the different planes through which it was to pass and in which it would later manifest itself.
God as He is in Himself could not directly come from the highest into the lowest. He had to come down through intermediate planes of creation. Yet we must believe, and we have abundant warrant for so believing, both from reason and the Word of God, that God was always potentially a man in the last things of nature. Nature is but the shadowing-forth, the projection of God, into ultimate forms, and all nature reflects the man-form. Trees with their branches and tops appear to strive to realize the human figure with its arms and head. Animal life in its progress upward grows more and more distinctly into the human form. Human society arranges itself into an approximation to the human form. All nature is thus the adumbration of the Divine, and suggests that the inmost soul of all is essentially Man.
Yet we can perceive that God in the creation of the natural universe separated it from Himself as it proceeded downward and outward, so that we can never correctly think of nature itself, or created forms, as being God. They are from God, but separated distinctly from Him.
