he _sons_ of God.

We cannot help wondering, as we read these verses, whether St. Paul had
in mind that occasion when, before the chosen witnesses, Christ was
bodily transfigured on the holy mount by an anticipation of the glory
destined for His sonship; and the apostles felt their hearts thereby
encouraged to believe more surely in the teaching of the prophets about
the general glory that was to accompany the final manifestation of the
Christ[8].

When St. Paul talks of nature 'groaning' and (still more) 'eagerly
expecting,' is it merely a poetical personification, as Chrysostom and
most {309} commentators suppose, like that of the Psalmist when he
makes 'the floods clap their hands'? It may be so. George Crabbe, in
his _Delay is Dangerous_, draws a singularly beautiful picture of a
late autumn morning as it appeared to a dejected man, and he ends the
description with the lines:--

These things were sad in nature, or they took
Sadness from him, the likeness of his look.

Is the latter the true explanation? Is there no sadness or eager
desire in nature independently--I will not say of spirit, but of the
human spirit? It is sometimes very difficult to believe this. And may
not the Christian belief about angels make the fancy legitimate, that
every created thing has some accompanying intelligence--higher or
lower--which consciously realizes its beauty and its joy, and also its
pain and its hope? If this be so, then there is not merely deficiency
and pain, but the consciousness of this deficiency and pain, a real
groaning and a real expectation, in the great fabric of nature. We may
legitimately imagine this; but we have probably no right to attribute
such an imperfectly-based speculation to St. Paul[9].

{310}

ii.

It is very interesting to notice the various points of view from which
St. Paul contemplates the great ideas of 'redemption,' 'adoption,'
'salvation.' Christ redeemed us by the shedding of His blood, and we
entered into the redeemed state individually and were adopted as sons
when we became Christians. This is, beyond all question, St. Paul's
belief. But when he contemplates the outward conditions of the
redeemed man, and finds them quite incongruous with freedom and
sonship, so wholly unashamed is he to require that these outward
conditions shall be transformed, and body as well as spirit shall be
redeemed, that he speaks as if the great hope were still unrealized and
we were still onl