What the furnaces are for. Man begins as a homogeneous substance - the body, containing all minerals and all things, all the memory and all the fires of the world - and none of it can be used as it stands. God, having sunk himself in that garment, puts it through furnace after furnace, which Neville would rather call furnaces of experience than of affliction, until the alloy burns off and what remains is unalloyed gold. That gold he names David: I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will. The order matters and he repeats it three times over - the gold must come out before the image can be made, because only gold takes the imprint, and you cannot make man in our image until the pure metal is produced. Then, having found David, he leaves David in the man and draws out of the man his own being, who is Jesse, and Jesse means I AM; so he is pulling himself out of himself and setting up in himself a son. The deceit still in a man is described as the one little bit of alloy left among the gold that must be burned away, which is why the refining goes on until no finger can be raised to take anything that is not one's own. A child of the furnaces motif: the parent is the refining, this is what the refining is for and what comes out.