himself, in spirit, will, and thought, is capable of reflecting the character of his Maker; and as perfect man in spirit, will, and thought, he was of necessity made in the image of God, and could have had no moral likeness to any being if not to God, who made him conscious of creative intelligence, truth, and goodness, as eternal qualities. The ape-likeness dies; the moral image is immortal.

We will, therefore, take it for granted that we are beings not to be measured by callipers and the inches on a tailor's yard. Without this concession we shall be in awful danger of misunderstanding those grand facts with which we are all familiar in the history of man; the burthen of the mystery of all this unintelligible world' will become intolerable, and science, logic, and philosophy will prove but miserable aids to reflection, and we shall have nothing to lead us in thought back to the bosom of our Maker, as the Being whose thought produced us, and who is revealing Himself in spirit to us by our consciousness. An act of consciousness is the condition of all knowledge; I cannot therefore define it to you,' says Sir W. Hamilton. know-I desire-I feel. What is it that is common to all these? Knowing, and desiring, and feeling are not the same, and may be distinguished. But they all agree in one fundamental condition. Can I know without knowing that I know.? Can I desire without knowing that I desire? Can I feel without knowing that I feel? This is impossible. Now, this knowing that I know, or desire, or feel--this common condition

'I

.of self-knowledge-is precisely what is denominated self-consciousness.' Demonstrate that an instinctive act is accompanied by an identical knowledge with our consciousness, and then, and not till then, it will be shown that the human mind is identical in kind with that of the animal.

If

We will not deem it, then, all conjecture and assumption to believe with Tennyson that a man is not as God, but then most God-like being most a man.'* this be not true, man's highest aspirations are but the height of his folly, and all that has ever been called Divine teaching is but delusion, then most deceptive when most sublimely beautiful and truthlike to our minds. What kindles the desire of true love and knowledge in us, but the Spirit to which by true love and knowledge we are conformed? If the nature of man is not best known by studying the best human characters as well as the best specimens of human bodies, we are thrown out from all analogy; and our reasoning will find no real basis, scientific or philosophic, to rest upon. Even on the scientific principle, man's relation to his Maker is not to be overlooked, and self-consciousness and conscience have to be accounted for as facts. The conscience certainly has a method of determining congruities in relation to man's moral nature, and the faith that grows out of moral conviction has a logic of its own, without the exercise of which it is quite a question

*The Buddhists have the same sentiment: 'Man's mind is divine but most divine when nearest no-thing,'-or God as distinct from matter. Hardy's Eastern Monachism.

whether the most scientific mind would see how to look a fact fairly in the face, or discern anything of the true relation of objects, or what to look for even in the natural world. Therefore it is no wonder that, dealing too exclusively with physical forms, elements, and forces, the realities of mental being should so often be blunderingly adverted to in the writings of scientific speculatists. They are apt to forget both beginnings and ends, or to imagine beginnings without causes and ends without consequences, simply because science as such is engaged with phenomena, or appearances, superficies and sensible qualities, and not with the reasons why things exist in their differences and relations.

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CHAPTER XII.

THE FIRST MAN A DIVINE IDEA.

CAN it be that the lowest form of man was the first? Can that have been the direct realisation, the nearest approximation of the Divine idea of a man? Can we conceive a higher style of man than He who made man? But it will be said all we know of man was included in the origin of man, and worked out by evolution, development, or natural selection: so that the Divine idea is not in the first but in the whole. A large idea, truly, but suggestive of large questions. Possibly we may draw conclusions from the doubtful data of flint axes in drift and peat bog, with other assumed evidences of man's connection with inferior and extinct races, mere homo-pithecoids, utterly at variance with the 'inexorable logic' of indisputable facts of another kind. Science is at present but a mental drift not yet settled into its ultimate deposit, but driven onwards still by a flood of conflicting forces tending to drift all minds into the indefinite. There is, however, nothing yet advanced which compels us to acknowledge that man was not created in perfect correspondence with his Maker. By holding to that belief, we shall be in possession of a

L

power capable of lifting our minds above the necessity of looking into the laws of nature for the cause and origin of man, or imagining for a moment the possibility that the modes of nature's working will account for nature's own existence as it is, including man.

Science has not accounted for any one thing yet, and the science of one age is the nonsense of the next. Our own existence itself is an awful subject of thought. It is terrible as a thing to be accounted for, and yet so utterly beyond the grasp of our faculties that any attempt to explain its origin overpowers us. We should lose our reason or our life under the weight of the consciousness of Being which was before any conceivable beginning, if in mercy we were not constituted to rest satisfied in the word 'God.' We are crushed with a sense that what to our logic is impossible is yet to our reason true. We are obliged to talk and think of objects of sense, in order to divert our minds from the thought of a Being without origin. But to account for man we must believe in God, as not only man's Maker, but as the Revealer of Himself to man; for every man capable of reasoning believes in his own creation, and is endowed with a consciousness that the desire and the capacity to know more of Him who made man is a warrant for the hope and the effort to know more.

Reason, as we have said, in these days compels all men in their senses to confess that one article of faith which is the basis of all truth and true faith; at least, we know no scientific or philosophic work now read in