Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But if someone should say to this: What then? Could not God from the beginning have made man perfect? Let him understand that God, being always the same and, in respect of himself, without origin, has every capability open to him. But the things that were made by him, since they had, as things afterward made, a beginning, must for this very reason be inferior to him who made them; for things which have only just been made could not be uncreated. And precisely because they are not uncreated, for this very reason they also fall short of the perfect. For inasmuch as they are more recent, to that extent they are also childlike; and inasmuch as they are childlike, to that extent they are likewise unused to, and untrained in, mature discipline. For just as a mother is able to supply perfect food to an infant, but the infant is not yet able to receive food too strong for it, so also God himself was indeed able from the beginning to grant man perfection, but man was unable to receive it, for he was an infant. And for this reason our Lord in the last times, recapitulating all things in himself, came to us, not as he himself was able, but as we were able to see him. For he in his own ineffable glory could have come to us, but we could not have borne the greatness of his glory. And for this reason he, who is the Father's fully-matured bread, offered himself to us as milk fit for infants — this was his arrival in human form — so that, nourished as it were at the breast of his flesh, and through such nursing made accustomed to take in and consume the Word of God, we might come to hold within ourselves him who is the bread of immortality, who is the Spirit of the Father. What is meant by what is said by Paul: 'I have given you milk to drink, not solid food.'