es. That suffering is for
redemption, for deliverance. It is the life in the corrupting thing that
makes the suffering possible; it is the live part, not the corrupted
part that suffers; it is the redeemable, not the doomed thing, that is
subjected to vanity. The race in which evil--that is, corruption, is at
work, needs, as the one means for its rescue, subjection to vanity; it
is the one hope against the supremacy of corruption; and the whole
encircling, harboring, and helping creation must, for the sake of man,
its head, and for its own further sake too, share in this subjection to
vanity with its hope of deliverance.

Corruption brings in vanity, causes empty aching gaps in vitality. This
aching is what most people regard as evil: it is the unpleasant cure of
evil. It takes all shapes of suffering--of the body, of the mind, of the
heart, of the spirit. It is altogether beneficent: without this ever
invading vanity, what hope would there be for the rich and powerful,
accustomed to, and set upon their own way? what hope for the
self-indulgent, the conceited, the greedy, the miserly? The more things
men seek, the more varied the things they imagine they need, the more
are they subject to vanity--all the forms of which may be summed in the
word disappointment. He who would not house with disappointment, must
seek the incorruptible, the true. He must break the bondage of havings
and shows; of rumours, and praises, and pretences, and selfish
pleasures. He must come out of the false into the real; out of the
darkness into the light; out of the bondage of corruption into the
glorious liberty of the children of God. To bring men to break with
corruption, the gulf of the inane yawns before them. Aghast in soul,
they cry, 'Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!' and beyond the abyss
begin to espy the eternal world of truth.

Note now 'the hope that the creation itself also,' as something besides
and other than God's men and women, 'shall be delivered from the bondage
of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.'
The creation then is to share in the deliverance and liberty and glory
of the children of God. Deliverance from corruption, liberty from
bondage, must include escape from the very home and goal of corruption,
namely death,--and that in all its kinds and degrees. When you say then
that for the children of God there is no more death, remember that the
deliverance of the creature is from the bondage o