Divine productions. If man spreads sails upon the waters, so did the nautilus before him. If the mariner guides his vessel with a helm, it was by a similar provision that the fish could wind and wander through his ocean home. If he feathers his oar, a similar operation is performed by the web-footed birds. If the fisherman spreads a net, so did the spider before him; if he uses a float, the seaweed is buoyed up upon the waters by a far more ingenious contrivance. Every human artist has had his predecessor among the tribes of the animal creation. If man weaves, there are insects that fashion a web far finer than his own. One great engineer took his happiest idea from a tree; another his from a lily. When the human mechanician would economize his materials, and combine lightness with strength, he makes a hollow tube; but the principle was acted upon before he was created to observe it, in the bones of animals. Is man a chemist? All the material universe is Nature's laboratory. Is man a geometer? The bee constructs his cell on principles that are strictly geometrical.*

* These observations are taken, with hardly any alteration, from the writings of Hugh Miller and Drs. Dickie and M'Cosh. See also "Pope's Essay on Man" :—

"Who taught the nations of the field and wood
To shun their poison and to choose their food?
Prescient the tides or tempest to withstand,
Build on the wave or arch beneath the sand.

But these resemblances are confined, for the most part, to mechanical contrivances; and are selected, not because they are the most satisfactory, but because they are perhaps the most intelligible. We argue that the same intellectual likeness can be traced in another set of faculties than those which these contrivances imply. Man is gifted with a desire and a power to arrange and classify; and philosophers have divided the living creation into classes, orders, genera, and species. But it would seem that the most distinguished amongst these students of nature have adopted at last the very arrangement which science is now proving that God must have adopted in the creation.* Man is gifted with a natural perception of the beautiful; hence his admiration of certain forms, colours, and harmonies. But the most perfect models of beauty are supplied in the works of Nature. We doubt not that the finest of all human forms of architecture will be acknowledged at last to be that which most resembles the Divine; while of this there are numberless specimens in those ornamental structures -mineral, vegetable, and animal-which adorn this,

Thus, then, to man the voice of Nature spake-
'Go, from the creatures thy instruction take;
Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield,
Learn from the beasts the physic of the field,
Thy arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave,
Learn of the little nautilus to sail,

Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.'

* See "Testimony of the Rocks," lecture 1.

God's own and God's beautiful world. Then, as for colours

:

"Who can paint

Like Nature? Can imagination boast,
Amid its gay creation, hues like hers?"

Again man is endowed with a sense of melody; and Nature, through her many and melodious tongues, makes creation musical with her harmonies.

The main object of all these remarks is to show that there are grounds, independently of Scripture, for believing that man might have been made in the image of God; and thus to remove, or help to remove, such antecedent reluctance as the mere speculations of modern science may create in the mind either of an objector to Christianity or a doubting believer in its truth, to receive the Scriptural account of the origin of man. We must not, then, beg the question by assuming that the Scriptures are a Divine composition, and then referring to the magnificent poetry of Isaiah and St. John to prove that the same feeling of the beautiful, of which we discover so many indications in the works of God, may be discovered also in His words-those burning words in which prophets, whose mouths were touched and purified with "a live coal from off the altar," uttered His messages and embodied His inspirations. But we can logically appeal to the Christian, and ask whether that "vision and faculty divine"-which is the very name that man has given to the source of his own loftiest poetry-is not found in a perfection which the noblest of all human bards could but humbly imitate, in the glowing language of Isaiah and the sublime visions of the Apocalypse?

Enough, however, has been said to show that, whether we consider man as a mechanician, a geometer, a chemist, a classifier, an architect, a painter, a decorative designer -or a lover of the beautiful in form, in colour, in sound, or even it may be in poetical conception-Nature, and therefore Nature's God, has furnished him on the whole with models of which his grandest achievements are but the happiest imitations; and that, intellectually, he is an humble copyist of the works of that Infinite Intelligence whom, according to Scripture, he was created to resemble. The results at which he arrives, though immeasurably inferior in degree, are exactly the same in kind as those of the great Original, whom we contend that, in this respect, he still, though most imperfectly, images. For we argue that this feature of the glorious likeness in which man was made at first is not, or not wholly, lost; but remains as an evidence, to some extent at least, that the origin which the Bible ascribes to his race is the true source of all the intellectual dignity that can be reached by the wisest and most gifted of his kind.

But the Scriptural doctrines once admitted-that man was created in the image of Christ-that Christ is Creator, and that this Creator was in due time to be incarnate-give to this argument some force and consistency; for they show that this intellectual correspondence between creature and Creator, if it does not explain, is at least in thorough harmony with the fact that (as hinted already) the merely human being was made in the likeness of that Divinely human being who was also his Redeemer.

Waiving this, however, for the present, the foregoing

remarks fortify the presumptions already suggested, independently of Scripture-that man was intended for some such place of dignity and importance among the works of the Creator as accords with the Scriptural account of his origin, and renders the statement that he was made in the image of his Maker far (to say the least of it) from incredible. For if, on the supposition of a personal Creator, it be admitted that man is the noblest of all the tenantry of the earth-that that earth has undergone a long series of preparations and changes, extending over vast cycles of time, all it would seem chiefly for his benefit that he is the great antitypal existence which was shadowed forth in the earliest of all created organisms-that the Creator's aim in forming the earth, causing it to undergo so many revolutions, and peopling it with the tribes of beings by whom, prior to man, it has been tenanted, was to introduce man upon the globeand that man himself is the great end to which all the animal creation has tended from the beginning, then the fact that we can trace a resemblance in many striking particulars between the intellectual nature of himself and his Creator, and the fact (to be noticed hereafter) that there are even yet traces in man (fallen though he be) of a moral resemblance also, all this will surely be evidence that it ought to be no mere query-no simple conjecture, nor even plausible hypothesis however ingenious-that should weaken our belief in the truth of the statement contained in that Book which has so many credentials of its origin from heaven-that in the beginning God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."