LECTURE VIII.

MAN, THE IMAGE OF GOD.

BY REV. HENRY GILES.

"FOR A MAN INDEED OUGHT NOT TO COVER HIS HEAD, FORASMUCH AS HE IS THE IMAGE AND GLORY OF GOD."-1 Cor. xi. 7.

"AND WHEN HE CAME TO HIMSELF, HE SAID-HOW MANY HIRED SERVANTS OF MY FATHER'S HAVE BREAD ENOUGH AND TO SPARE, AND I PERISH WITH HUNGER. I WILL ARISE, AND GO TO MY FATHER, AND WILL SAY UNTO HIM,-FATHER, I HAVE SINNED AGAINST HEAVEN AND BEFORE THEE, AND AM NO MORE WORTHY TO BE CALLED THY SON; MAKE ME AS ONE OF THY HIRED SERVANTS."-Luke xv. 17-19.

WE are often told that man was originally created in the image of his Maker; and, in the same connection, we are told that, in his fall, he lost it. If this be true, we might expect that Scripture writers, in alluding to fallen man, would never ascribe to him so holy a resemblance. Paul, however, does it in one of the texts I have quoted; and Paul is not alone in this ascription. In an ordinance to Noah, immediately after the deluge, we find the same truth made the foundation of a most solemn injunction. "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man."* Had the resemblance of God been effaced from the soul of man in the fall of Adam, there had been in this ordinance neither meaning nor solemnity. Since, therefore, the sacred writer uses the fact of man's likeness to God to stamp deeper guilt on the crime of murder;

Gen. ix. 6.

since, moreover, that fact is alleged after the narration of the fall, we are justified by Scripture in claiming this high and glorious distinction for our universal nature.

I have quoted the second text, because the principle implied in it is identical with that which I stand here to maintain, namely, that sin is not of our nature, but against it; that it is not consistent with it, but contradictory to it; that to be sinful, is not to be natural, but unnatural. Sin, properly speaking, is moral delirium; and the progress towards that last paroxysm which, by revulsion, arouses the soul from its madness, is eloquently symbolised in the parable from which my second text is taken. Having tried all that sin could offer him; having sunk to the very husks of carnal appetites, and vainly sought thus to satisfy the hunger of an immortal soul, wearied, disappointed, and disgusted; satiated, but not satisfied, the prodigal arises from his torpor; he awakens from his wildering dream; the delirium that so long beset him is dispersed; with a calm and clear brain he finds himself in open day-light, and discerns the empty and unsubstantial vanities for which, in a false hope, he spent his labour and his strength, to reap at last, in the bitterness of a repentant heart, nothing but grief, tribulation, and anguish.

Sin is not a following of nature, but a violence on it; not conformity, but contradiction to it. And so, as when returning life beats in the palsied heart, or the dawn of reason bursts again on the madman's brain, the prodigal is said "to come to himself;" when the spirit of moral renovation opens on him with compunctuous visitings of nature, and reveals to him a full sense of his condition. In his guilt he was at variance with all the moral instincts of humanity; and, in the sorrow of repentance, he needed as much to be at peace with himself as with his father. It is universally thus. God has established a certain order and harmony in our nature, appointed to each faculty a place and a pur

pose; and, in disturbing this arrangement, we become transgressors. We cannot sin against God without also sinning against our own souls, for in them is the primitive revelation of God; and in thus sinning against our own souls, we may practically resist all the divine attributes of which our weak faculties are the dim reflection; God's wisdom in the abuse of our intellect; his greatness in the loss of our moral dignity; his goodness in the destruction of our charities; his purity in the corruption of our hearts. Unitarians are accused of making sin a light matter. We protest against the justice of the accusation. We hold sin to be the greatest of evils, and the most dire of miseries. We hold it not as a mere social impropriety, but we regard it as a dark disloyalty against conscience and against God. Much suffering, we know, it inflicts on society; but slight, indeed, is it compared with the ruin and devastation it works in our own souls. Here, at first, God impressed his image; here, at last, he fixes his tribunal: it is here his voice was heard in kindness, it is here it shall be also heard in judgment. God's government is, like himself, spiritual. Man rules by outward power, God by inward inspiration; and it is the peculiarity of the divine legislation that, in the same individual, it attaches the condemnation to the crime; forces transgression, to pronounce its own sentence, and to inflict its own punishment. Human society has set up various bulwarks to guard its security; human law-givers have accompanied their enactments with fiercest penalties; and before Draco, and since, millions upon millions of God's erring creatures have been offered, a sanguinary sacrifice to justice: superstition has personified all hideous evil in Satan,-the mighty sinner of creation,—the minister of eternal vengeance, the great executioner of the universe; superstition has spread the limitless prisons of hell, and filled them with tortures, and lit those flames which it asserts are kept burning by the breath of an angry God, and are never to be quenched during his everlasting existence;

but we assert, there is no scorn of society, there is no torture of most cruel laws, there is no hell of superstition, deep, burning, and eternal as it may be, that can equal the agonies which man's own sense of wrong and degradation heap upon his overwhelmed and sunken spirit. The glory of an immortal soul is beyond all outward glories; the majesty of empires and crowns, the splendour of the sun, the beauty of the firmament, the riches of the universe, are nothing in comparison. We say to those to whom it is our privilege to minister, though you were stripped of all that constitute your frail and present happiness; though saddest reverses became your lot; though God laid his hand heavily upon you and your family, tore you from that rank and station that now make your glory; though your children and friends were one by one snatched from you, until you stood in the world-wilderness like a branchless and a blasted tree; though all illness of body and grief of mind were yours,-having an upright soul, it is but a light affliction compared with a guilty conscience, which could wield over earth a universal sceptre. The wages of sin is death,-death in the most tremendous meaning of that tremendous word,-death of purity, death of holy confidence, death of self-respect, death of inward and outward peace. Sin is misery, and the worst of miseries,

-one that carries with it its own vengeance, is self-punished and self-cursed. True, we recognize no omnipresent and invisible tempter; true, we hold no gross and eternal punishment; we preach no original malediction, and no inherent depravity; we proclaim no sin which blots out all light and hope around the mercy-seat of God, and scathes the heart of man with everlasting despair. True, we show you no maniac penitents, bewildered in the madness of remorse, shrieking on the death-bed which conscience peoples with furies. We announce no deity coming from heaven, putting on the frail existence of humanity, and expiating on the cross the sin which had closed all access to peace. We cannot, and if we

could we would not, freeze your hearts with ideas of torture, nor appal you with threatenings, nor echo on your ears the groans that never cease, the weepings, the wailings, the knashing of teeth, the sighs and hopeless complainings that swell for ever and ever a thickening smoke of torment. Independently of these things, there are other considerations more solemn,-more solemn, because more true, there is our conscience; there is our peace; there is the dignity of our whole spiritual nature; there is reverence for duty; there is the power to enjoy what is pure and beautiful; there is fitness for communion with God, with all the righteous and the excellent, these may be lost, or clouded by sin; and they may be so lost as never fully to be recovered. We count sin no slight evil, either as to its inward spirit or outward influence: as I have stated, so we preach. And here, once for all, I enter my protest against the impeachment which charges us with stripping guilt of its danger and its awfulness.

I. Human nature, according to the point from which we regard it, has a good or an evil aspect, each perfectly distinct, and each perfectly true. The whole truth is then in neither separately, but in both conjointly. Fixing too intently on either, and carrying our ideas to extremes, we may, on the one side, flatter human nature above its merits; or, on the other, be guilty towards it of injustice: on the one side see in it all possible good, and on the other nothing but incorrigible evil: on the one side soar into Utopianism, and on the other descend into Calvinism. The Calvinistic view we hold to be false, the Utopian impossible. We have no idea of any perfect goodness or perfect happiness in this world, either possessed or to be attained. Whilst we pace our way in this earthly pilgrimage, sin and suffering must more or less track our steps; the prodigal's confession, and the publican's prayer, must still be ours; the most favoured of God's children have to meet, and bear their allotted griefs,-to see their glory grow dim, the desire of their eyes