He has made us, but we have to be. All things were made _through_ the Word, but that which was made _in_ the Word was life, and that life is the light of men: they who live by this light, that is, live as Jesus lived--by obedience, namely, to the Father, have a share in their own making; the light becomes life in them; they are, in their lower way, alive with the life that was first born in Jesus, and through him has been born in them--by obedience they become one with the godhead: 'As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.' He does not _make_ them the sons of God, but he gives them power to become the sons of God: in choosing and obeying the truth, man becomes the true son of the Father of lights. It is enough to read with understanding the passage I have quoted from his epistle to the Galatians, to see that the word _adoption_ does not in the least fit St. Paul's idea, or suit the things he says. While we but obey the law God has laid upon us, without knowing the heart of the Father whence comes the law, we are but slaves--not necessarily ignoble slaves, yet slaves; but when we come to think _with_ him, when the mind of the son is as the mind of the Father, the action of the son the same as that of the Father, then is the son _of_ the Father, then are we the sons of God. And in both passages--this, and that which, from his epistle to the Romans, I have placed at the head of this sermon--we find the same phrase, _Abba, Father_, showing, if proof were needful, that he uses the word [Greek: uiothesia] the same sense in both: nothing can well be plainer, that needs consideration at all, than what that sense is. Let us glance at the other passages in which he uses the same word: as he alone of the writers of the New Testament does use it, so, for aught I know, he may have made it for himsef. One of them is in the same eighth chapter of the epistle to the Romans; this I will keep to the last. Another is in the following chapter, the fourth verse; in it he speaks of the [Greek: viothesia], literally the _son-placing_ (that is, the placing of sons in the true place of sons), as belonging to the Jews. On this I have but to remark that 'whose is the [Greek: viothesia]' cannot mean either that they had already received it, or that it belonged to the Jews more than to the Gentiles; it can only mean that, as the elder-brother-nation, they had a foremost claim to it, and would naturally first receive it; that, in their best men, they had always been nearest to it. It must be wrought out first in such as had received the preparation necessary; those were the Jews; of the Jews was the Son, bringing the [Greek: viothesia], the sonship, to all. Therefore theirs was the [Greek: viothesia], just as theirs was the gospel. It was to the Jew first, then to the Gentile--though many a Gentile would have it before many a Jew. Those and only those who out of a true heart cry '_Abba, Father_,' be they of what paltry little