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.
