Bible Commentaries
Genesis 1

Verse 1

The Creation and the Creator

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.— Genesis 1:1.

This is a sublime sentence with which the Bible opens. Will the sentences that follow be in keeping with the musical throb and stately massiveness of these opening words? Even when we regard the book simply as a monument of literature we find it impossible to conceive a more appropriate introduction than this: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Yet the end is not less majestic than the beginning: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away.”

How should we approach the study of a book which opens and closes with words of such sublimity? There is a sentence or two in the preface to John Wesley’s first volume of sermons, in which the great evangelist gives us the secret of his method of Bible-study. “Here am I,” he says, “far from the busy ways of men. I sit down alone; only God is here. In His presence I open, I read His Book; for this end—to find the way to heaven. Does anything appear dark or intricate? I lift my heart to the Father of Lights. I then search after and consider parallel passages of Scripture, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. I meditate thereon with all the attention and earnestness of which my mind is capable. And what I thus learn, that I teach.” To Wesley, then, there were two great realities—the visible Book, and its invisible but ever-present Author; and to a man of his training and susceptibilities the one would have been an enigma without the other. He saw God at the beginning of every section of Holy Scripture.

Let us attempt to explain this great but difficult text by considering—

I. The Creation.

i. The meaning of “In the beginning,” and of “the heaven and the earth.”

ii. The idea in the word “created.”

iii. Other explanations of the origin of the world.

iv. In what sense God continues to create.

II. The Creator.

i. What does Creation tell us about the Creator?

ii. What other works of God follow from Creation?

1. Providence.

2. Redemption.

iii. Three things in Creation to encourage us.

I

The Creation

i. Two Phrases

1. “ In the beginning” does not mean here “from all eternity.” There is no “beginning” in eternity. It means in the beginning of the existing universe as conditioned by time. The expression is used in precisely the same sense in the prologue of St. John’s Gospel, the difference between the opening of Genesis and the opening of the Fourth Gospel being due to the use of the verbs. In the beginning—that is, of the things which we see and among which our human history unfolds itself—God created the universe. In the same beginning the Word was, as existing from all eternity. When the beginning was we are not told; it may have been thousands or millions of years ago; but there was a beginning. Matter is not eternal.

When I was a student at College, the Standard book on divinity which was put into our hands was Bishop Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed, in which it was laid down as quite an authoritative statement that heaven and earth were created most certainly within not more than six, or, at the farthest, seven, thousand years from the age in which we were living. Astronomers who have gone into this question, however, now say that the time when the moon became separated from the earth—an event which might be regarded as the commencement of the earth’s history—could not be placed at any period less than fifty-seven millions of years ago. Even the historians find records of men living in a high state of civilization more than eight thousand years ago—and that state of civilization must itself have taken long centuries for its development. Similarly, the geologist, when he tries to read the book of Nature, finds, in the relics of the river-drift man, evidences that man had existed on this earth more than twenty thousand years. 1 [Note: J. Lightfoot.]

2. “ The heaven and the earth” does not mean the chaotic mass, the rough material, so to speak, but the whole cosmos, the universe as it appears in its present order. This is the common mode of expression in Hebrew for what we call the universe. The nearest approach to this idea of “universe” is found in Jeremiah 10:16, where the English versions have “all things,” the Hebrew being literally “the whole.” Taking the first verse as complete in itself, we have here the broad general statement of creation; then follows the early dark, empty, lifeless condition, not of the whole, but of the earth; and then the gradual preparation of the earth to be the abode of man. The history of the visible heavens and earth is bound together throughout Scripture till the final consummation, when the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up, to make way for the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

The conception which we express by the term “universe” is usually expressed in the Old Testament by this phrase, “the heaven and the earth.” But there is a still more complete expression: “heaven above, earth beneath, and the water under the earth” ( Exodus 20:4). A similar phrase is found on the Assyrian Creation-tablet: “the heaven above, the earth beneath” (line 1), and “the ocean” (line 3).

ii. The Idea in Creation

It cannot be proved that the word translated “created” means etymologically to create out of nothing. It is common to all the Semitic languages, and may be connected either with a root meaning “to cut” and “fashion by cutting,” the material so cut or fashioned being already in existence; or perhaps with a root signifying “to set free,” “to let go forth,” “to cause to appear.” It is in favour of this latter derivation that the word is never followed, like other words denoting “to form,” “to fashion,” and the like, by the accusative of the material out of which the thing is fashioned. (See the striking use of the word in Numbers 16:30, “If Jehovah should create a creation.”) But the word, whatever be its derivation, is never used except of a Divine act; and it is quite certain that the writer intends to convey the impression of a creation called into existence out of nothing by the voice and will of God. “In the beginning God created.” Before “the beginning” no material thing existed. God called all that is into existence. This is the sense in which the words were understood by the earliest commentators, the Hebrew poets. So in Psalms 33:9, “For he spake, and it was” (came into being); and Psalms 148:5, “He commanded, and they were created.” So, too, in the Epistle to the Hebrews 11:3, “By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear.” The creation, then, was no operation wrought upon pre-existent matter, neither is it an emanation from a Divine substance. The Hebrew cosmogony has no tinge in it either of dualism or of pantheism. God is the eternal, self-subsistent Being; “He is before all things, and by him all things consist.” Moreover, on its first page the Hebrew Scripture asserts clearly the unity of the Godhead. There are no rival deities here, each exercising an independent power, and claiming separate worship: God is one.

The idea in the word cannot be defined with precision, but the following points are to be noted: ( a) the most important fact is that it is used exclusively of Divine activity—a restriction to which perhaps no parallel can be found in other languages. ( b) The idea of novelty or extraordinariness of result is frequently implied, and it is noteworthy that this is the case in the only two passages of certainly early date where the word occurs. ( c) It is probable also that it contains the idea of effortless production (such as befits the Almighty) by word or volition ( Psalms 33:9). ( d) The facts just stated, and the further circumstance that the word is used always with accusative of product and never of material, constitute a long advance towards the full theological doctrine of creation out of nothing, and make the word “create” a suitable vehicle for it. 1 [Note: J. Skinner, Genesis , 15.]

This is not a philosophical account of the Creation. There is no such thing in the Bible. Wisdom, among the Israelites, developed herself in quite a different direction from the philosophy of the Greeks. She did not give herself up to speculations upon the origin and nature of things. This one word, resplendent with light, lying at the foundation of all the Jewish conceptions, set their minds at rest upon these matters: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Hence the greater minds among the Jews directed their thoughts to the problems of practical life. The result of these labours is given us in five books, which form, as it were, the code of the Hebrew wisdom. The subjects treated in them relate, not to the study of Being, but to the purely practical question of right living; they even exhaust it. These books are—Job, in which is revealed the art of suffering well; the Psalms, which give us a model of true prayer; Proverbs, in which is taught the art of acting rightly in all circumstances; Ecclesiastes, which treats of the right manner of enjoying the good things granted to man here below; and finally, in the Song of Songs, the wisdom of the Israelites rises to the contemplation of the supreme art—that of true and pure love. 1 [Note: F. Godet.]

iii. Other Explanations

What are the alternative explanations of the origin of the world? Three may be named—

1. Materialism.—Materialism tells us that the Universe is eternal and self-existent. The Universe exists, because it exists. God, of course, it leaves out of the question altogether. It holds Him to have no real existence. He is pronounced to be a creature of the human imagination, the product of the human heart at a particular stage of its development. In its most elaborated modern form, Materialism proposes to substitute two self-existent factors for the God of Heaven, two blind, all-powerful agencies—Matter and Force. It pronounces the Universe to be the result of innumerable combinations of self-existent force with self-existent matter; and it maintains that while the quantity of this eternally existing force is invariable, force can transform itself into light, into heat, into electricity, into magnetism; it is, by turns, weight, affinity, cohesion, mechanism. It is inherent in matter; it is light and heat in the suns and in the fixed stars; it is mechanical impulse in planets which move around a central globe; it is cohesion or magnetism in the ponderable material of the heavenly bodies. Its action is regulated by uncreated, self-existent laws.

I do not ask whether we can listen to a system which gives the lie, both to the heart and to the conscience, to some of the deepest and profoundest aspirations of which man is conscious. But I bid you look out for one moment upon the Universe and ask yourselves if the materialistic account of its existence is even rational. That quick-witted and thoughtful people of antiquity, the Greeks, gave it a name which has lasted until modern times; they called it the Cosmos. They meant by that word that upon the face of the Universe there is stamped beyond everything else the imprint of an harmonious beauty. It meets the eye, it falls upon the ear of man, this harmony of nature; it is no fancy impression which we gain from that splendid spectacle of universal order. But why should this harmony exist? Why do we behold this regularity, this concerted and orderly movement of universal existence? If blind force and blind matter are the only ultimate factors of existence, why should chaos ever have terminated in a reign of such harmonious and perfect order? Materialism replies that force moulds matter in obedience to laws. But law implies a legislator, and the question is, Who has created the laws? Why do these laws exist and no other? Has any one presided over that perpetual intercommunion of force with matter, and guided it by law to a result of such singular beauty? Atheism smiles at us Christians when we ask this question, and replies, “A chance.” Out of millions upon millions of chances that it might have been otherwise, one chance has carried the day; it has issued in the reign of order; it has eventuated in the world. 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

There was a philosopher, a great man in Aberdeen; his name was Dr. Beattie. He had a little boy about five years old, who was just able to read. Dr. Beattie wanted to teach his little boy about God, and how do you think he did it? He went into the garden, and in a corner, with his finger, he made in the ground the letters of his little boy’s name; and when he had made those marks in the ground he put some mustard and cress in those lines. About ten days afterwards his little boy came running into his study, saying, “Father, father, there is my name coming up in my garden.” He could just read it. The father said, “Nonsense! nonsense! There cannot be your name in the garden. Don’t talk like that.” He said, “Father, come and see.” He took him out, and there was his name in the garden. The father said, “There is nothing remarkable in that; it all came by chance.” The little boy pulled his father by the coat into the house, and said, “I do not think it came by chance, father. It could not come by chance.” The father said, “Do you think somebody put it there, then?” “Yes, I do, father,” said the little boy. “I think somebody must have put it there.” Then his father began to tell him about God. “That is just the way with you,” he said. “Somebody must have made you. You are more wonderful than that mustard and cress.” 1 [Note: James Vaughan.]

2. Pantheism.—From the belief that the Universe is the result of matter and force guided by chance a violent recoil is natural; and when this recoil takes place without the guidance of Revelation the result is Pantheism. While the Atheistic Materialist says, “There is no God,” the Pantheist answers, “Everything is God.” The Universe is not made by God; it is God in solution; God passing into various manifestations of being. God is the soul of the Universe; He is the common principle which constitutes its unity; He is at the root of, He combines, He manifests Himself in all its infinite variety of being and life. He is the common fund of life, which animates all that lives; He is the existence which is shared in by all that exists. Pantheism lays emphasis on, it exaggerates, two great truths—the Omnipresence of God, and the interdependence of created life. But Pantheism denies that God is independent of the world; it asserts that He has no existence apart from the Universe which manifests Him as being Himself. It asserts that He is not a Person, having as such consciousness, memory, and will; that He is only an impersonal quality or force; or that He is an Idea, slowly realizing itself in being. Of the general doctrine there are many shades and modifications, but they practically agree in making the Universe identical with God.

Pantheism often uses a religious kind of language which puts people off their guard and blinds them to its real nature and drift. But if Pantheism speaks of God it practically denies Him. Pantheism says that God is the Infinite; but then it goes on to say that this Infinite exists only in that which is finite. But if the Infinite be thus literally identified with the finite, it ceases to be, or rather never was, the Infinite, and there is in reality no Infinite in existence; in other words, there is no God. This is a speculative objection, sufficiently formidable but less serious than a moral objection which I proceed to notice. The very first element of our belief in God is that God is a Moral Being, that He is Essential Right, Essential Justice, Essential Sanctity, Essential Purity, Essential Truth, Essential Love. But if you say with the Pantheist that God is Universal Life, and that Universal Life is God, you thereby destroy God’s Morality. You make God the agent and producer of evil as well as the agent or producer of good; or else you deny that the distinction between absolute good and absolute evil really exists. You make God, indeed, the energy which produces deeds of charity, of courage, of justice, of integrity; but you also identify Him with the energy which issues in adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, and all that is untrue, cruel, impure. 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

It is surely more philosophical to believe that all true being centres in Personality, and proceeds from Personality, than that some pantheistic or atheistic It is the ground and first principle of Nature. The one implies that Nature is thought less, soul less, and the other that she is full of soul. 2 [Note: John Pulsford, The Supremacy of Man, 127.]

3. The Eternity of Matter.—Besides the doctrines of Materialistic Atheism and Pantheism there is one other supposition—that the Universe and God are both eternal; that an Eternal Universe has existed side by side with an Eternal God. This is the refuge of minds which shrink from the revealed truth of a creation, yet hesitate to acquiesce in the dark theories of a Universe without God, or a Universe which is God. But this third theory inevitably resolves itself into one of the two first. Unless it is to say that there are two Gods, two self-existent, co-eternal Beings, either it must say that the Universe is the reality, and God the imaginary counterpart, or it must say that the Universe itself is God. And if, somewhat violently, this consequence be declined, and the co-existence of God and an Eternal Universe be resolutely maintained, whence then, we ask, come the laws, the harmony, the form of this self-subsisting, uncreated Universe? We have only the difficulties of Atheism or of Pantheism, as the case may be, without their completeness.

How the Jews have understood the first verse of Genesis is sufficiently notorious. “Those,” says Maimonides, “who believe in the laws of our master Moses, hold that the whole world, which comprehends everything except the Creator, after being in a state of non-existence, received its existence from God, being called into existence out of nothing.… It is a fundamental principle of our law that God created the world from nothing.” The mother of the Maccabean martyrs, when endeavouring to strengthen her youngest son for his last agony, bids him look upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them out of things that were not. If the Alexandrian author of the Book of Wisdom speaks of God’s making the cosmos out of shapeless matter, it does not follow that, like Philo afterwards, he had so yielded to Platonic ideas as to suppose that matter was eternal; he is speaking of God’s later creative action, which gave form to matter that had been made before. Justin Martyr uses the phrase in the same sense; and St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of matter having no relation to time, not meaning that matter is eternal, but that it had been created at a period when there were no “times or seasons or days or years.” Tertullian holds that the Carthaginian artist, Hermogenes, who probably had never unlearnt his heathen creed, really teaches the existence of a second God when he asserts the eternity of matter: “Duos Deos infert,” says Tertullian, “materiam parem Deo infert.” And the common sense of Christian antiquity is expressed in the devout reasoning of St. Augustine: “Thou, O Lord, hast made heaven and earth; yet not out of Thine own Substance, for then heaven and earth would be equal to Thine Only Begotten, and, besides Thyself, there was nought else out of which Thou couldst make it: therefore hast Thou made heaven and earth out of nothing.”

iv. Continuous Creation

In the sense of giving form and order to pre-existent matter, God has continued to create ever since the Creation. It is quite possible, as was distantly suggested by Peter Lombard in the heart of the Middle Ages, and as is maintained by the evolutionary theory in our time, that He has continuously developed ever new species of creatures by a natural selection out of lower species previously existing. In this, and other kindred ways, it may be that He “worketh hitherto.” And to us the development of one species out of another may appear even more wonderful and a greater miracle than the independent creation of every species.

The forest oak is a majestic object, as it sits rooted upon its rocks, looking forth toward all the winds, and watching the seasons come and go. The apparatus of an intricate life is playing in a million of veins and arteries, adding each year its ring of robust strength to the concentric circles on which you may mark off the centuries, girding about it anew its coats of shaggy bark, and painting its leaves with the tender green of spring and the ruddy hue of autumn. It is the grand production of His word who bade the earth bring forth her grass, her herb, her tree. But you bring to me, half hidden in its rustic cup, an acorn, and tell me that in the white kernel within that brown shell are imprisoned all the possibilities of the future oak—not some chance tree, it may chance of beech or elm or of some other tree, but the oak itself with all its lordly traits, its giant boll, its Stretch and grasp of root, its tough fibre, its shaggy bark, its deep-cut leaves of shining green—that all these, to the last detail, are provided for in that little nodule of starch, and I say this is a greater wonder still! 1 [Note: L. W. Bacon.]

Men startle us with their beginnings; at once they show their hand, and after the pomp of initiation we are disappointed with the finish. This is all exactly contrary to the method of the greatest Worker of all. He is usually modest, meagre, unpromising in His beginnings; but His finishing strokes make the sublime. It was thus with the creation of the world. Starting with slime and darkness, He went forward in firmaments, suns, moons, stars, and the humanity that is more than all galaxies. This is God’s order in the world still. Beginning with coral insects and earth-worms, He ends with rich landscapes; beginning with specks of jelly, He works up to splendid organisms; beginning with sober seeds, He crowns His creation with the golden lilies and burning roses. 2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

II

The Creator

The sentence, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” stands like an archway at the beginning of the Universe. In the beginning of heaven, God; in the beginning of the earth, God; in the beginning of time, God; in the beginning of man, God; in the beginning of the Bible, God; in the beginning of salvation, God. Looking back at the universe to the time when the chaotic mists hung across the morning of creation, we see streaking their silvery summits that infinite word, “God.” Looking above us at the stars of the heavens, and contemplating their number and magnitude, and the power that created and sustains them, we think of “God.” Looking forward into the infinite future, toward which all are travelling, we meet with “God.” The idea of God is the centre of the spiritual universe. It is the focal point of human thought. It is the answer to the soul’s thirst. It is the universal prayer. It is the greatest idea in the world. It is the idea that over-whelms us, that humbles us, that exalts us, that saves us, that inspires us, and that makes us believe in our immortality. It is the keynote to religious progress. “As a man thinks about God, so is he.”

i. What does Creation tell us about God?

What discoveries about God does Creation allow us to make? If He is creator, what does that enable us to assert concerning Him?

1. His Existence.—Conceive that a thoughtful man, in the full maturity of his powers, had suddenly been placed in the midst of this beautiful system of natural life. His eye rests upon the forms and colours around him with keen, fresh delight. Earth, sky, sun, stars, clouds, mountains, valleys, rivers, seas, trees, animals, flowers, and fruits, in groups and separately, pass before him. His thought is still eagerly curious; it has not yet been vulgarized and impoverished down to the point at which existence is taken as a matter of course: the beauty, the mysteriousness, the awfulness of the Universe, still elevates and thrills him; and his first desire is to account to himself for the spectacle on which he gazes. Whence comes it, this beautiful scene? What upholds it? Why is it here? Does it exist of itself? Is it its own upholder and ruler, or is there any Cause or Being in existence who gives it substance and shape? From this question there is no escape; we cannot behold the vast flood of life sweep before our eyes without asking whence it takes its rise: we cannot read the pages of that marvellous book of Nature and be indifferent to the question whether they have an Author. And thus it is that in circles where Christ is not named, or is named only in accents of contemptuous scorn, the question is asked in our day more and more importunately: Whence comes this Universe? what upholds it in being? for what end does it exist? Now the Christian Solution of this question is the only one which seriously respects the rights and even the existence of God.

Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of London, used to warn his Ordination candidates against too great confidence in attempting to prove the existence of God. Preaching in Suffolk on one occasion in early life from the text, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,” he entered into a powerful argument in proof of the existence of God. The service over, the preacher went to dine with a neighbouring farmer, who complimented him on his sermon, but observed quite naively, “At the same time, sir, I believe there is a God.”

That in the beginning of his noviciate, he spent the hours appointed for private prayer in thinking of God, so as to convince his mind of, and to impress deeply upon his heart, the Divine existence, rather by devout sentiments, than by studied reasonings, and elaborate meditations. That by this short and sure method, he exercised himself in the knowledge and love of God, resolving to use his utmost endeavour to live in a continual sense of His Presence, and, if possible, never to forget Him more. 1 [Note: Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 25.]

The word “God” is very great. He who realizes and acknowledges this will be mild and fair in his judgment of those who frankly confess they have not the courage to say they believe in God. 2 [Note: R. Rothe, Still Hours, 91.]

There was a very wise man who lived many, many hundreds of years ago. His name was Simonides. People came to him because he was one of the wisest men that ever lived; and they said to him, “What is God, Simonides?” He said, “Give me a day to think about it.” They came to him the next day, and said, “What is God, Simonides?” He said, “Give me a week to think about it.” After a week had passed, they came to him again, and said, “What is God, Simonides?” He said, “Give me a month to think about it.” They came again to him at the end of a month, and they said, “What is God, Simonides?” He said, “Give me a year to think about it.” At the end of a year they came to him, and said, “What is God, Simonides?” And he said, “I am no nearer than when I first began to think about it. I cannot tell what God is.” 3 [Note: James Vaughan.]

Some one came once to an Arab in his tent in the desert, and said to him, “How do you know there is a God?” He said, “How do I know whether it was a man or a camel that went by my tent last night?” How did he know which it was? “By the footprints.” The marks in the sand showed whether it was a man’s foot, or a camel’s foot, that had passed his tent. So the Arab said, “That is the way I know God. I know Him by His footprints. These are His footprints that are all around me.”

2. His Power.—“God created:” does anything so lead up our thoughts to the almightiness of God as this? For think of the untold vastness of creation, with its two infinities, of great and small; universe beyond universe, in ever-expanding circles of magnificence, as we press our researches without, and universe within universe, in ever-refining delicacy of minute texture, as we pry into the secrets of the infinitely little—think of all this, and then think that it came into being at His word: “He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast” ( Psalms 33:9).

Observe, as an element of creation, the presence of that mysterious gift, so intimately present to each one of us, in its essence so entirely beyond our power of analysis, which we call Life. We know life by its Symptoms: by growth and movement, by feeling and gesture; and in its higher forms, by speech and expression. What is life? It is growth in the vegetable; it is feeling and movement in the animal; it is thought, reflection, resolve in man, as these manifest themselves in speech and look and action. But what is it in itself, in its essence, this gift of life? Science, the unraveller of so many secrets, is silent here: as silent as when she had not yet begun to inquire and to teach. She can define the conditions, the accompaniments, the surroundings, the phenomena of life; but its essence she knows not. It is a mystery which eludes her in her laboratories and her museums; each of her most accomplished votaries carries it perpetually with him, and understands it as little as does the peasant or the child. Oh, marvellous gift of life! true ray of the Creator’s Beauty, in thy lowest as in thy highest forms! We men can foster it; we can stint it; we can, by a profound natural mystery, as parents, yet in obedience to inviolable laws, transmit it as a sacred deposit to beings which have it not; we can crush it out by violence into death. But we cannot create it.

When Mr. Simeon, of Cambridge, was dying, he looked round with one of his beaming smiles, and said, “What do you think specially gives me comfort now? The Creation! Did Jehovah create the world, or did I? I think He did. Now if He made the world, He can sufficiently take care of me.”

O Master of the Beautiful,

Creating us from hour to hour,

Give me this vision to the full

To see in lightest things Thy power!

This vision give, no heaven afar,

No throne, and yet I will rejoice,

Knowing beneath my feet a star,

Thy word in every wandering voice. 1 [Note: “A. E.”]

ii. What other works follow from Creation?

Belief in the creation of the universe by God out of nothing naturally leads to belief in God’s continuous Providence, and Providence in turn, considering the depth of man’s moral misery, suggests Redemption. No such anticipation would be reasonable, if we could suppose that the world emanated from a passive God, or that, per impossibile, it had existed side by side with Him from everlasting. But if He had created it in His freedom, the question will inevitably be asked, Why did He create it? Could it add anything to His Infinite Blessedness and Glory? could it make Him more powerful, more happy, more wise? Revelation answers the question by ascribing creation to that attribute of God which leads Him to communicate His life; that generous attribute which is goodness in its relation to the irrational and inanimate universe, and love in its relation to personal beings. “I have loved the with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”

The sower is justly held responsible for the due care and cultivation of the growing plant. To neglect it, to allow it to wither and die for lack of proper attention, is felt to be a wrong and almost a cruelty. The father and the mother are, still more justly and still more severely, held responsible for the maintenance, education, and tenderest nurture of their children. And why? Because they are their pro-creators; that is, under God, their creators. Nature itself teaches us the rights of creation. And can we think for a moment, that the Creator is forgetful of, is insensible to, those rights? Let our Saviour’s familiar argument be the reply to the question: “If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children; how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” The Creator, the Father, must be infinitely more righteous and faithful than all subordinate and secondary creators and fathers. He will not forsake—He will have a desire to—the work of His own hands. 2 [Note: D. J. Vaughan.]

1. Providence.—If God created the world He will also rule it. God does not create worlds in order that meaner spirits may control them. Creation means providence, and providence means redemption, and redemption means heaven, and heaven is a term which no lexicographer can fitly define.

Of this property of God’s activity there is on earth one most beautiful and instructive shadow—the love of a parent for his child. That love is the most disinterested, the purest, if not the strongest, of human passions. The parent hopes for nothing from his child; yet he will work for it, suffer for it, die for it. If you ask the reason, it is because he has been the means of bringing it into existence. Certainly, if it lives, it may support and comfort him in his old age; but that is not the motive of his anxious care. He feels the glory and the responsibility of fatherhood; and this leads him to do what he can for the helpless infant which depends on him. Our Lord appeals to this parental instinct when He teaches us the efficacy of prayer. If men, evil as they are, give good gifts unto their children, how much more shall not a moral God—your heavenly Father—give the best of gifts, His Holy Spirit, to them that ask Him. 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

Lo! I have sought, he said, and striven

To find the truth, and found it not,

But yet to me it hath been given,

And unto you it hath been brought.

This Host of ours our Father is,

And we the children He begot.

Upon my brow I felt His kiss,

His love is all about our steps,

And He would lead us all to bliss;

For though He comes in many shapes,

His love is throbbing in them all,

And from His love no soul escapes,

And from His mercy none can fall. 2 [Note: Walter C. Smith.]

2. Redemption.—If love was the motive for creation, it implies God’s continuous interest in created life. If love urged God to reveal Himself by His work under finite conditions—and both David and St. Paul insist upon the high significance of creation as an unveiling of the hidden life of God—surely love might urge Him to reveal Himself yet more distinctly under finite conditions, as “manifest in the flesh.” The formula that “time has no meaning for God” is sometimes used even by writers of consideration, in senses which are incompatible with the idea of creation. If it is not beneath God’s dignity to create a finite world at all, it is not beneath His dignity to accept the consequences of His work; to take part in the development of His creatures; to subject Himself, in some sense, to the conditions imposed by His original act. If in His knowledge He necessarily anticipates the development of His work, so that to Him a “thousand years are as one day”; by His love, on the other hand, which led Him to move out of Himself in creation at the first, He travails with the slow onward movement of the world and of humanity; and His incarnation in time, when demanded by the supreme needs of the creatures of His hand, is in a line with that first of mysteries, His deigning to create at all. For thus God, having created the rational and human world, so loved it, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

It lies at the very root of all Christian religion that our Word of Revelation should open, not with the Call of Abraham, or the Covenant of Circumcision, or the Law of Sinai, but with the Creation of the Heaven and the Earth. There is One Lord for the physical world and for the spiritual. True; the salvation through Christ has come to us in history from the people of Israel. The work of Redemption, however, is not a Jewish event, but the continuance of the work of Creation, to be consummated in the days of “the Restoration of all things.” The love that was manifested on the Cross is the love that was shown in the framing of the Universe. To us, with the Bible in our hands, the two epochs, if the phrase be permissible, are inseparable, that of Creation and that of Redemption. The whole teaching of Revelation Springs, as it were, from the first chapter of Genesis. The God who made the world did not send it “spinning down the grooves of change,” and then gaze at a distance upon its course, unheeding of its destiny, regardless of its inhabitants. The same God that created has also redeemed, even now sanctifies, even now encompasses us with mercies, and will hereafter, in a fashion and a manner yet to be revealed, restore. The Gospel of Genesis is one of hope. 1 [Note: H. E. Ryle, On Holy Scripture and Criticism, 62.]

“When” (in the words of a Talmudic allegory) “the Almighty was about to create man, He called together before His Throne a Council of the angelic hosts. ‘Create him not!’ so spake the Angel of Justice. ‘He will be unjust towards his brother man. He will injure and oppress the weak, and cruelly ill-treat the feeble.’ ‘Create him not!’ said the Angel of Peace. ‘He will stain the earth with the blood of men, his brethren. The first-born of his race will be the murderer of his brother.’ ‘Create him not!’ said the Angel of Truth. ‘Thou mayest create him in Thine own image, after Thy likeness, and stamp the impress of truth upon his brow; yet will he desecrate with falsehood even Thine own Sanctuary.’ And more they would have said, but Mercy—the youngest and dearest child of the Eternal Father—stepped to the sapphire Throne, and knelt before Him, and prayed: ‘Father, oh, Father, Create him! Create him after Thine own image, and as the favoured child of Thy goodness. When all others, Thy servants, forsake him, I will be with him. I will lovingly aid him, and turn his very errors to his own good. I will touch his heart with pity, and make him merciful to others weaker than himself. When he goes astray from the paths of Truth and Peace, when he transgresses the laws of Justice and Equity, I will still be with him; and the consequences of his own errors shall lead him back to the right path, and so Thy forgiving love shall make him, penitent, Thine’ The Father of mankind listened to her voice, and with the aid of Mercy created man.” 1 [Note: H. Gollancz.]

Let us bear in mind that a religion of mere Theism is now impossible. We are redeemed from our sin by Him who gave us being, and therefore the claims of God the Creator are enhanced and intensified by the new, wondrous, matchless claims of God our Saviour.

’Twas great to speak a world from nought,

’Twas greater to redeem!

And of all the universe the most significant and sacred place is the place of the Cross; for there we hear a voice more full of constraining power than any voice that comes down to us from the everlasting hills, or finds an echo in the spacious heavens, even the voice of a love unto death! 2 [Note: T. F. Lockyer.]

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;

What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;

On the earth the broken arcs,—in the heaven, a perfect round! 1 [Note: Browning, Abt Vogler.]

iii. Three Encouragements

Now in this great thought of Creation involving Providence and Redemption there are three things to encourage us.

1. First, there is the fact that the material world originated from the spiritual; the visible from the invisible. It is the unseen forces that give shape and form to the things which are. The phenomenal world is but the expression of invisible forces. The Unseen dominates and rules the seen. It would seem as if all force is, in the last analysis, spiritual, and has its seat and origin in God. The Unseen is the eternal and unchangeable; the visible is temporal and perishable. A mighty truth is contained in that word of St. Paul, “All things work together for good … while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are … not seen are eternal.” And all those unseen verities and forces have their root in God.

When that my soul, too far from God,

In earthy furrows crawled about,

An insect on a dusty clod

Wandering wingless in and out:

At deepest dusk I looked above

And saw a million worlds alight,

That burnt the mortal veils of Love

And left it shining infinite:

I gazed and gazed with lifted head

Until I found my heart had wings,

And now my soul has ceased to dread

The weary dust of earthly things. 2 [Note: Rachel Annand Taylor.]

2. Next there is the fact that the unity of God the Creator carries with it the idea of the unity of the Creation. And here arises the grand conception of the universe as a cosmos. One law, the law of gravitation, pervades the whole material creation, and binds it into one vast and glorious system. And that law of gravitation, what is it but the expression of one omnipotent Will, the exertion of one infinite Energy? Here the poetry of the Psalmist is seen almost as a physical truth: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” May we not most surely conclude that as physical law pervades all space, so also does moral law reign over the whole creation in unchanged majesty? John Stuart Mill thought there might be a place in the universe where two and two do not make four. That position is unthinkable. Truth here is truth everywhere, because God is the same everywhere. Nothing can really hurt the good man. “Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him.”

Professor Henry Jones, in his book on Browning, points out how Browning differs from two others of his great contemporaries—Emerson and Carlyle. Speaking of Emerson’s always rose-coloured view of things, he says: “Such an optimism, such a plunge into the pure blue and away from facts, was Emerson’s. Caroline Fox tells a story of him and Carlyle which reveals this very pointedly. It seems that Carlyle once led the serene philosopher through the abominations of the streets of London at midnight, asking him with grim humour, at every few steps, ‘Do you believe in the devil now?’ Emerson replied that the more he saw of the English people the greater and better he thought them. This little incident lays bare the limits of both these great men. Where the one saw, the other was blind. To the one there was the misery and the universal murk; to the other the pure white beam was scarcely broken. Carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt; he fought his great battle in its strength, and won; but ‘he was sorely wounded.’ Emerson was Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail; his armour spotless white, his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and heat. But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory.” Now, in opposition to the pessimism of Carlyle on the one hand, and the “too easy” optimism of Emerson on the other, Browning—seeing the worst, as Carlyle saw it, and seeing also the best beyond, as Emerson saw it—reveals a true, unfailing, and glorious optimism, which grounds itself upon the only sure, immovable basis—a conviction resulting from the vision of the loving, powerful, regnant God! Evil may exist, does exist—paint it, if you will, in its blackest colours; but good exists too, and good will triumph at last, because God and good are one. And so our poet declares—

Oh, thought’s absurd!—as with some monstrous fact

Which, when ill thoughts beset us, seems to give

Merciful God that made the sun and stars,

The waters and the green delights of earth,

The lie! I apprehend the monstrous fact—

Yet know the maker of all worlds is good,

And yield my reason up, inadequate

To reconcile what yet I do behold—

Blasting my sense! There’s cheerful day outside. 1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 30.]

3. And there is also the assurance that through the ages an unceasing Divine purpose runs. Scientific research reveals that plan up to a certain point. It proceeds from lower to higher, and from higher to highest; from inorganic to organic; from the simple to the complex; from the zoophyte to man. It is ever ascending, unfolding into richer amplitude and meaning. Such is the testimony of the rocks. Here revelation takes up the mighty theme. God is in creation. The development of the plan cannot cease where geology leaves it. A Divine purpose runs through the ages, and, according to later revelation, centres in Jesus Christ. Hence He is described as “a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” The redemptive idea is thus fundamental; it is the central truth of creation. “For by him and through him and to him are all things.” Here is the meaning of creation; man as created is not the ultimate purpose of God, but man as redeemed and glorified. Here the purpose of God in creation becomes luminous and grand. The suffering world is not the fulfilment of the Divine plan, but the renewed and reconstructed world. “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together … waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” At the opening of the Bible we see all things proceeding from God, at the other end we see all things returning to Him again. “When all things shall be subdued unto him (Christ), then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”

There is plan in the universe; plan implies thought, thought predicates a thinker. Philosophically, the Divine mystery of Creation is the transmutation of thought into matter, or the self-evolution of God, the evolution from the Originating Spirit of what was involved in Himself—

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains—

Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?

Is not the Vision He? Tho’ He be not that which He seems?

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

We live in dreams, because the self-evolution of the Spirit in man and matter necessarily implies a career amidst various complications and appearances that are more or less obscure, a kind of divinely appointed dreamland; but the Divine origin of the problem is the assurance of the awakening from the dream, for it is the Omnipotent who is hidden in the dream—the dream of life; and the full awakening will be when Parent and offspring, Thinker and thing thought, become consciously one; perhaps that will be when we die, perhaps there is truth in Shelley’s words, “Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep, he hath awakened from the dream of life.” I do not know. But I do know from direct revelation, endorsed by conscious intuition, that God is Love and that the human race and its Divine source are inseverable, and, as Owen Meredith says—

Only matter’s dense opaqueness

Checks God’s Light from shining through it,

And our senses, such their weakness,

Cannot help our Souls to view it

Till Love lends the world translucence,

Then we see God clear in all things.

Love’s the new sense, Love’s the true sense,

Which teaches us how we should view things. 1 [Note: B. Wilberforce.]

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, iv. 1.

Bacon (L. W.), The Simplicity that is in Christ, 196.

Brandt (J. L.), Soul Saving, 41.

Brooke (S. A.), Sermons, i. 222.

Flint (R.), Sermons and Addresses, 56.

Forbes (A. P.), Sermons on the Grace of God, 183.

Fotheringham (D. R.), The Writing on the Sky, 1.

Gibson (E. C. S.), Messages from the Old Testament, 1.

Hiley (R. W.), A Year’s Sermons, i. 85.

Kingsley (C.), The Gospel of the Pentateuch, 1.

Liddon (H. P.), University Sermons, ii. 38.

Liddon (H. P.), Sermons at St. Paul’s, 1.

Lockyer (T. F.), The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 1.

Middleton (W.), Alpha and Omega, 15.

Parker (J.), City Temple Pulpit, vii. 3, 128.

Parker (J.), The City Temple, i. (1872) 56.

Pattison (T. H.), The South Wind, 275.

Pearse (M. G.), Some Aspects of the Blessed Life, 17.

Reichel (C. P.), Sermons, 143.

Selby (T. G.), The God of the Patriarchs, 23.

Shore (T. T.), Some Difficulties of Belief, 103.

Terry (G. F.), The Old Theology in the New Age, 43.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xv. (1877) No. 1034.

Waller (C. B.), Two Sermons, 1.

Wilberforce (B.), The Hope that is in Me, 193.

Wilson (J. M.), Rochdale Sermons, 79.

Christian Age, xxxv. 306 (Growden).

Christian World Pulpit, xii. 333 (Peabody); xvii. 249 (Gibberd); xxvii. 123 (Taft); xlv. 108 (Law); 1. 211 (Ryle); lxi. 212 (Jones); lxix. 92 (M‘Cleery); lxxii. 307 (Shelford); lxxiii. 133 (Fotheringham).

Church of England Pulpit, lx. 142 (Lightfoot); lxi. 223 (Jackson); lxiii. 118 (Shelford), 130 (Fotheringham).

Churchman’s Pulpit (Trinity Sunday), ix. 270 (Shelford); (Sermons to the Young) xvi. 100 (Vaughan).

Preacher’s Magazine, ii. (1891) 120 (Watson).

Verses 2-3

Let There Be Light

And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved (R.V. m. was brooding) upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.— Genesis 1:2-3.

This is the second stage in the history of the Creation. After the first verse, it is of the earth, and of the earth only, that the narrative speaks. The earth did now exist, but in the form of chaos. This expression does not mean a state of disorder and confusion, but that state of primitive matter in which no creature had as yet a distinctive existence, and no one element stood out in distinction from others, but all the forces and properties of matter existed, as it were, undivided. The materials were indeed all there, but not as such—they were only latent. However, the creative spirit, the principle of order and life, brooded over this matter, which, like a rich organic cell, comprehended in itself the conditions, and up to a certain point the elementary principles, of all future forms of existence. This Spirit was the efficient cause, not of matter itself, but of its Organization, which was then to begin. He was the executant of each of those Divine commands, which from this time were to succeed each other, stroke after stroke, till this chaos should be transformed into a world of wonders.

We cannot tell how the Spirit of God brooded over that vast watery mass. It is a mystery, but it is also a fact, and it is here revealed as having happened at the very commencement of the Creation, even before God had said, “Let there be light.” The first Divine act in fitting up this planet for the habitation of man was for the Spirit of God to move upon the face of the waters. Till that time, all was formless, empty, out of order, and in confusion. In a word, it was chaos; and to make it into that thing of beauty which the world is at the present moment, even though it is a fallen world, it was needful that the movement of the Spirit of God should take place upon it. How the Spirit works upon matter, we do not know; but we do know that God, who is a Spirit, created matter, and fashioned matter, and sustained matter, and that He will yet deliver matter from the stain of sin which is upon it. We shall see new heavens and a new earth in which materialism itself shall be lifted up from its present state of ruin, and shall glorify God; but without the Spirit of God the materialism of this world must have remained for ever in chaos. Only as the Spirit came did the work of creation begin. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

We have first chaos, then order (or cosmos); we have also first darkness, then light. It is the Spirit of God that out of chaos brings cosmos; it is the Word of God that out of darkness brings light. Accordingly, the text is easily divided in this way—

I. Cosmos out of Chaos.

i. Chaos.

ii. The Spirit of God.

iii. Cosmos.

II. Light out of Darkness.

i. Darkness.

ii. God’s Word.

iii. Light.

I

Cosmos out of Chaos

i. Chaos

“The earth was without form (R.V. waste) and void.” The Hebrew (tôhû wâ-bôhû) is an alliterative description of a chaos, in which nothing can be distinguished or defined. Tôhû is a word which it is difficult to express consistently in English; but it denotes mostly something unsubstantial, or (figuratively) unreal; cf. Isaiah 45:18 (of the earth), “He created it not a tôhû, he fashioned it to be inhabited,” Genesis 1:19, “I said not, Seek ye me as a tôhû ( i.e. in vain).” Bôhû, as Arabic shows, is rightly rendered empty or void. Compare the same combination of words to suggest the idea of a return to primeval chaos in Jeremiah 4:23 and Isaiah 34:11 (“the line of tôhû and the plummet of bôhû”).

Who seeketh finds: what shall be his relief

Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray,

No sense of God, but bears as best he may,

A lonely incommunicable grief?

What shall he do? One only thing he knows,

That his life flits a frail uneasy spark

In the great vast of universal dark,

And that the grave may not be all repose.

Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry,

But spread the desert of thy being bare

To the full searching of the All-seeing Eye:

Wait—and through dark misgiving, blank despair,

God will come down in pity, and fill the dry

Dead place with light, and life, and vernal air. 1 [Note: J. C. Shairp.]

ii. The Spirit of God

1. In the Old Testament the spirit of man is the principle of life, viewed especially as the seat of the stronger and more active energies of life; and the “spirit” of God is analogously the Divine force or agency, to the operation of which are attributed various extraordinary powers and activities of men, as well as supernatural gifts. In the later books of the Old Testament, it appears also as the power which creates and sustains life. It is in the last-named capacity that it is mentioned here. The chaos of Genesis 1:2 was not left in hopeless gloom and death; already, even before God “spake,” the Spirit of God, with its life-giving energy, was “brooding” over the waters, like a bird upon its nest, and (so it seems to be implied) fitting them in some way to generate and maintain life, when the Divine fiat should be pronounced.

This, then, is the first lesson of the Bible; that at the root and origin of all this vast material universe, before whose laws we are crushed as the moth, there abides a living conscious Spirit, who wills and knows and fashions all things. The belief of this changes for us the whole face of nature, and instead of a chill, impersonal world of forces to which no appeal can be made, and in which matter is supreme, gives us the home of a Father.

In speaking of Divine perfection, we mean to say that God is just and true and loving—the Author of order and not of disorder, of good and not of evil. Or rather, that He is justice, that He is truth, that He is love, that He is order; … and that wherever these qualities are present, whether in the human soul or in the order of nature, there is God. We might still see Him everywhere if we had not been mistakenly seeking Him apart from us, instead of in us; away from the laws of nature, instead of in them. And we become united to Him not by mystical absorption, but by partaking, whether consciously or unconsciously of that truth and justice and love which He Himself is. 1 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.]

I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains. 2 [Note: Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey.]

2. The doctrine of the all-pervading action of the Spirit of God, and the living Power underlying all the energies of Nature, occupies a wider space in the pages of Divine revelation than it holds in popular Christian theology, or in the hymns, the teaching, and the daily thoughts of modern Christendom. In these the doctrine of the Spirit of God is, if we judge by Scripture, too much restricted to His work in Redemption and Salvation, to His wonder-working and inspiring energy in the early Church, and to His secret regenerating and sanctifying energy in the renewal of souls for life everlasting. And in this work of redemption He is spoken of by the special appellation of the Holy Ghost, even by the revisers of the Authorized Version; although there seems to be not the slightest reason for the retention of that equivocal old English word, full of unfortunate associations, more than there would be in so translating the same word as it occurs in our Lord’s discourse at the well of Jacob—“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth”—where the insertion of this ancient Saxon word for spirit would create a painful shock by its irreverence. All these redeeming and sanctifying operations of the Spirit of God in the soul of man have been treated with great fulness in our own language, in scores of valuable writings, from the days of John Owen, the Puritan Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, down to the present time, when Bishop Moule has given us his excellent work entitled Veni Creator, a most delightful exposition of Scripture doctrine on the Holy Spirit in His dealings with the souls of men. In few of these works, however, appears any representation of the Scripture doctrine of the Spirit of God, as working in Nature, as the direct agent of the Eternal Will in the creation and everlasting government of the physical and intellectual universe.

It has been the fault of religious teachers, and it is also the fault of much of what prevails in the tone of the religious world—to draw an unwarrantably harsh contrast between the natural and the spiritual. A violent schism has thereby been created between the sacred and the secular, and, consequently, many disasters have ensued. Good people have done infinite mischief by placing the sacred in opposition to the secular. They have thus denied God’s presence and God’s glory in things where His presence should have been gladly acknowledged, and have thereby cast a certain dishonour on matters which should have been recognized as religious in the truest sense. The result has been that others, carefully studying the things thus handed over to godlessness, and discovering therein rich mines of truth, and beauty, and goodness, have too frequently accepted the false position assigned to them, and have preached, in the name of Agnosticism or Atheism, a gospel of natural law, in opposition to the exclusive and narrow gospel of the religionists I have described. 1 [Note: Donald Macleod, Christ and Society, 243.]

3. It is an ennobling thought that all this fair world we see, all those healthful and strong laws in ceaseless operation around us, all that long history of change and progress which we have been taught to trace, can be linked on to what we behold at Pentecost. It is the same Spirit who filled St. Peter and St. John with the life and power and love of Christ, who also “dwells in the light of setting suns, in the round ocean, and the living air.” There is no opposition. All are diverse operations of the same Spirit, who baptized St. Paul with his glowing power, and St. John with his heavenly love, and who once moved over the face of the waters, and evoked order out of chaos. The Bible calls nothing secular, all things are sacred, and only sin and wickedness are excluded from the domain which is claimed for God. But if we believe that He has never left Himself without a witness, and that the very rain and sunshine and fruitful seasons are the gifts of Him whose Spirit once moved over the waters and brought order out of confusion, then are we entitled to go further and to say that in the love of parent and child, in the heroic self-sacrifice of patriots, in the thoughts of wisdom and truth uttered by wise men, by Sakyamuni or Confucius, Socrates or Seneca, we must see nothing less than the strivings of that same Divine Spirit who spake by the prophets, and was shed forth in fulness upon the Church at Pentecost.

In the Life of Sir E. Burne-Jones, there is an account by his wife of the effect first made upon her by coming into contact with him and his artist friends, Morris and Rossetti. She says, “I wish it were possible to explain the Impression made upon me as a young girl, whose experience so far had been quite remote from art, by sudden and close intercourse with those to whom it was the breath of life. The only approach I can make to describing it is by saying that I felt in the presence of a new religion. Their love of beauty did not seem to me unbalanced, but as if it included the whole world and raised the point from which they regarded everything. Human beauty especially was in a way sacred to them, I thought; and a young lady who was much with them, and sat for them as a model, said to me, ‘It was being in a new world to be with them. I sat to them and I was there with them. And I was a holy thing to them—I was a holy thing to them.’ ”

Wherever through the ages rise

The altars of self-sacrifice,

Where love its arms has opened wide,

Or man for man has calmly died,

I see the same white wings outspread,

That hovered o’er the Master’s head!

Up from undated time they come,

The martyr souls of heathendom;

And to His cross and passion bring

Their fellowship of suffering.

So welcome I from every source

The tokens of that primal Force,

Older than heaven itself, yet new

As the young heart it reaches to,

Beneath whose steady impulse rolls

The tidal wave of human souls;

Guide, comforter, and inward word,

The eternal spirit of the Lord! 1 [Note: Whittier.]

iii. Cosmos

1. The Spirit of God was brooding upon the face of the waters. The word rendered “brooded” (or “ was brooding,” R.V. m.) occurs elsewhere only in Deuteronomy 32:11, where it is used of an eagle (properly, a griffon-vulture) hovering over its young. It is used similarly in Syriac. It is possible that its use here may be a survival, or echo, of the old belief, found among the Phœnicians, as well as elsewhere, of a world-egg, out of which, as it split, the earth, sky, and heavenly bodies emerged; the crude, material representation appearing here transformed into a beautiful and suggestive figure.

2. The hope of the chaotic world, and the hope of the sinning soul, is all in the brooding Spirit of God seeking to bring order out of chaos, to bring life out of death, light out of darkness, and beauty out of barrenness and ruin. It was God’s Spirit brooding over the formless world that put the sun in the heavens, that filled the world with warmth and light, that made the earth green with herbage, that caused forests to grow upon the hillsides, with birds to sing in them, and planted flowers to exhale their perfume in the Valleys. So God’s Spirit broods over the heart of man that has fallen into darkness and chaos through sin.

(1) As the movement of the Holy Spirit upon the waters was the first act in the six days’ work, so the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul is the first work of grace in that soul. It is a very humbling truth, but it is a truth notwithstanding its humiliating form, that the best man that mere morality ever produced is still “waste and void” if the Spirit of God has not come upon him. All the efforts of men which they make by nature, when stirred up by the example of others or by godly precepts, produce nothing but chaos in another shape; some of the mountains may have been levelled, but valleys have been elevated into other mountains; some vices have been discarded, but only to be replaced by other vices that are, perhaps, even worse; or certain transgressions have been forsaken for a while, only to be followed by a return to the selfsame sins, so that it has happened unto them, “According to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” ( 2 Peter 2:22). Unless the Spirit of God has been at work within him, the man is still, in the sight of God, “without form and void” as to everything which God can look upon with pleasure.

(2) To this work nothing whatever is contributed by the man himself. “The earth was waste and void,” so it could not do anything to help the Spirit. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The Spirit found no light there; it had to be created. The heart of man promises help, but “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” The will has great influence over the man, but the will is itself depraved, so it tries to play the tyrant over all the other powers of the man, and it refuses to become the servant of the eternal Spirit of truth.

(3) Not only was there nothing whatever that could help the Holy Spirit, but there seemed nothing at all congruous to the Spirit. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of order, but there was disorder. He is the Spirit of light, but there was darkness. Does it not seem a strange thing that the Spirit of God should have come there at all? Adored in His excellent glory in the heaven where all is order and all is light, why should He come to brood over that watery deep, and to begin the great work of bringing order out of chaos? Why should the Spirit of God ever have come into our hearts? What was there in us to induce the Spirit of God to begin a work of grace in us? We admire the condescension of Jesus in leaving Heaven to dwell upon earth; but do we equally admire the condescension of the Holy Spirit in coming to dwell in such poor hearts as ours? Jesus dwelt with sinners, but the Holy Ghost dwells in us.

(4) Where the Spirit came, the work was carried on to completion. The work of creation did not end with the first day, but went on till it was finished on the sixth day. God did not say, “I have made the light, and now I will leave the earth as it is”; and when He had begun to divide the waters, and to separate the land from the sea, He did not say, “Now I will have no more to do with the world.” He did not take the newly fashioned earth in His hands, and fling it back into chaos; but He went on with His work until, on the seventh day, when it was completed, He rested from all His work. He will not leave unfinished the work which He has commenced in our souls. Where the Spirit of God has begun to move, He continues to move until the work is done; and He will not fail or turn aside until all is accomplished. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

Burning our hearts out with longing

The daylight passed:

Millions and millions together,

The stars at last!

Purple the woods where the dewdrops,

Pearly and grey,

Wash in the cool from our faces

The flame of day.

Glory and shadow grow one in

The hazel wood:

Laughter and peace in the stillness

Together brood.

Hopes all unearthly are thronging

In hearts of earth:

Tongues of the starlight are calling

Our souls to birth.

Down from the heaven its secrets

Drop one by one;

Where time is for ever beginning

And time is done.

There light eternal is over

Chaos and night:

Singing with dawn lips for ever,

“Let there be light!”

There too for ever in twilight

Time slips away,

Closing in darkness and rapture

Its awful day. 1 [Note: A. E., The Divine Vision, 20.]

II

Light out of Darkness

i. Darkness

“Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The deep (Heb. tehôm) is not here what the deep would denote to us, i.e. the sea, but the primitive undivided waters, the huge watery mass which the writer conceived as enveloping the chaotic earth. Milton ( Paradise Lost, vii. 276 ff.) gives an excellent paraphrase—

The Earth was formed, but, in the womb as yet

Of waters, embryon, immature, involved,

Appeared not; over all the face of Earth

Main ocean flowed.

The darkness which was upon the face of the deep is a type of the natural darkness of the fallen intellect that is ignorant of God, and has not the light of faith. “Behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people.” Very often in Holy Scripture darkness is the symbol of sin, and the state of those who are separated from God. Satan is the prince of “the power of darkness,” while in God there “is no darkness at all.”

The intermixture in our life of the material and the spiritual has no more striking illustration than in the influence upon us of darkness. The “power of darkness” is a real power, and that apart from any theological considerations. The revolution of this planet on its axis, which for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four shuts from us the light of day, has had in every age the profoundest effect on man’s inner states. It has told enormously on his religion. It has created a vocabulary—a very sinister one. It lies at the origin of fear. It binds the reason and sets loose the Imagination. We are not the same at midnight as at midday. The child mind, and the savage mind, which is so closely akin to it, are reawakened in us. “I do not believe in ghosts,” said Fontenelle, “but I am afraid of them.” We can all feel with him there. 1 [Note: J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 248.]

ii. God’s Word

1. And God said.—This gives the keynote to the narrative, the burden ten times repeated, of this magnificent poem. To say is both to think and to will. In this speaking of God there is both the legislative power of His intelligence, and the executive power of His will; this one word dispels all notion of blind matter, and of brute fatalism; it reveals an enlightened Power, an intelligent and benevolent Thought, underlying all that is.

Says Carlyle: “Man is properly an incarnated word; the word that he speaks is the man himself.” In like manner, and with still more truth, might it be said of God that His Word is Himself; only John’s assertion is not that the Word is God, but that it was God, implying is of course. 2 [Note: J. W., Letters of Yesterday, 48.]

2. And at the same time that this word, “And God said,” appears to us as the veritable truth of things, it also reveals to us their true value and legitimate use. Beautiful and beneficent as the work may be, its real worth is not in itself; it is in the thought and in the heart of the Author to whom it owes its existence. Whenever we stop short in the work itself, our enjoyment of it can only be superficial, and we are, through our ingratitude, on the road to an idolatry more or less gross. Our enjoyment is pure and perfect only when it results from the contact of our soul with the Author Himself. To form this bond is the true aim of Nature, as well as the proper destination of the life of man.

We read, “God created”; “God made”; “God saw”; “God divided”; “God called”; “God set”; “God blessed”; “God formed”; “God planted”; “God took”; “God commanded”; but the most frequent word here is “God said.” As elsewhere, “He spake and it was done”; “He commanded the light to shine out of darkness”; “the worlds were framed by the Word of God”; “upholding all things by the word of His power.” God’s “word” is then the one medium or link between Him and creation.… The frequency with which it is repeated shows what stress God lays on it.… Between the “nothing” and the “something”—non-existence and creation—there intervenes only the word—it needed only the word, no more; but after that many other agencies come in—second causes, natural laws and processes—all evolving the great original fiat. When the Son of God was here it was thus He acted. He spake: “Lazarus, come forth”; “Young man, arise”; “Damsel, arise”; “Be opened,” and it was done. The Word was still the medium. It is so now. He speaks to us (1) in Creation, (2) in the Word, (3) in Providence, (4) by His Sabbaths. 1 [Note: Horatius Bonar.]

3. This word, “And God said,” further reveals the personality of God. Behind this veil of the visible universe which dazzles me, behind these blind forces of which the play at times terror-strikes me, behind this regularity of seasons and this fixedness of laws, which almost compel me to recognize in all things only the march of a fixed Fate, this word, “And God said,” unveils to me an Arm of might, an Eye which sees, a Heart full of benevolence which is seeking me, a Person who loves me. This ray of light which, as it strikes upon my retina, paints there with perfect accuracy, upon a surface of the size of a centime, a landscape of many miles in extent—He it is who commanded it to shine.

Be kind to our darkness, O Fashioner, dwelling in light,

And feeding the lamps of the sky;

Look down upon this one, and let it be sweet in Thy sight

I pray Thee, to-night.

O watch whom Thou madest to dwell on its soil, Thou Most High!

For this is a world full of sorrow (there may be but one);

Keep watch o’er its dust, else Thy children for aye are undone,

For this is a world where we die. 2 [Note: Jean Ingelow.]

iii. Light

1. Let there be light.—The mention of this Divine command is sufficient to make the reader understand that this element, which was an object of worship to so many Oriental nations, is neither an eternal principle nor the product of blind force, but the work of a free and intelligent will. It is this same thought that is expressed in the division of the work of Creation into six days and six nights. The Creation is thus represented under the image of a week of work, during which an active and intelligent workman pursues his task, through a series of phases, graduated with skill and calculated with certainty, in view of an end definitely conceived from the first.

“Let there be light.” This is at once the motto and the condition of all progress that is worthy of the name. From chaos into order, from slumber into wakefulness, from torpor into the glow of life—yes, and “from strength to strength”; it has been a condition of progress that there should be light. God saw the light, that it was good.

2. The Bible is not a handbook of science, and it matters little to us whether its narrative concerning the origin of the world meets the approval of the learned or not. The truths which it enfolds are such as science can neither displace nor disprove, and which, despite the strides which we have made, are yet as important to mankind as on the day when first they were proclaimed. Over the portal that leads to the sanctuary of Israel’s faith is written, in characters that cannot be effaced, the truth which has been the hope and stay of the human race, the source of all its bliss and inspiration, “the fountain light of all our day, the master light of all our seeing”; it is the truth that there is a central light in the universe, a power that in the past has wrought with wisdom and purposive intelligence the order and harmony of this world of matter, and has shed abroad in the human heart the creative spark which shall some day make aglow this mundane sphere with the warmth and radiance of justice, truth, and loving-kindness. “Let there be light: and there was light.”

Let me recall to your remembrance the solemnity and magnificence with which the power of God in the creation of the universe is depicted; and here I cannot possibly overlook that passage of the sacred historian, which has been so frequently commended, in which the importance of the circumstance and the greatness of the idea (the human mind cannot, indeed, well conceive a greater) are no less remarkable than the expressive brevity and simplicity of the language:—“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The more words you would accumulate upon this thought, the more you would detract from the sublimity of it; for the understanding quickly comprehends the Divine Power from the effect, and perhaps most completely when it is not attempted to be explained; the perception in that case is the more vivid, inasmuch as it seems to proceed from the proper action and energy of the mind itself. The prophets have also depicted the same conception in poetical language, and with no less force and magnificence of expression. The whole creation is summoned forth to celebrate the praise of the Almighty—

Let them praise the name of Jehovah;

For He commanded, and they were created.

And in another place—

For He spoke, and it was;

He commanded, and it stood fast. 1 [Note: R. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 176.]

3. In creation it was the drawing near of God, and the utterance of His word, that dispersed the darkness. In the Incarnation, the Eternal Word, without whom “was not anything made that was made,” drew nigh to the fallen world darkened by sin. He came as the Light of the world, and His coming dispersed the darkness. On the first Christmas night this effect of the Incarnation was symbolized when to the “shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night … the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them.” The message to the shepherds was a call to them and to the world, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.”

Thirty years ago last December I went to a place where they practised cannibalism, and before I left those people to go to New Guinea, and start a mission there, so completely were idolatry and cannibalism swept away that a gentleman who tried to get an idol to bring as a curiosity to this country could not find one; they had all been burnt, or disposed of to other travellers. I saw these people myself leaving their cannibalism and their idolatry, and building themselves tolerably good houses. We had our institutions among them, and I had the honour of training a number of young men as native pastors and pioneer teachers. What is the use of talking to me of failure? I have myself baptized more than five thousand of these young people—does that look like failure? In thirteen or fourteen years these men were building houses and churches for themselves, and attending schools, and, if you have read the mission reports, you will know that some of them have gone forth as teachers to New Guinea, and across New Caledonia, and some of the islands of the New Hebrides. The people, too, have been contributing handsomely to the support of the London Missionary Society, for the purpose of sending the Gospel, as they say, to the people beyond. They have seen what a blessing it has been, and their grand idea is to hand it on to those who are still in heathen darkness. 1 [Note: S. McFarlane.]

Meet is the gift we offer here to Thee,

Father of all, as falls the dewy night;

Thine own most precious gift we bring—the light

Whereby mankind Thy other bounties see.

Thou art the Light indeed; on our dull eyes

And on our inmost souls Thy rays are poured;

To Thee we light our lamps: receive them, Lord,

Filled with the oil of peace and sacrifice. 2 [Note: Prudentius, translated by R. Martin Pope.]

Literature

Banks (L. A.), The World’s Childhood, 13, 25.

Bellew (J. C. M.), Sermons, iii. 241.

Burrell (D. J.), The Golden Passional, 110.

Cohen (O. J.), in Sermons by American Rabbis, 158.

Evans (R. W.), Parochial Sermons, 237.

Fuller (M.), The Lord’s Day, 1.

Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, i. 445.

John (Griffith), A Voice from China, 123.

Jowett (B.), Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, 282.

Kemble (C.), Memorials of a Closed Ministry, i. 1.

M‘Cheyne (R. M.), Additional Remains, 88.

Macleod (D.), Christ and Society, 243.

Matheson (G.), Leaves for Quiet Hours, 159.

Matheson (G.), Voices of the Spirit, 1.

Sale (S.), in Sermons by American Rabbis, 114.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, lv. No. 3134.

Stanley (A. P.), Church Sermons, i. 171.

Thomas (J.), Sermons (Myrtle Street Pulpit), ii. 293.

Thorne (H.), Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 246.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xix. (1881) No. 1166.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxviii. 331 (White); lxv. 145 (Davidson)

Church Pulpit Year Book, vi. (1909) 42.

Verses 26-27

In the Image of God

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.— Genesis 1:26-27.

God made the light and the sun, and they were very good. He made the seas and the mountains, and they were very good. He made the fishes of the water, and the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field—all that wonderful creation of life, which, dull and unbelieving as we are, daily more and more excites our endless wonder and awe and praise—and He saw that it was all very good. He made the herb of the field, everything that grows, everything that lives on the face of this beautiful and glorious world, and all was very good. But of all this good the end was not yet reached. There was still something better to be made. Great lights in the firmament, and stars beyond the reach of the thought of man in the depth of space, sea and mountain, green tree and gay flower, tribes of living creatures in the deep below and the deep above of the sky, four-footed beasts of the earth in their strength and beauty, and worms that live out of the sight and knowledge of all other creatures—these were all as great and marvellous as we know them to be; these were all said to be “very good” by that Voice which had called them into being. Heaven and earth were filled with the majesty of His glory. But they were counted up, one by one, because they were not enough for Him to make, not enough for Him to satisfy Him by their goodness. He reckoned them all up; He pronounced on their excellence. But yet there was something which they had not reached to. There was something still to be made, which should be yet greater, yet more wonderful, yet more good than they. There was a beauty which, with all their beauty, they could not reach; a perfection which, with all their excellence, they were not meant, or made, to share. They declared the glory of God, but not His likeness. They displayed the handiwork of His wisdom, but they shared not in His spirit, His thoughts, His holiness. So, after their great glory, came a yet greater glory. The living soul, like unto God, had not yet been made. Then said God, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” There was made the great step from the wonder and beauty of the world, to the creation of man, with a soul and spirit more wonderful, more excellent, than all the excellence and wonders of the world, because it was made in the likeness of that great and holy and good God who made the world.

1. The foundations of the Biblical doctrine of man are firmly laid, at the very commencement of his history, in the accounts given of his creation. In this narrative of creation in the opening chapter of Genesis we have the noblest of possible utterances regarding man: “God created man in his own image.” The manner in which that declaration is led up to is hardly less remarkable than the utterance itself.

2. The last stage in the work of creation has been reached, and the Creator is about to produce His masterpiece. But, as if to emphasize the importance of this event, and to prepare us for something new and exceptional, the form of representation changes. Hitherto the simple fiat of omnipotence has sufficed—“God said.” Now the Creator—Elohim—is represented as taking counsel with Himself (for no other is mentioned): “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”; and in the next verse, with the employment of the stronger word “created” ( bara), the execution of this purpose is narrated: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

We are told that the language in which that creation is spoken of, i.e. “Let us make man,” implies the doctrine of a plurality of persons in the Deity; in other words, the author, whose avowed object it was to teach the unity of God, so far forgot himself as to teach the contrary. We are told again that we are to found on this account the doctrine of the Trinity. There is no reason, only ignorance, in such a view. The Hebrew when he wanted to speak of anything majestic, spoke in the plural, not in the singular. He spoke of “heavens,” not of heaven. In the same way he spoke of Gods, yet meaning only One. Exactly in the same way the courtesy of modern ages has substituted “you” for “thou”; and here the very form of the writer’s language required that he should put “us” instead of “me” in speaking of the majesty of God. Further, to look for the Trinity here would be utterly to reverse the whole method of God’s revelation. We know from our own lives that God does things gradually, and we conclude that He did the same with His chosen people. He had to teach them first the unity of the Godhead; the nature of that unity was to be taught afterwards. Conceive what would have been the result in an age of polytheism of teaching the Trinity. The doctrine would have inevitably degenerated into tritheism. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]

The subject is the creation of man in the image of God. There are two ways of looking at it: (1) in its entirety, as we look at the white light; and (2) in its component parts, as we see the light in a rainbow. Then we have—

I. The Image of God in itself.

1. Image and Likeness are not distinct.

2. The Image is not Dominion.

3. The Image is of the whole Personality.

4. The Image was not wholly lost.

II. The Parts of the Image.

1. Reason.

2. Self-consciousness.

3. Recognition of Right and Wrong.

4. Communion with God.

5. Capacity for Redemption.

Then will follow two practical conclusions, and the text will be set in its place beside two other texts.

I

The Image of God

1. No distinction is to be made between the words “image” and “likeness.” In patristic and mediæval theology much is made of the circumstance that two words are used, the former being taken to mean man’s natural endowments, the latter a superadded gift of righteousness. But the words are synonymous. “Likeness” is added to “image” for emphasis. The repetition imparts a rhythmic movement to the language, which may be a faint echo of an old hymn on the glory of man, like Psalms 8.

2. The view that the Divine image consists in dominion over the creatures cannot be held without an almost inconceivable weakening of the figure, and is inconsistent with the sequel, where the rule over the creatures is, by a separate benediction, conferred on man, already made in the image of God. The truth is that the image marks the distinction between man and the animals, and so qualifies him for dominion: the latter is the consequence, not the essence, of the Divine image.

With respect to man himself we are told on the one side that he is dust, “formed of the dust of the earth.” The phrase marks our affinity to the lower animals. It is a humbling thing to see how little different the form of man’s skeleton is from that of the lower animals; more humbling still when we compare their inward physiological constitution with our own. Herein man is united to the beasts. But “God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life”: herein he is united to the Deity. The heathen, recognizing in their own way the spiritual in man, tried to bridge over the chasm between it and the earthly by making God more human. The way of revelation, on the contrary, is to make man more godlike, to tell of the Divine idea yet to be realized in his nature. Nor have we far to go to find some of the traces of this Divine in human nature. (1) We are told that God is just and pure and holy. What is the meaning of these words? Speak to the deaf man of hearing, or the blind of light, he knows not what you mean. And so to talk of God as good and just and pure implies that there is goodness, justice, purity, within the mind of man. (2) We find in man the sense of the infinite: just as truly as God is boundless is the soul of man boundless; there is something boundless, infinite, in the sense of justice, in the sense of truth, in the power of self-sacrifice. (3) In man’s creative power there is a resemblance to God. He has filled the world with his creations. It is his special privilege to subdue the power of nature to himself. He has forced the lightning to be his messenger, has put a girdle round the earth, has climbed up to the clouds and penetrated down to the depths of the sea. He has turned the forces of Nature against herself; commanding the winds to help him in braving the sea. And marvellous as is man’s rule over external, dead nature, more marvellous still is his rule over animated nature. To see the trained falcon strike down the quarry at the feet of his master, and come back, when God’s free heaven is before him; to see the hound use his speed in the service of his master, to take a prey not to be given to himself; to see the camel of the desert carrying man through his own home: all these show the creative power of man and his resemblance to God the Creator. Once more, God is a God of order. The universe in which God reigns is a domain in which order reigns from first to last, in which everything has its place, its appointed position; and the law of man’s life, as we have seen, is also order. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]

There is no progress in the world of bees,

However wise and wonderful they are. Lies the bar,

To wider goals, in that tense strife to please

A Sovereign Ruler? Forth from flowers to trees

Their little quest is; not from star to star.

This is not growth; the mighty avatar

Comes not to do his work with such as these. 2 [Note: E. W. Wilcox, Poems of Experience, 72.]

3. The image or likeness is not that of the body only, or of the spirit only, but of the whole personality.

(1) It is perfectly certain that the Hebrews did not suppose this likeness to God to consist in any physical likeness. It is the doctrine of the Old Testament as well as of the New that God is a Spirit; and, although He may have manifested Himself to men in human or angelic shape, He has no visible form, and cannot and must not be represented by any. “Thou sawest no form or similitude” ( Deuteronomy 4:12). The image does not, directly at least, denote external appearance; we must look for the resemblance to God chiefly in man’s spiritual nature and spiritual endowments, in his freedom of will, in his self-consciousness, in his reasoning power, in his sense of that which is above nature, the good, the true, the eternal; in his conscience, which is the voice of God within him; in his capacity for knowing God and holding communion with Him; in a word, in all that allies him to God, al that raises him above sense and time and merely material considerations, all that distinguishes him from, and elevates him above, the brutes. So the writer of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom says: “God created man to be immortal, and made him an image of his own eternity” ( Genesis 2:23).

(2) On the other hand, that this Divine image expresses itself and is seen in man’s outward form cannot be denied. In looks, in bearing, in the conscious dignity of rule and dominion, there is a reflection of this Divine image. St. Augustine tries to make out a trinity in the human body, as before in the human mind, which shall correspond in its measure to the Divine Trinity. Nevertheless, he says modestly: “Let us endeavour to trace in man’s outward form some kind of footstep of the Trinity, not because it is of itself in the same way (as the inward being) the image of God. For the apostle says expressly that it is the inner man that is renewed after the image of Him that created him; and again, ‘Though the outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.’ Let us then look as far as it is possible in that which perisheth for a kind of likeness to the Trinity; and if not one more express, at least one that may be more easily discerned. The very term ‘outward man’ denotes a certain similitude to the inward man.”

(3) But the truth is that we cannot cut man in two. The inward being and the outward have their correspondences and their affinities, and it is of the compound being man, fashioned of the dust of the earth and yet filled with the breath of God, that it is declared that he was created after the image of God. The ground and source of this his prerogative in creation must be sought in the Incarnation. It is this great mystery that lies at the root of man’s being. He is like God, he is created in the image of God, he is, in St. Paul’s words, the “image and glory of God” ( 1 Corinthians 11:7), because the Son of God took man’s nature in the womb of His virgin mother, thereby uniting for ever the manhood and the Godhead in one adorable Person. This was the Divine purpose before the world was, and hence this creation of man was the natural consummation of all God’s work.

4. And it is important to remember that the “image of God,” according to Hebrew thought, was not completely lost, however seriously it may have been impaired, by what is described as the Fall. In Genesis 5:1-3, we read, “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; … and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. And Adam … begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth”—meaning that, as Adam was created in the image of God, Seth inherited that image. After the flood, God is represented as saying to Noah, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” Murder is a kind of sacrilege; to kill a man is to destroy the life of a creature created in the Divine image; the crime is to be punished with death. James, too, in his epistle, insists that the desperate wickedness of the tongue is shown in its reckless disregard of the Divine image in man, “Therewith bless we the Lord and Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made in the image of God”; in cursing men we therefore show a want of reverence for God Himself, in whose image they were made, and are guilty of a certain measure of profanity. The “image of God,” therefore, according to these ancient Scriptures, does not necessarily include moral and spiritual perfection; it must include the possibility of achieving it; it reveals the Divine purpose that man should achieve it; but man, even after he has sinned, still retains the “image of God” in the sense in which it is attributed to him in the Hebrew Scriptures. It belongs to his nature, not to his character. Man was made in the “image of God” because he is a free, intelligent, self-conscious, and moral Personality.

I have been told that there is in existence, amongst the curiosities of a Continental museum, a brick from the walls of ancient Babylon which bears the imprint of one of Babylon’s mighty kings. Right over the centre of the royal cypher is deeply impressed the footprint of one of the pariah dogs which wandered about that ancient city. It was the invariable custom in ancient Babylon to stamp the bricks used for public works with the cypher of the reigning monarch, and while this particular brick was lying in its soft and plastic state, some wandering dog had, apparently accidentally, trodden upon it. Long ages have passed. The king’s image and superscription is visible, but defaced—well-nigh illegible, almost obliterated. The name of that mighty ruler cannot be deciphered; the footprint of the dog is clear, sharply defined, deeply impressed, as on the day on which it was made. So far as any analogy will hold (which is not very far), it is an instructive type of the origin and the dual construction of the human race. Suffer the imagination to wander back—far, far back—into the unthinkable past, and conceive the All-creating Spirit obeying the paramount necessity of His nature, which is Love, and bringing into existence the race called man. As the outbirth of God—as Divine Spirit differentiated into separate entities—man could not be other than deeply impressed, stamped with the cypher of his Father’s image and likeness; the mark of the King is upon him. Obviously, however, he is not yet ready to be built into that great temple of imperishable beauty, fit to be the habitation of the Eternal, which is the ultimate design of God for man. A responsible being, perfected and purified, tested and found faithful, cannot be made; he must grow; and to grow he must be resisted. He must emerge pure from deep contrasts; contradiction being a law of moral life, contradiction must be provided. And therefore, while still in his plastic State, while still in the unhardened, inchoate condition indicated in the sweet pastoral idyll of the Garden of Eden, there comes by the wandering dog—the allegorical impersonation of the animal nature, the embodiment of the lower appetite, the partial will, the Ahriman of the Zoroastrian, the Satan of post-captivity Judaism—and he, metaphorically, puts his foot upon him. Right over the King’s impress goes the mark of the beast, apparently defacing the cypher of the King; in other words, humanity gave heed to the lower psychical suggestion, in opposition to the higher dictate of the Divine Spirit. The partial will severed itself from the universal will, and, as it is expressed in theological language, though not in scriptural language, man fell. 1 [Note: B. Wilberforce.]

Why do I dare love all mankind?

’Tis not because each face, each form

Is comely, for it is not so;

Nor is it that each soul is warm

With any Godlike glow.

Yet there’s no one to whom’s not given

Some little lineament of heaven,

Some partial symbol, at the least, in sign

Of what should be, if it is not, within,

Reminding of the death of sin

And life of the Divine.

There was a time, full well I know,

When I had not yet seen you so;

Time was, when few seemed fair;

But now, as through the streets I go,

There seems no face so shapeless, so

Forlorn, but that there’s something there

That, like the heavens, doth declare

The glory of the great All-Fair;

And so mine own each one I call;

And so I dare to love you all. 1 [Note: H. S. Sutton.]

II

The Parts of the Image

i. Reason

1. In speaking of man as being created in the image of God, one must speak first of the intellectual powers with which man has been endowed. Nothing can surprise us more than the marvellous results of human science, the power which mankind have exhibited in scanning the works of God, reducing them to law, detecting the hidden harmony in the apparent confusion of creation, demonstrating the fine adjustment and delicate construction of the material universe: and if the wisdom and power of God occupy the first place in the mind of one who contemplates the heavens and the earth, certainly the second place must be reserved for admiration of the wonderful mind with which man has been endowed, the powers of which enable him thus to study the works of God.

2. As regards his intellectual powers, consider that man is, like God, a creator. Works of Art, whether useful or ornamental, are, and are often called, creations. How manifold are the new discoveries, the new inventions, which man draws forth, year after year, from his creative genius—the timepiece, the microscope, the steamship, the steam-carriage, the sun-picture, the electric telegraph! All these things originally lay wrapped up in the human brain, and are its offspring. Look at the whole fabric of civilization, which is built up by the several arts. What a creation it is, how curious, how varied, how wonderful in all its districts! Just as God has His universe, in which are mirrored the eternal, archetypal Ideas of the Divine Mind, so this civilization is Man’s universe, the aggregate product of his intelligence and activity. It may possibly suggest itself here that some of the lower animals are producers no less than man. And so they are, in virtue of the instinct with which the Almighty has endowed them. The bird is the artisan of her nest, the bee of his cell, the beaver of his hut. But they are artisans only, working by a rule furnished to them, not architects, designing out of their own mental resources. They are producers only, not creators; they never make a variation, in the way of improvement, on foregone productions; and we argue conclusively that because they do not make it, they can never make it. Instinct dictates to them, as they work, “line upon line, precept upon precept”; but there is no single instance of their rising above this level—of their speculating upon an original design, and contriving the means whereby it may be carried into effect. But the creative faculty of man is still more evident in the ornamental arts, because here, more obviously than in the useful, man works according to no preconceived method or imposed condition, but throws out of his brain that which is new and original. A new melody, a new drama, a new picture, a new poem, are they not all (some more, some less, in proportion to the originality of the conception which is in them) creations? Is not this the very meaning of the word “poem,” in the language from which it is drawn—a thing made, a piece of workmanship? So that, in respect of the rich and varied developments of the human mind in the different forms of Art, we need not hesitate to call man a creator. And this is the first aspect under which God is presented to us in Holy Scripture; “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

A thing should be denominated from its noblest attribute, as man from reason, not from sense or from anything else less noble. So when we say, “Man lives,” it ought to be interpreted, “Man makes use of his reason,” which is the special life of man, and the actualization of his noblest part. Consequently he who abandons the use of his reason, and lives by his senses only, leads the life not of a man, but of an animal; as the most excellent Boëthius puts it, he lives the life of an ass. And this I hold to be quite right, because thought is the peculiar act of reason, and animals do not think, because they are not endued with reason. And when I speak of animals, I do not refer to the lower animals only, but I mean to include also those who in outward appearance are men, but spiritually are no better than sheep, or any other equally contemptible brute. 1 [Note: Dante. Conv. ii. 8 (trans. by Paget Toynbee).]

ii. Self-consciousness

Man is not only conscious, but also self -conscious. He can turn his mind back in reflection on himself; can apprehend himself; can speak of himself as “I.” This consciousness of self is an attribute of personality which constitutes a difference, not in degree, but in kind, between the human and the merely animal. No brute has this power. None, however elevated in the scale of power, can properly be spoken of as a person. The sanctity that surrounds personality does not attach to it.

Man’s greatest possibility lies in the knowledge of himself. Most people know more of minerals than of men; more about training horses than children. The day is coming when the education of a child will begin at birth; when mothers, who, because of their opportunities, ought to be better psychologists than any university professor, will become not only trained scientific observers of mental phenomena, but directors of it. Even puppies have been so trained that they could surpass many artists in their discrimination between colours, and by this training the brain has been observed to grow enormously. It looks as if man might not only develop the brain he has, but add to it and build up a new brain—and thus practically create a new human race. I hope this may prove true. Man is a spirit, child of the Infinite Spirit, capable of using the best physical machinery with ease; better machinery than he now has. 1 [Note: C. M. Cobern.]

iii. Recognition of Right and Wrong

The great distinction between right and wrong belongs to man alone. An animal may be taught that it is not to do certain things, but it is because these things are contrary to its master’s wish, not because they are wrong. Some persons have endeavoured to make out that the distinction between right and wrong on the part of ourselves is quite arbitrary, that we call that right which we find on the whole to be advantageous, and that wrong which on the whole tends to mischief; but the conscience of mankind is against this scheme of philosophy. That the wickedness of mankind has made fearful confusion between right and wrong, and that men very often by their conduct appear to approve of that which they ought not to approve, is very true; and that men may fall, by a course of vice, into such a condition that their moral sense is fearfully blunted, is also true: but this does not prove the absence of a sense of right and wrong from a healthy mind, any more than the case of ever so many blind men would prove that there is no such thing as sight. No—the general conscience of mankind admits the truth which is assumed in Scripture, namely, that man, however far gone from original righteousness, does nevertheless recognize the excellence of what is good, that he delights in the law of God after the inward man, even though he may find another law in his members bringing him into captivity. This sense of what is right and good, which existed in man in his state of purity, and which has survived the fall and forms the very foundation upon which we can build hopes of his restoration to the favour of God, is a considerable portion of that which is described as God’s image in which man was created.

Darwin opens his chapter on the moral sense with this acknowledgment: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that, of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense is summed up in that short but imperious word, ‘ought,’ so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.” 1 [Note: G. E. Weeks.]

What! will I ca’ a man my superior, because he’s cleverer than mysel’? Will I boo down to a bit o’ brains, ony mair than to a stock or a stane? Let a man prove himsel’ better than me—honester, humbler, kinder, wi’ mair sense o’ the duty o’ man, an’ the weakness o’ man—an’ that man I’II acknowledge—that man’s my king, my leader, though he war as stupid as Eppe Dalgleish, that couldna count five on her fingers, and yet keepit her drucken father by her ain hands’ labour for twenty-three yeers. 2 [Note: Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke.]

Devoid of the very taint of ambition, Dean Church obtained a singular authority, which was accepted without cavil or debate. Such an authority was a witness to the force and beauty of high moral character. It testified to the supremacy which belongs, of right and of necessity, to conscience. His special gifts would, under all conditions, have played a marked part; but they do not account for the impressive sway exercised over such multitudes by his personality. 3 [Note: Life and Letters of Dean Church, 233.]

God hath no shape, nor can the artist’s hands

His figure frame in shining gold or wood,

God’s holy image—God-sent—only stands

Within the bosoms of the wise and good. 1 [Note: Statius, translated by W. E. A. Axon.]

iv. Communion with God

The sense of right and wrong may be regarded as part of that nature originally imparted to man, by which he was fitted to hold communion with God. God called other creatures into existence by His word, and so made them live; but man He inspired with His own breath, and so gave him a portion of His own Divine life. And corresponding to this difference of beginning was the after history. God blessed the living creatures which He had made, pronounced them very good, and bade them increase and multiply; but with man He held communion. “They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” ( Genesis 3:8).

To me, the verse has, and can have, no other signification than this—that the soul of man is a mirror of the mind of God. A mirror, dark, distorted, broken—use what blameful names you please of its State—yet in the main, a true mirror, out of which alone, and by which alone, we can know anything of God at all.

“How?” the reader, perhaps, answers indignantly. “I know the nature of God by revelation, not by looking into myself.”

Revelation to what? To a nature incapable of receiving truth? That cannot be; for only to a nature capable of truth, desirous of it, distinguishing it, feeding upon it, revelation is possible. To a being undesirous of it, and hating it, revelation is impossible. There can be none to a brute, or fiend. In so far, therefore, as you love truth, and live therein, in so far revelation can exist for you;—and in so far, your mind is the image of God’s.

But consider, further, not only to what, but by what, is the revelation. By sight? or word? If by sight, then to eyes which see justly. Otherwise, no sight would be revelation. So far, then, as your sight is just, it is the image of God’s sight.

If by words—how do you know their meanings? Here is a short piece of precious word revelation, for instance—“God is love.”

Love! yes. But what is that? The revelation does not tell you that, I think. Look into the mirror and you will see. Out of your own heart, you may know what love is. In no other possible way—by no other help or sign. All the words and sounds ever uttered, all the revelations of cloud, or flame, or crystal, are utterly powerless. They cannot tell you, in the smallest point, what love means. Only the broken mirror can.

Here is more revelation. “God is just!” Just! What is that? The revelation cannot help you to discover. You say it is dealing equitably or equally. But how do you discern the equality? Not by inequality of mind; not by a mind incapable of weighing, judging, or distributing. If the lengths seem unequal in the broken mirror, for you they are unequal; but if they seem equal, then the mirror is true. So far as you recognize equality, and your conscience tells you what is just, so far your mind is the image of God’s; and so far as you do not discern this nature of justice or equality, the words, “God is just,” bring no revelation to you. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. i. §§ 11–13.]

I have often imagined to myself the large joy which must have filled the mind of Aristarchus of Samos when the true conception of the solar system first dawned upon him, unsupported though it was by any of the mathematical demonstrations which have since convinced all educated men of its truth, and constraining belief solely on the ground of its own simple and beautiful order. I could suppose such a belief very strong, and almost taking such a form as this:—It is so harmonious, so self-consistent, that it ought to be so, therefore it must be so. And surely this is nothing more than might be looked for in regard to spiritual realities. If man is created for fellowship with God there must exist within him, notwithstanding all the ravages of sin, capacities which will recognize the light and life of eternal truth when it is brought close to him. Without such capacities revelation would in fact be impossible. 2 [Note: Thomas Erskine of Linlathen.]

A fire-mist and a planet,

A crystal and a cell,

A jelly-fish and a saurian,

And caves where the cave-men dwell.

Then a sense of law and beauty,

And a face turned from the clod,—

Some call it evolution,

And others call it God.

Like tides on a crescent seabeach,

When the moon is new and thin,

Into our hearts high yearnings

Come welling and surging in;

Come from the mystic ocean,

Whose rim no foot has trod.—

Some of us call it longing,

And others call it God.

v. Capacity for Redemption

The possibility of redemption after man had sinned is as great a mark as any of the image of God impressed upon him. When man has fallen he is not left to himself, as one whose fall is a trifling matter in the great economy of God’s creation. It was because His own image had been impressed on man that God undertook to redeem him; it was because that image, though defaced, had not been wholly destroyed, that such redemption was possible. Yes—thanks to God—we are in some sense in His image still; much as we incline to sin, yet we feel in our hearts and consciences that sin is death and that holiness is life. Much as we swerve from the ways of God, yet our consciences still tell us that those ways are ways of pleasantness and paths of peace; foolishly as we have behaved by seeking happiness in breaking God’s commands, yet our hearts testify to our folly and our better judgment condemns us. Here then are the traces of God’s image still, and because these traces remain, therefore there is hope for us in our fallen condition. God will yet return and build up His Tabernacle which has been thrown down; and it may be that the glory of the latter house will through His infinite mercy be even greater than that of the first.

There is a story in English history of a child of one of our noble houses who, in the last century, was stolen from his house by a sweep. The parents spared no expense or trouble in their search for him, but in vain. A few years later the lad happened to be sent by the master into whose hands he had then passed to sweep the chimneys in the very house from which he had been stolen while too young to remember it. The little fellow had been sweeping the chimney of one of the bedrooms, and fatigued with the exhausting labour to which so many lads, by the cruel custom of those times, were bound, he quite forgot where he was, and flinging himself upon the clean bed dropped off to sleep. The lady of the house happened to enter the room. At first she looked in disgust and anger at the filthy black object that was soiling her counterpane. But all at once something in the expression of the little dirty face, or some familiar pose of the languid limbs, drew her nearer with a sudden inspiration, and in a moment she had clasped once more in her motherly arms her long-lost boy. 1 [Note: H. W. Horwill.]

Travellers to the islands of the South Seas reported—that is, such of them as came back—that the natives were fierce and cannibal, bearing the brand of savagery even upon their faces. But Calvert and Paton went there, and proved that this savage countenance was only a palimpsest scrawled by the Devil over a manuscript of the Divine finger. To us the face of a Chinaman is dull and impassive. It awakens no interest; it stirs no affection. Then why have our friends Pollard and Dymond gone out to Yunnan? Because the Spirit of God has opened their eyes, so that behind all that stolid exterior they can see a soul capable of infinite possibilities of godlike nobility, just as the genius of the great sculptor could see an angel in the shapeless block of marble. And even already their inspired insight has been verified: they have seen that sluggish nature move; they have watched that hard, emotionless Chinese face as it has glowed with the joy that illumines him who knows that Christ is his Saviour. It is as when in the restoration of an old English church the workmen begin to take down the bare whitewashed wall, and the lath and plaster, as they are stripped off, reveal the hidden beauty of some ancient fresco or reredos. Let a new race of men be discovered to-day, and the true missionary will not hesitate to start for them to-morrow. Before he has heard anything of their history or their customs, before he has learnt a word of their language, there is one thing that he knows about them—that, however deeply they may be sunk in barbarism, they are not so low that the arm of Christ cannot reach them. 1 [Note: H. W. Horwill.]

Count not thyself a starveling soul,

Baulked of the wealth and glow of life,

Destined to grasp, of this rich whole,

Some meagre measure through thy strife.

Ask not of flower or sky or sea

Some gift that in their giving lies;

Their light and wonder are of thee,

Made of thy spirit through thine eyes.

All meaningless the primrose wood,

All messageless the chanting shore,

Hadst thou not in thee gleams of good

And whispers of God’s evermore. 1 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, Poems and Sonnets, 57.]

III

Two Practical Conclusions

There are two facts of immense practical importance for us which follow from the one momentous fact of creation.

1. We owe to God our being and therefore we owe to God ourselves.—What God makes, He has an absolute right to. There is a corresponding fundamental principle in social ethics among men; and in the case of God’s relation to His creatures the principle is yet more fundamental and absolute, even as the case itself is altogether unique. The obedience of nature to the Creator is unvarying, but it is only the blind obedience of necessity. Of the spiritual creation, on the other hand, the obedience must be free, but it is nevertheless as rightfully and absolutely claimed. Indeed, if it were possible, God’s claims on those whom He has made in His own likeness are of even superior Obligation. For the existence which they have received is existence at its highest worth, and to them is given the capacity to recognize and appreciate the paramount sovereignty of creative power as inspired and transfigured by creative love.

The disinclination to be under an obligation is always more or less natural to us, and it is particularly natural to those who are in rude health and high spirits, who have never yet known anything of real sorrow or of acute disease. It grows with that jealous sentiment of personal independence which belongs to an advanced civilization; and if it is distantly allied to one or two of the better elements of human character, it is more closely connected with others that are base and unworthy. The Eastern emperor executed the courtier who, by saving his life, had done him a service which could never be forgotten, perhaps never repaid; but this is only an extreme illustration of what may be found in the feelings of everyday life. A darker example of the same tendency is seen in the case of men who have wished a father in his grave, not on account of any misunderstanding, not from any coarse desire of succeeding to the family property, but because in the father the son saw a person to whom he owed not education merely, but his birth into the world, and felt that so vast a debt made him morally insolvent as long as his creditor lived. If men are capable of such feelings towards each other, we can understand much that characterizes their thought about and action towards God. By His very Existence He seems to inflict upon them a perpetual humiliation. To feel day by day, hour by hour, that there is at any rate One Being before whom they are as nothing; to whom they owe originally, and moment by moment, all that they are and have; who so holds them in His hand that no human parallel can convey a sense of the completeness of their dependence upon His good pleasure; and against whose decisions they have neither plea nor remedy:—this they cannot bear. Yet if God exists, this, and nothing less, is strictly true. 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

2. We can co-operate with God in His creating, preserving, and redeeming activity.—Though now “subject to vanity” and (not as to locality, but as to apprehension) far from his heavenly home, the assurance of man’s ultimate perfection rests upon the impregnable foundation that there is within him a Divine potency. With this Divine potency it is his duty and privilege to co-operate. Man is begotten, but he is being made—

Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape

From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape?

Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages,

Shall not æon after æon pass and touch him into shape?

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade,

Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade,

Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric

Hallelujah to the Maker, “It is finished. Man is made.” 2 [Note: Tennyson, The Making of Man.]

IV

Three Texts

Take these three texts together—

Genesis 1:27.—“God created man in his own image.”

Romans 3:23.—“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

Hebrews 2:9.—“But we see Jesus.”

The first text describes man as he was when he first came from the hand of his Creator; the second describes man as he is, as we know him, in the condition to which sin has reduced him; the third text describes man as he will be when his redemption is complete. He has not yet attained to the supremacy, the character and glory, which God preordained for him, but Christ has attained all these. We see Jesus crowned, and all things put under Him, and we shall be crowned also when our full redemption is reached.

1. In His own Image.—The first great truth of the Bible in regard to man is this, that he was made in the image of God. He is the Creator’s noblest earthly work. Out of the dust of the earth God fashioned man’s body, and then breathed into it the breath of life. Science tells us that man’s body is the culmination and recapitulation of all prior forms of life. But some of its highest and most authoritative teachers acknowledge that man as man is a distinct creation. Wallace, for instance, maintains that “man’s bodily structure is identical with the animal world, and is derived from it of which it is the culmination”; but he declares emphatically that “man’s entire nature and all his faculties, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, are not derived from the lower animals, but have an origin wholly distinct; that the working of material laws does not account for the exaltation of humanity. These are from the spiritual universe, and are the result of fresh and extra manifestations of its power.” Let us try to realize this great truth. The body, the meanest part of man, is the culmination of all created forms of life. But between man and the highest animal there is an infinite difference. How great then is man: “A little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour”! He stands midway between the material and the spiritual, the manifestation of both. Dust and deity. Below, he is related to the earth; above, he is related to the heavens. He claims kinship with seraphs; nay, he is God’s own offspring. In man God objectified Himself, made Himself visible. God intended man to be the incarnation of Himself, for He “made man in His own image.” What a stupendous truth! Herder once exclaimed, “Give me a great truth that I may feed upon it.” Here it is. Man is the incarnation of God.

“I am staring,” said MacIan at last, “at that which shall judge us both.”

“Oh yes,” said Turnbull, in a tired way; “I suppose you mean God.”

“ No, I don‘t,” said MacIan, shaking his head; “I mean him.”

And he pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing, down the road.

“ I mean him. He goes out in the early dawn; he digs or he ploughs a field. Then he comes back and drinks ale, and then he sings a song. All your philosophies and political systems are young compared to him. All your hoary cathedrals—yes, even the Eternal Church on earth is new compared to him. The most mouldering gods in the British Museum are new facts beside him. It is he who in the end shall judge us all I am going to ask him which of us is right.”

“ Ask that intoxicated turnip-eater——”

“ Yes—which of us is right. Oh, you have long words and I have long words; and I talk of every man being the image of God; and you talk of every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to govern. But, if every man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an enlightened citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man one meets is always man. Let us catch him up.” 1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross.]

2. All have sinned.—Man has fallen by disobedience. It was not merely the eating of the fruit; it was the principle involved in the act that proved fatal. What was that—what but rebellion? The conflict of the human will with the Divine. That involved death. By that act the soul of man passed from spiritual health and felt below the fulness of life, and in that sense died. And Adam’s sin was diffusive. He was the first of the race. His sin entered into human nature, and the poison passed from generation to generation with ever deeper taint, so that every life repeats the sin of Adam. There is in it the refusal of the human will to submit to God’s will. Thus it is absolutely and universally true that all have sinned and come short of that life which is the glory of God. We sometimes boast of our ancestors, but if we went far enough back we should have little to boast of. Think of the filth, the falseness, the lust, the cruelty, the drunkenness, the ferocity of the races out of which we have sprung. Look around you! Is not the text true? In many, reason is prostituted to evil. The free choice of man becomes the fixed choice of evil; myriads are the abject slaves of sin. Conscience has been so often disobeyed that its writs no longer run in the life, or it is so seared that men can commit the foulest crimes without blushing. The spirit has been so neglected that no prayer to God ever rises to the lip and no thought of God enters the mind. Think of the crimes which stain the pages of our newspapers, and the numberless crimes known only to God. Even among the most intellectual there are sins of the darkest hue. We have been rudely reminded within the last few years that our boasted æstheticism and culture may be but thin veils which hide vices we fain hoped were dead two thousand years ago. How bitter and ceaseless has been the conflict between the conscience and the will in all of us! How powerful, almost invincible, is the habit of sin! We never realize our bondage until we seek to break away. When the younger son of the parable stood on his father’s doorstep with his patrimony in his pocket and his face toward the far country, at that moment he was a prodigal. We are all prodigals. Though we may never have reached the swine-troughs we have turned our backs on God.

In one of his books, Salted with Fire, George MacDonald tells of a young woman who had been led astray. A warm-hearted minister found her one night on his doorstep, and guessing her story, brought her into his home. His little daughter upstairs with her mother, asked, “Mamma, who is it papa has in the library?” And the wise mother quietly replied, “It is an angel, dear, who has lost her way, and papa is telling her the way back.” 1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Home Ideals, 18.]

3. But we see Jesus.—“Made a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour, all things put in subjection under him.” We see not yet all things put under Him. But we see Jesus. He was crowned. He put all things under Him; and humanity in Him shall yet attain this glorious supremacy. When Jesus trod the pathways of this world, limited as He was by His incarnation, how like a conqueror He worked! He was master of all the forces of Nature. The sea became to Him an unyielding pavement of adamant. When the storm arose He had but to say, “Peace!” and the huge, green, yeasty billows lay down at His feet like sleeping babes. Disease fled at His touch. The dead came forth at His call. And though He yielded to the yoke of death He did it like a conqueror. “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it again.” He died of His own free choice. And on the third morning He broke through the barriers of the tomb and came forth the Victor of the dark realm of Hades. He was crowned also in the moral and spiritual world. He lived a life of perfect victory over sin. All the assaults of sin beat unavailingly against the rock of His pure manhood. He mingled with men of the lowest order, but He remained without spot, and went back to God as pure as when He came from God. Christ was the first crowned of a new race. He made a new beginning, and humanity in Him will reach His level at the last. We see not yet all things put under man, but we see Jesus.

Dr. Barnardo used to illustrate the benefits of his redemptive work by taking a group of “specimens” to the platform with him. Look at that boy there on the right. Poor lad, he has not yet all things put under him; no, indeed, he was picked up only an hour ago off the streets. Dirt is not put under him, and ignorance is not put under him, and vice is not put under him. He is the slave of all three. But look at that lad on the extreme left. Sixteen years of age, clean, well dressed, intelligent, and virtuous. He has been three years in the Home. What a contrast! He has put all things under him. Even so it is with humanity. It is being transformed by Christ. Some are at the base of the ladder of progress and redemption, others are ascending, and others have again entered into the glory of God. Like Christ, humanity shall have all things put under it.

Oh, fairest legend of the years,

With folded wings, go silently!

Oh, flower of knighthood, yield your place

To One who comes from Galilee.

To wounded feet that shrink and bleed,

But press and climb the narrow way,

The same old way our own must step,

For ever, yesterday, to-day.

For soul can be what soul hath been,

And feet can tread where feet have trod,

Enough to know that once the clay

Hath worn the features of the God. 1 [Note: Daily Song, p. 151.]

One of the most precious memories of my life is that of my own father’s victorious death. After thirty years in the ministry he passed away while yet in the prime of manhood. He died of consumption, and at the last was very feeble; so feeble, indeed, that he could scarcely make his voice audible. The last night came. He whispered to my mother again and again, “It is well with me, it is well with me.” Then he said, “When the last moment comes, if I feel I have the victory I will tell you … but if I cannot speak I will raise my hand.” As the grey morning light stole into the death-chamber my mother saw that the end had come. His lips moved. She stooped to catch the words, but there was no sound; his power of articulation had gone. The next moment he seemed to realize it, and, with a smile on his dying face, he lifted his thin, worn hand for a few seconds, and then it fell on the pillow, and he was not, for God had taken him. 1 [Note: J. T. Parr.]

O, may I triumph so,

When all my warfare’s past,

And, dying, find my latest foe

Under my feet at last.

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, iv. 35.

Banks (L. A.), The World’s Childhood, 186.

Baring-Gould (S.), Village Preaching, ii. 9.

Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 41.

Brown (J. B.), The Home Life, 1.

Campbell (R. J.), Thursday Mornings at the City Temple, 1.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 64.

Clifford (J.), Typical Christian Leaders, 215.

Cobern (C. M.), The Stars and the Book, 78.

Coyle (R. F.), The Church and the Times, 175.

Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 170.

Gibbon (J. M.), The Image of God, 1.

Goodwin (H.), Parish Sermons, 5th Ser., 1.

Horwill (H. W.), The Old Gospel in the New Era, 53.

Hughes (D.), The Making of Man_1:9 .

Kingsley (C.), The Gospel of the Pentateuch, 19.

Lefroy (W.), The Immortality of Memory, 229.

Lewis (E. W.), Some Views of Modern Theology, 169.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Genesis.

Matheson (G.), Leaves for Quiet Hours, 37.

Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 215.

Murray (A.), With Christ, 137.

Orr (J.), God’s Image in Man, 34.

Robinson (F.), College and Ordination Addresses, 47, 53.

Selby (T. G.), The Lesson of a Dilemma, 264.

Weeks (G. E.), Fettered Lives, 49.

Woodford (J. R.), Sermons in Various Churches, 33.

Christian Age, xxv. 212 (Vaughan).

Christian World Pulpit, xvi. 218 (Williams); xviii. 17 (Brooke); xix. 369 (Vaughan); l. 419 (Bliss); lvi. 4 (Parr).

Churchman’s Pulpit (Trinity Sunday), ix. 272 (Goodwin).

Expositor, 4th Ser., iii. 125 (Perowne).

Expository Times, iii. 410 (Pinches); x. 72.

Preacher’s Magazine for 1891, 145, 193 (Selby).

Treasury (New York), xiii. 196.