An excerpt from a homily of St. Leo the Great, On the Fast of the 10th Month and Offerings. 

If we, most dearly Beloved, judiciously and with reliance of God, seek to understand the beginnings of our own creation, we shall find that man was made to the image of God, in order that he might be an imitator of his own Creator; that it is but the natural dignity of our origin, if there should shine forth in us, as in a kind of mirror, the beauty of the divine goodness. To which dignity the grace of the Saviour does indeed daily restore to us, in that what was overthrown in the first Adam, is raised up in the Second.

The reason of our restoration is none other than the mercy of God, we would not love Him unless He first loved us, and scattered the darkness of our ignorance, with the Light of His Own Truth; as the Lord, speaking through the holy Isaias says: I will lead the blind into the way which they know not: and in the paths which they were ignorant of I will make them walk: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight: these things have I done to them, and have not forsaken them (Is. 43:16). And again: They have found me, He says, that sought me not, and I have appeared openly to those who did not call upon me (Is. 45:1).