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This is the likeness of God. The good and loving will of a Father
following his wandering children. The likeness of a loving Father
repenting that He hath brought into the world sinful children, to be
a misery to themselves and all around them, and yet for the same
reason loving those children, striving with their wicked wills to the
very last, giving them one last chance and time for repentance; as
the Lord did to those evil men of the old world, sending to them
Noah, a preacher of righteousness, if by any means they would turn
from their sins and be saved. Ay, not only preaching to their ears
by Noah, but to their hearts by His Spirit; as St. Peter tells us, He
Himself, Christ the Lord, went Himself by His Spirit to those very
sinners before the flood, and strove to bring them to their reason
again. By His Spirit; by the very same one and only Holy Spirit of
God, St. Peter says, by which Christ Himself was raised from the
dead, did He try to raise the souls of those sinners before the
flood, from the death of sin to the life of righteousness: but they
would not. They were disobedient. Their wills resisted His will to
the last; and then the flood came, and swept them all away.
And so the first work of the heavenly Workman was marred in the
making by no fault of His, but by the fault of what He made.
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