iffered nothing from slaves;
for as long as you were in your heathen ignorance and foolishness,
God had to treat you as His slaves, not as His children; and so you
were in bondage under the elements of the world, till the fulness of
time was come.

And, then, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under a law, to
redeem those who were under a law--that is, all mankind. The Jews
were keeping, or pretending to keep, Moses' law, and trying to
please God by that. The heathens were keeping all manner of old
superstitious laws and customs about religion which their
forefathers had handed down to them. But heathens, and indeed Jews
too, at that time, all agreed in one thing. These laws and customs
of theirs about religion all went upon the notion of their being
God's slaves, and not his children. They thought that God did not
love them; that they must buy His favours. They thought religion
meant a plan for making God love them.

Then appeared the love of God in Jesus Christ. As at this very
Christmas time, the Son of God, Jesus Christ the Lord, in whose
likeness man was made at the beginning, was born into the world, to
redeem us and all mankind. He told them of their Heavenly Father;
He preached to them the good news of the kingdom of God; that God
had not forgotten them, did not hate them, would freely forgive them
all that was past; and why? Because He was their Father, and loved
them, and loved them so that He spared not His only begotten Son,
but freely gave Him for them. And now God looks at us human beings,
not as we are in ourselves, sinful and corrupt, but he looks at us
in the light of Jesus Christ, who has taken our nature upon Him, and
redeemed it, and raised it up again, so that God can look on it now
without disgust, and henceforth no one need be ashamed of being a
man; for to be a man is to be in the likeness of God. Man was
created in the image and likeness of God, and who is the image and
likeness of God but Jesus Christ? Therefore man was created at
first in Jesus Christ, and now, as St. Paul says, he is created anew
in Jesus Christ; and now to be a man is to partake of the same flesh
and blood which the Lord Jesus Christ wore for us, when He was made
very man of the substance of his mother, and that without spot of
sin, to show that man need not be sinful, that man was meant by God
to be holy and pure from sin, and that by the Holy Spirit of Jesus
Christ we, every one of us, can become pure f