From this general thought, James now passes again to its application to himself and his readers. To God alone were they indebted also for the dawning of the divine light on them, and for the new life thereby imparted. "Of his own will begat he us, with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures." We here perceive in James, as in Paul, the opposite of the Jewish tendency to the outward. He presupposes in the Christian a moral transformation, wrought from within. The word of truth, the divine power of the Gospel, is that whereby the new higher life has been produced. He too describes this as something not consequent upon any human desert; all are indebted for it to the will of Him from whom all good proceeds. He too characterizes this moral transformation as a new creation. Those in whom it was first effected, he describes as the first-born of this creation; since from them it should continue to spread, till its final completion in a world pervaded and transformed by the divine principle of life.