preliminary state of suffering, where it has a grandeur, a duration, and a beauty like nothing else on earth. What it shall be in its future state S. John saw when he called it the great City invested with the glory of God, the Bride adorned for her husband; and S. Paul hints, when he speaks of the perfect man compacted and fitly framed together by what every joint supplies, and grown up to full stature in the Head. There is in the redeemed, not only the exceeding greatness of the quality of their salvation, that is, the gift of divine sonship; nor, again, that this gift is heightened by its being the purchase of the Son of God, so that He is not ashamed to call those brethren whom He has first washed in His own blood: but over and above all this, one thing more, that the whole mass of the redeemed and adopted are not so many souls, but the Body of Christ. Faint shadows, indeed, to our earthly senses are House and Temple, Kingdom and City paved with precious stones of that mighty unity of all rational natures, powers, and virtues, each with the perfection of his individual being, each with the superadded lustre of membership in a marvellous whole, under the Headship of Christ. The exceeding glory of this creation, which will be the wonder of all creation through eternity, is that God the Word made flesh, the Head and His Body, make one thing, not an inorganic, but an organised unity, the glorified Body of a glorified Head. Once more let us note the consistency and unbroken evolution of the divine plan. In the first creation of the human race the Body of Christ is not only foretold but prefigured, not only prefigured but expressed in the very words uttered by Adam in his ecstasy, the words of God delineating that act of God, the greatest of all His acts of power, wisdom, and goodness, whereby becoming man, and leaving His Father and His Mother,(90) He would cleave to the wife He so took, the human nature which in redeeming He espoused. This, and no other, was the reason why Eve was formed out of Adam. It is the beginning of the divine plan, which is coherent throughout, which was designed in the state of innocency, which remains intended through the state of guilt, which is unfolded in the state of grace, which is completed in the state of glory, when what that forming of Eve from the side of Adam, and of the Church from the side of her Lord, what that growth through thousands of years, through multitudinous conflicts, through unspeakable sorrows, through immeasurable triumphs, shall finally issue in, shall be seen by those whom the Second Adam has made worthy of that vision, and by whom it is seen enjoyed.