What is the image of God in man?

What greater thing would you then have been?

Suppose God had made you perfect in the beginning and avoided for you all this effort and stumbling—what greater thing would you then have been than a flower, a beast, a world? 

You would have simply been such a thing as God made you, nothing more, no virtue in yourself, no possibility of ever becoming greater than the thing, which you were at first created. 

But God endowed you a living soul—endowed you the offspring of His own undying spirit!—endowed you too with all the possibilities necessary to develop to a comprehension of Himself.

He made us spiritually in His own image, in that He gave us personal freedom and free will and the inherent power of evolution outwardly from our own individual life germs.