fellowship in all the infinite, if all can be where the end is not. Bodily, death belongs to a world too small for life's full operation and enlargement; but to the spiritlife of man there is no limit, because God's power and kingdom are not hedged around with nothingness, but with the inconceivable, which is ever full and yet ever filling, because for ever enlarging without limit. Therefore we conclude that the model man, perfectly endowed with logical power and intuitive appreciations, could infer quite as much from what he saw as we can. As a personal being himself, he could be in no danger of confounding nature with its Maker; his very constitution of spirit obliged him to think of everything definite in its purpose as the production of a Being exercising power, will, and design. For the same reason every unusual, and far more any mysterious occurrence in the realms of nature, assumes to man's unenlightened imagination the character of a portent, a warning of something doing, or about to be done, by some personal agent acting behind phenomena. If, then, the correct definition of a wise man is interpres naturæ, expounder of nature, are we to suppose that the man for whom there was no companionship but as he could perceive the thoughts of his Creator towards himself, had a mind less capable of interpreting appearances than a modern philosopher, the utmost extent of whose knowledge amounts to no more, at best, than acquaintance with nature and reflections on the properties of things, partly observed by himself, and partly learnt from other minds. The philosopher's interpreta tions, now, as of old, are, and ever have been, nothing but mistakes, where he has not thought of seeking to learn the intentions of the one master mind, the Maker of the universe, in whatever He has made: If, then, faith in God as the Creator of all is requisite to the perception of the congruity and consistency of nature, we cannot imagine for a moment that the man who knew nothing but as God Himself instructed him, was worse instructed, or worse endowed with capacity to receive instruction, through the lack of faith and intellect, than any of his descendants. To conceive of man at all as the direct work of an Omnipotent person, we cannot but think of him as the mental and moral image and reflection of his Maker. It is so now in all right-minded men, and must so have been from the beginning. As Sir Thomas Browne nobly says, While I study to find out how I am a little world, I find myself something more than the great one. There is surely a piece of Divinity within me. There is something which was before the elements, and which owes no homage to the sun. Nature, as well as Scripture, tells me that I am the image of God.' In short, reason informs us that man's Creator must have revealed Himself humanly, or personally, to the first man on the opening of his faculties, and the possibility of such a revelation presupposes the existence of a fitness in man's mental nature to receive that revelation, which is all we can understand as to a correspondence between *Religio Medici. 6 It is thus only that man the Divine and the human. That God, which ever lives and loves, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves. TENNYSON. 177 CHAPTER XV. MAN'S FIRST VISION. THE Word that uttered Light spoke thought towards the coming man; that word on which hang all the worlds, included the end in the beginning. As the life that forms the germ is fulfilled in its perfection, so the primal day-dawn of this earth foretold a finished work in the creation of man. As that which makes visible to sense is the type of that which reveals to the soul, so the first recorded act of Divine energy in becoming light necessarily called worlds of minds into existence to be manifested to each other. Thus the excellence of all harmony, order, law, beauty, use is brought forth with light which means to man love and intelligence, the everlasting revelation of God in human nature. The small ray of light that on the retina photographs a vision of the starry heavens for the soul's insight, is as the centre of the infinite. Thence proceed radii that reach no circumference; thence begin the paths in which the spirit may travel from this moment and this point on and on for ever to find no end, no rest but in the Eternal One, a Presence everywhere. Thus the feeling of time and space becomes a feeling after God, N which cannot be satisfied till we know His mind towards us. It is no false sentiment to assert that the full significance of light to us is the manifestation of our Maker. This Plato felt in feeling after God; this, too, was he who leaned on the bosom of Immanuel taught by the same spirit to say God is Light. The genesis of man's world truly begins with light, in anticipation of all philosophy, foretelling man and the revelation of Divinity to man thenceforth for ever. We will not discuss the omphalos, for it had no necessary place in the first man, who was complete without derivation from birth and the processes of development. He was a circle in himself with no mark upon him of connection with another; but yet we may ask At what apparent period of life was the first man created? Was he produced as if in full maturity, an adult man, or as a child or a youth? These curious questions we have no means of answering, and concerning them we may speculate as may best comport with our notions in respect to the provisions made for man's accommodation, the training to which his faculties of mind and body were to be subjected, and what especial providential aids and interferences on his behalf were to qualify him to become master of his position as at the head of the organic and animated earthly hierarchy. It will best suit our purpose here to assume that when awakened to selfconsciousness and made aware of the presence of other beings, he was as a youth verging upon the commencement of manhood; just when the mind is most sensitive to the stir of life, most alive to beauty, most desirous of 糖 |