LIFE IN CHRIST: chap. 1, part 2

Lent with Fr Harton

Note: Starting today only first paragraph of the subsequent excerpts will be available free subscribers. To read the rest you will have to become a paid subscriber. Do so below.

---

CHAPTER 1: SONS OF GOD (part 2)

Now adoption, as we all know, is a legal process whereby a man takes a child which is not his own by birth and makes him his own, if we may so put it, by grace.¹ The child so adopted is not his own, in the sense that his natural child is, and never will be, but he is his child henceforward; his adoption has given him a totally new status and made him the son in all but birth of one who was not his father until that new status was given. If a king were to adopt the son of a peasant that child would no longer be a peasant but a prince, and a real prince; just so, when God adopts us in Holy Baptism He takes a son of man, who in comparison with the divine majesty is infinitely lower than the humblest peasant, and makes him His own son.