Holy Child who should teach and illustrate the truth of love and the love of truth, and make it possible for the spirit of holiness proceeding from the Father and the Son, the human and the divine, to enter the human heart through Faith, and thus renew all human hearts, in that moral and authoritative image and representative of God which corruption of the will alone destroys. Nor are we at liberty to separate what God has joined together through the union of the first parents of mankind in innocence, with the restoration of our fallen humanity, by the birth of the Perfect Man out of the fallen flesh, as the fulfiller of all righteousness for us and in us. It is thus the man Immanuel claims to represent in His own person all the offspring of the first mother, as redeemed in Him who destroyed death by dying and obtained immortality for us.

And was there not unconscious prophecy of this fuller fellowship with God through woman in the aspirations of the first man for fit companionship? His demands upon Creative Power, Wisdom, Love, in thought and language, were but as foresights of what he would be in union with another having nature like his own, responsive, correspondent, the same yet other, in soul alike but different, and with both the likeness and the difference enlarging and advancing through the revelations of truth and love in all humanity. Thus man found the complement and reflex of his own being in woman. The gift of speech and thought to man was a promise fulfilled in woman; for is not that gift, the utterance of faith, love, reason, a demand, effectual as a righteous

prayer, for the further gift of whatever faith, love, reason, may require for their completion?

Thus, perfect woman must have, in fact, been brought as if by the Creator's hand into the presence of perfect man, that he might learn directly all the Divinity imaged in her being, that he might know himself also as God's likeness, and that each in the other might perceive that God is Love. Is there a child that thinks in words, who knows no better than to interpret by the letter' the story of the making of woman out of man, or to think of it as any other than a mode of expressing the moral as well as the miracle of man's unity of existence with the woman's? And this, too, without in thought refusing to see the possibility of the figure being also the fact, for the means and the mode of the Omnipotent in creation are but immediate acts of His will, and to form another human being from a part of man is as divine an act as to breathe into the dust and thus make man.

With the creation of woman, then, human creation was made perfect, not merely because man alone would remain alone, housed in a dream at distance from all kind,' but because with woman came all the after possibilities through womanhood, all the mysterious sublimities of sin and suffering, with all those results that brought heaven into unison with humanity. The human motherhood has brought forth for death, and is constantly replacing the dead by the living, but all the dead are alive unto God, for He is not God to the dead but the living.

But how was man to recognise woman as one in substance and nature with himself, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh, unless by something in the mode and manner of her creation that should demonstrate to his soul that her life was but as an extension of his own, and that she was essentially and for ever one with him in the heritage of immortal life and love? The man who dreams by day or night with any lower sense of feminine humanity and loveliness than that which the majestic masculine soul of the grand Puritan, Milton, puts in poetic thought before us, in the imagined first ideas of woman as possessed by the first man, but proves himself degraded below the proper standard of a man.

Greatness of mind, and nobleness, their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic placed.

What higher, in her society, thou find'st
Attractive, human, rational, love still,

said the admonitory angel, whom Milton* made to talk a little too much theology perhaps, but whose philosophy with Adam might be studied with advantage in these days.

And the man or the woman that loves anything less than the Divine image stamped upon the outward form and the inward character, or believed to be, is in love with a demon, assuming a delusive and destructive loveliness, but whose beauty and whose breath will

* Paradise Lost, book viii.

blight the loving soul with a living death, the very power and presence of personified perdition.

The thoughts and heart enlarges; hath his seat

In reason and is judicious; is the scale

By which to heavenly love thou mayst ascend,

Not sunk in carnal pleasure.

MILTON.

296

CHAPTER XXIV.

WORK, DOMINION, WORSHIP.

WORK for man and woman is the first essential of their happiness, since without the active employment of their mental and manual powers the faculties themselves lie dormant, for the will that ends in wishing without effort is a force that runs to waste.

'Genuine WORK alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and WorldBuilder himself.'*

Man hath his daily work of body or mind
Appointed, which declares his dignity,
And the regard of Heaven on all his ways.

Appointed work means responsibility as well as enjoyment. It requires intention to fulfil duty. It is the carrying out of a design in co-operation with God, who shows man what he should do while giving the knowledge and the power to do. Therefore he works best who worships while he works and feels that God works with him. By work with thought every man can create a new world for himself, by bringing into new combi

* Carlyle.

† Paradise Lost, iv.