The second half of Proverbs 8, read as an offer with a stake in it. The first of God's acts of old - set up ages ago, before the beginning of the earth, beside him like a little child, daily his delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men - ends by speaking for itself: he who finds me finds life and obtains favour from the Lord; he who misses me injures himself; all who hate me love death. Neville grades the three outcomes rather than flattening them. Missing is not fatal, it is an injury. Hating is the serious one, and he glosses it by what it loves rather than what it hates: they love this world more than anything, and this world is the world of death, so they will give anything to extend by twenty-four hours what they take for life. He says he is speaking from experience when he calls it the world of death, and joins it to the grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die before it can be made alive - the flesh is that ground, and it is God who falls into it. Kept as a child of the stripling motif, which carries the lexical argument that the first act was a child and not Wisdom; this one carries what the child says.