given immortality, the likeness of the eternity of God: "God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of His own eternity" (Wisdom ii. 23); Free-will, the likeness of the creating, ruling will of God; Sovereignty over the world, the likeness of God's universal monarchy; Innocence, the likeness of God's holiness; Reason, the likeness of the wisdom of God; Happiness, the likeness of God's perfect bliss.

Note the indication of the concurrence in man's creation of the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity, in the use of the plural form: “Let us make man in our image." St. John tells us, "All things were made by Him" i.e., the Son (John i. 3); and it was, doubtless, the third Person, the Lord and Lifegiver, who "breathed (inspired) into his nostrils the breath (spirit) of life, and man became a living soul."

We owe our being, then, to all three Persons of the Godhead; and when we regard God as our Father, and ourselves as the children of God, it is not the first Person of the blessed Trinity we ought to have exclusively in mind, but the whole three Persons in their unity. The first Person is not called God the Father because of His relation to us (a common error), but in His relation to the Son. “Our Father," is the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost-one God, blessed for ever more.

Man was not introduced into the world till it was finished, and then God prepared a portion of it for his special abode. He planted a garden with every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, watered by four streams (Gen. ii. 8), and there he put the man whom he had formed. And He formed woman out of the side of man to be his companion. And He made man sovereign of the world: "He gave him dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (Gen. i. 28).

Oh! the grandeur of the being of man; the crown and flower of the terrestrial creation; the image and likeness of God. Oh! the dignity of his estate; made Lord of the world. Oh! the happiness of his life, in the garden of. God's planting.

CHAPTER IX.

MAN'S PLACE IN THE SCALE OF BEING.

MAN's place in the scale of creation is a very remarkable and interesting one. He is the connecting link between two realms of being. Below him we see, first, dead matter, as earth and stones; second, vegetable life, organised matter which has life but not consciousness; third, animals having life and consciousness. To some animals we cannot deny also a kind of will, and an instinct which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish from reason; but no mere animals have a self-determining will to choose between good and evil, a power of self-education, a proper moral character, and so have no personality. Man has life, consciousness, reason, self-determining will, true personality. It is no mere human vanity which places man at the top of the scale of known animal life, for the soberest scientific classification, looking at him merely as an animal, must place him there.

And the Scripture account of creation represents the world as passing by successive steps through this ascending scale. First there was chaotic matter, which was reduced to form and order; then on the third day the earth brought forth vegetation; and on the fifth animal life, fish, and bird ; and on the sixth day the beasts; and lastly, man, the culminating point of the system.

But while by the animal part of his nature man is allied to the lower creation, by his spiritual half he is brought into relation with the spiritual existences. Looking about us in

the world, we do not see any spiritual beings, we do not see our own human spirits; but God has revealed to us that there are thousands and ten thousands of spiritual existences of different orders. Very little is revealed to us about them. We read the names of angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, virtues, principalities, powers, seraphim, and cherubim, which are believed to represent nine different orders of spiritual beings; probably of different forms-if they have forms-of different capacities and powers, rising one above another in the scale of being; the higher of them, perhaps, so grand and glorious, that if we could see one of them we should be overwhelmed with his majesty, and think we saw God, and with St. John be ready to fall down and worship him. But God is still infinitely above the greatest of His creatures. The difference between the most mighty and glorious angel and man is nothing compared with the difference between the Infinite and the finite, between God and any creature.

Man" was made a little lower than the angels," and by the spiritual half of his nature is allied to those spiritual beings. Man then stands in this interesting position, that he is the connecting link betwee the two great realms of being, between the material and the spiritual worlds.

When astronomy revealed to men that the earth was but a speck of matter, a little dark planet, one of the smaller of many planets dependent on the sun, and the sun but one of the countless stars, it was objected to Christianity that it was highly improbable that the mighty God, that pure selfexistent essence, who lives in eternity and fills immensity, passionless and unchanging, would take upon Himself the nature of this poor race of man, in order to redeem him from the consequences of his fall.

It has been, on the other hand, suggested by Irenæus and others of the great Christian thinkers, that the Incar

nation of the Son of God has other objects besides the redemption of man; that the Son of God would have become Incarnate had man never fallen, in order to the fulfilment of the counsels of God in relation to other orders of beings besides the human race; and that it was only the circumstances of the Incarnation which were modified by the fall of the race. And that it was man's peculiar position, as the centre in which the two great realms of creation meet and are united, which made his race the destined medium, and this speck of matter the scene, of the manifestation to the universe of the fulness of the Godhead in a bodily shape.