LECTURE II – William Elbert Munsey
MAN.
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained:
” What is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him?
” For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” — Psalm 8: 3-5.
” And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living soul.”— Gen. 2:7.
MAN is a complex being in his unity. With reference to his personality he is one ; with reference to his substance, popularly speaking, he is two ; with reference to his nature, as distinguished from his substance, he is three. He is a unity in personality, a dichotomy in substance, a trichotomy in nature. He is one in person, but in the unity of his personality he is twofold, in substance being both ma- terial and immaterial, and threefold in nature, having a body, soul, and spirit.
For a knowledge of the distinction between body and spirit we are indebted to the Bible and science, for a knowledge of the distinction between soul and spirit we are indebted to the Bible and religion solely and wholly. The body is the lowest part of man’s nature, the soul is the middle part, the spirit is the highest part. Now without noticing man especially in his bifold character as material and immaterial simply, I will present him to you according to this tripartite analysis.
1. The Body is the lowest part of man’s nature ; it is compounded of material elements, the base of whose con- struction is dust : of itself it is nothing but an arrangement of passive and thoughtless organs prepared and systematized for the use of a power or powers, which it cannot originate, but only serve. Yet it is an essential part of man’s nature as man, and is the most exquisitely constructed thing in the material world, the most wonderful of all chemical compounds. It is the masterpiece of God’s terraqueous workmanship.
It is a magnificent structure of more than 250 bones, clothed with muscles and tied together by 1,000 ligaments, the whole invested with a skin containing 200,000,000 of pores, and enclosing three grand cavities in which are organs of wonderful functions and powers. The ends of these bones are veneered with elastic cartilage and the ligaments which bind them together are lined with a membrane which secretes a lubricating fluid. The muscles which clothe them are disposed in bundles enclosed in sheaths, and the skin which invests the whole is made up of tissues disposed in layers. The body is a metropolitan municipality of bones and muscles, an organized, functional human city, of which the head is the Capitol and* palatial abode of royalty. Within the mural inclosures of the Capitol and covered with its osseous dome are chambers hung with curtains of woven filaments of the finest structure and elastic textures of the most delicate membrane, carpeted with exquisitely compounded encephalon, and splendidly furnished and elaborately and magnificently ornamented.
Within its walls are galleries adorned with the gorgeous paintings of Imagination’s artistic pencil : the rooms of Mnemosyne, clerk of state, packed and crammed with memory’s records ; the sombre halls of State in which Judgment, Reason, and Conscience, the Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Eacus of the human realm, sit ermined in stern judicial conclave ; and the imperial chamber where the human will sits enthroned, diademed and sceptred in Sovereignty.
The royal edifice is interpenetrated from the outside world by labyrinthine and complicate corridors, along whose nervous floors fiery messengers ever run, leading from two curious cavernous openings on both sides, and two splendid, arched oval and convex entrances, protected by two cunning little doors or palpebra, hinged and fringed, high up in the front, whose retinal passages are ever crowded with light and beauty.
At the base of the building is the temple of Taste ; standing at the entrance of the street leading to the Stomach, the city market-house, resides the mind’s herald, who formally announces to other municipalities the decrees, laws, opinions, decisions, and acts of the high functionaries and courts of the realm, resident within — sometimes, however, exceeding its province and babbling secrets of the throne and bench to the great detriment of the State.
But of all the mysteries of this most mysterious palace, the front is the most curious. From the supraciliary cornice down to the maxillary foundations it is veneered with a covering of fibrous muscle, delicately lineated and instinct with nerves, which advertises, by the curvature and com- bination of its lines, its expressions and complexion, the acts, resolutions, and even dispositions and conditions of the imperial, judicial, and official residents within.
To notice anatomically, however, in detail the several cavities, organs, etc., of the body is unnecessary now, and would be entirely inappropriate as well as exceedingly wearisome both to you and myself; but an address, the subject of which is Man, must necessarily include within its compass the body in that physical condition in which the body only can be considered as a part of the man — viz., as a live body
The body is alive.
The vital condition of every part of the human body is subject to continual change ; such change being the result of the action of four forces : mechanical forces, chemical forces, vital forces, and mental forces. Life with relation to the body is an invisible, imponderable, intangible, immaterial energy.
There are various theories with reference to the source of animal life :
1. It may be one of the manifestations of man’s spirit breathed into the body by God the Maker in the day of man’s making.
2. Or it may be something individually distinct from man’s spirit, and an emanation from Deity per afflatum. What it is, or what it is not, I do not know, and I shall not farther speculate. But we do know it is not the result of physical organization, for it is the formative principle of the body, that which induces in matter organization, therefore it exists before the development of the body. Its presence is detected in the almost diamond brilliancy of the fluid within the little germinal cell in the ovum from which the body is evolved.
Life as a force with reference to mechanical forces brings under its control all mechanical laws in their application to the internal structure of the body, and works the machine and supplies the body’s waste and wear and tear in the exercise of its functions, preserving its structure and form through the roll of years.
Life as a force with reference to chemical forces subordinates to itself the chemical laws of affinity, dissolution, and combustion so far as such laws are necessary to maintain in healthy state and vital action the functions of the body, and counteracting and suspending these laws in so far as they tend to destroy the bodily organization.
Life as a force with reference to mental forces, brings passive and foreign matter into such relations and aspects to mind, that mind can govern matter, develop itself through matter, and make matter, thoughtless, purposeless, and inert as it is, subserve intelligent ends. Life organizes the body and unites all the organs into the oneness of itself, that they may subserve the purpose of an individual and single soul. While life organizes matter and perpetuates the organization and is therefore a higher power than body, yet it is but the servant of mind. Mind can wrest at will from the hands of life some of life’s most valuable instruments, and so interfere with life’s operations as to destroy it. Mind has destroyed life and disembodied itself.
The life of the body exhibits itself to us in a twofold aspect : animal life and organic life. Animal life is life in the nerves ; organic life is life in the organs. Animal life is life in the nervous system with its great cerebrospinal centre ; organic life is life in the vascular system with its grand engine-heart centre. The life, however, is one, as life in man in the nervous system is the cause of life in the vascular system. Life being an invisible, imponderable, intangible, and immaterial energy, must necessarily have an instrument for its operations. The instrument of life — that by which the whole chemistry of animal and organic life is carried on, by which the whole machinery of man’s body is driven, and by which the functional activity of every part of the body is harmonized into relative, reciprocal, and correlative action to subserve the purposes of a single life, and a single soul — is an imponderable something electrical in its nature. Physiologists call it nerve force …………[A very elaborate description of the nervous system here follows.]
But now, let us arrive at some conclusions : If God be more excellent than dust, then the governing part of man must be that part farthest removed from dust, and nearest to God. The soul is nearer to God in its nature than the body, therefore it must govern the body ; if man’s nature be tripartite, the spirit is nearer to God than the soul, therefore it must govern the soul. The spirit must govern the soul, the soul as governed by the spirit must govern the body. For the lower parts of man’s nature to be uncontrolled by the higher, is utterly frustrative of man’s attainable glorious des- tiny. If the body is not governed by the soul the man is a beast — a low grovelling beast. The adaptation of body to soul, the connection of the soul with the body, and the nature and manner of its government over the body, with other col- lateral questions, I intended to notice at some length but I am compelled to pass all of them by. If the soul is not governed by the spirit, it is like a furious horse without a rider, a flying locomotive without an engineer.
The spirit must govern the soul, or in other words the Pneuma must govern the Psuche, or soul, Psyche, or mind will rush into those wild extremes which have rendered knowledge a curse from the time its desire seduced our mother Eve through all the ages to this time. Knowledge sanctified by religion is a great good, but knowledge without religion is a great curse. It plucked Eden’s forbidden fruit, murdered Abel, and has murdered on to the present. It has erected every system of tyranny and cruelty which has oppressed mankind. It built every inquisition, and invented every instrument of torture whose diabolical uses are too appalling for detail. It has generated all the forms of infidelity which have run riot among the nations. It is an appalling fact that infidelity is born in our colleges and universities, and that it increases in the ratio of the increase of knowledge, and that the strongholds of learning are the strongholds of infidelity. Infidels are not the fools of earth, but I would say, better a believing ignorance than the incredulity of learning.’
But why does infidelity reign in such high places ?
I. Colleges and universities have to do with mind, not with spirit. The mind is the seat of man’s individuality and personality, the seat of his volitional and intellectual independence, the seat of his rational life. The unconverted student does not find a necessity in such a mind for such a thing as religion, and not being acquainted with the existence of a dead Pneuma in whose nature, condition, and dependence the necessity for religion is found, he very naturally regards the mind, the Psuche, as the highest part of his nature. And mounting the psychical car of human reason and human philosophy, drives out with ruinous speed upon the highway of in- fidelity, to discover his mistake probably not till his chariot is flying through the gates of death, and not then till it is too late to return, till hell’s doors are closed behind him and bolted, and he is hurried away by attendant demons to perdition’s fiery sea to embark upon an eternal voyage in the frail boat of his own philosophy, while eternal tempests ever rage, and amid eternal smoke churn the Tartarean sea into mountain surges which hiss, and roar, and beat, and splash forever — ten thousand electric shuttles drawing lightning threads ever-flying and weaving the whole into a plexus of indescribable horror, hell’s unmuffled thunders rolling upon hell’s infernal drums the dreadful bass in hell’s uproar.
2. The philosophic student is told that Religion teaches a resurrection to life of something dead. Credulous ignorance would very probably accept the statement and act upon it, but not so always with the learned man, he must reason, and thus he reasons : ” My body is not dead — my soul is not dead ” — and knowing nothing of .a dead spirit, he concludes that religion is the merest abstraction, the wildest dream of human ignorance ; he therefore renounces it. He feels more necessity of bread, meat, and a doctor for the body, and books, and ideas, and a preceptor for the soul, than he does of religion. He knows nothing of a spirit that needs life, medicine, and nutriment, and to the balm of Gilead and the Physician there he attaches no significance.
3. The philosophical student is told that religion is a sys- tem involving the profoundest philosophy — and so it is — but its relations to the spirit are such that the unconverted and natural man cannot perceive it. ” The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God : for they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Cor. ii. 14.) The student not being able to distinguish a so-called religious creed or system and its ethical developments, from an experimental and saving re- ligion, indeed cognizing the first and not the last, regards religion simply as a psychical thing, and immediately makes it a subject of human reason. But an adventurous explorer may as well endeavor to explore the Mammoth Cave and expect to map it correctly with only a glow-worm for a taper, as to endeavor to intelligently explore the fields of our holy religion with the feeble light of man’s uncertain reason.
There is a nature in man higher than that of reason, an intuitional pneumatical nature that never reasons. Psuche reasons, and by its reasonings has peopled the world with direst monsters — one-footed creeds, one-legged theories, eyeless systems, bodiless philosophies, and headless religions. In all the fabrics of human reason and human logic there are so many faulty bricks, mistakes of measurement, and errors of con- struction, that the Judgment will shake them to fragments and dust — and woe to the man that finds in them his only refuge. There is a nature in man higher than the reasoning Psuche, and if made alive by Christ, and preserved in con- stant communion with God, will never make a mistake fatal to salvation in any of its intuitions. The Christian knows to-day that many things are prohibited to him in his con- science, in which his reason can find no fault ; and he knows furthermore, that if he obeys his enlightened conscience, he will never make a fatal error. But the irreligious student un- acquainted with the Pneuma tries religion with the Psychical touchstone of his reason, and becomes so confounded in his logic as utterly to ignore religion and fling it out of his mind — becoming wholly an infidel.
In short, nearly all the infidelity of the world has its origin in knowledge, the development in learning of the Psuche, ungoverned by an awakened and converted spirit, the devel- opment in religion of the Pneuma. The gist of the difficulty is found in a failure to recognize in man a higher power than mind, and a higher attainment than education : that higher power is spirit, that higher attainment is religion. Unless this higher power and higher attainment are enthroned in man as the governing power and governing attainment, both body and mind with their attainments are curses, not blessings — better for the man he had never been born. And though, young man, you may from matriculation to gradua- tion have ascended with slow and laboring steps the heights of this college’s curriculum, arriving at the summit with honor, yet, if you are not religious, you have gained no last- ing good. You have now constructed a magnificent machine, but religion must be your motive power to drive it ; if you have not this motive power Satan will drive it for you, and if he drives it having such a machine will but speed your ruin. Again I assert in the face of all the world’s precedents, in the face of all the world’s axioms so-called, in the face of the church’s practice who have given greater attention to the dress and education of their children than to their con- version, that knowledge unsanctified by religion is a great curse — but with religion to govern it, it is a blessing whose real value can only be accurately estimated when eternity shall end.
Those in whom the soul is made the governing part are persons who love science better than they love God. Mind is the highest part in the development of their natures, and everything in the heaven, the earth and universe is estimated only in proportion as it administers to mind. Such persons sometimes have what they call religion ; but it is a religion which consists in the apotheosis of the mind and the worship of knowledge. Here is the student’s danger. It has not been a great while ago since one of the great peoples of the earth avowedly substituted the Bible with philosophy, and in place of Jesus deified the human reason. Such persons, unless they become Atheists — having no religion at all, some- times, regarding the Bible only from a Psychical standpoint, and perceiving nothing in it but that which is merely Psychical— having no conceptions of that deep spirituality which lies beyond the Psychical and which constitutes the real essence of the Bible and is the secret of its unity, and in the hands of the Holy Ghost is the source of its real power, and weighing it only in the Psychical scales of evidence, reject revealed religion, and their religion, conventionally so-called, assumes the form of Deism. Sometimes such persons, if they escape perchance the lowest forms of degrading materialism, reasoning from the Psychical laws of cause and effect, lose their God in nature, and their religion, conventionally so-called, assumes the form of Pantheism. Sometimes such persons are so pre-emi- nently Psychical that they adopt the Psychical reason as their only and all-sufficient guide in religious matters, and repudi- ating everything like Supernaturalism their religion assumes some of the intellectual forms of Rationalism.
Sometimes such persons making a false distinction in the Psychical part of their natures between intellect and sensi- bilities, reserve the intellect for philosophy and science, and turn over their religion to their emotions. In such a case, the religion of such persons has not even the redeeming feature of common-sense to make its apology, and it consists only in bursts of excitement. Such a religion has often kindled the passions of men into combustion fraught with ruin, changing the soul into a volcano, whose lavic cataclysms of a fiery fanaticism have at times deluged the world and buried so far beneath ashes and scoriae the fair fields of civilization that the work of ages could only exhume them. Such a man’s religion never ascends so high as to become a matter of consciousness in his cooler hours. He only knows he has religion when he is excited. Between his religious eruptions he is like an extinguished volcano, sometimes the snow and ice of hoary winter lying upon the bald summits of his nature, defying the sun of the Gospel’s midsummer to melt them away. If such a man’s religion never ascends so high as to become a matter of consciousness in his cooler hours, it also never descends so low as to have anything to do with his life — and not only is he not conscious of possess- ing religion in his cooler hours, but when he is in the same state the world does not know it either. He and the world only know that he is religious when he is excited, and to tell the truth God knows nothing at all about it. This is one thing that God does not know.
Sometimes the mind, the Psuche, of such persons, in place of looking upward and inward to the enshrined spirit, the appropriate seat of true religion, turns its attention down- ward and outward to the senses which form the media of its intelligent connection with the outside world, and in are- fined sensism finds its only religion. The minds of such persons in looking towards spirit see nothing but darkness, death, and a tomb — for spirit by sin is dead. Such a mind may be well educated, but the defective psychology of the schools and a want of pneumatical preaching has been such, that ignoring the existence of spirit it regards itself as the highest part of man’s nature, and religion as a gratification of itself — and being taught that religion comes from some extrinsic source, and being ignorant of that high communi- cation between itself and that source through spirit, very naturally turns its attention to the senses, the only channels with which it is acquainted of a communication between itself and some extrinsic power. The religion of such persons always clothes itself in gorgeous vestments, and swells and struts in magnificent pageant, and performs its services in splendid ritual — in other words, God is mocked by a religion of empty forms, meaningless ceremonies, spiritless rites, hol- low symbols, hollow-hearted worshippers, and whited tombs. Their religion is nothing more than a fine coat, which can be put on and off at pleasure.
Again, the enlightened mind or Psyche, being able to un- derstand things, states, relations, and premises, subjects, copulae, and predicates, and obligations to do or not to do, and having the ability to compare, adjust, systematize, and draw conclusions, is able to perceive the difference between virtue and vice, right and wrong, and to feel the power of moral obligation. The mind in virtue of a defective philos- ophy arrogating to itself the position that it is the highest part of man’s nature, is apt right here to confound morality with religion — and this it often does, and the religion is noth- ing but a system of Ethics. Ethics is not religion. It is purely Psychical, appertaining to the Psuche or soul, while religion is purely Pneumatical, appertaining to Pneuma or spirit.
Religion is not a Psychical thing, therefore has nothing to do with the Psuche of which the ego is the centre. It is not couched in the ” enticing words of man’s wisdom,” it does not ” stand in the wisdom of men,” it is ” not the wis- dom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to naught ” — ” eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him ” — ” It is not the spirit of the world” (i Cor. ii.) — it is not that wisdom which de- scended! not from above, but is “earthly, sensual, devilish.” (James iii. 15.)
Those in whom the spirit is made the governing part : Such persons only are Christians. They love God better than mind or body, better than they love science, meats and drinks. God becomes philosophically the governing powei of the man. Religion is a Pneumatical thing, therefore has to do primarily with the Pneuma, of which the God that is in man is the centre. It is ” the wisdom that is from above.” It is the wisdom revealed u in demonstration of the spirit and of power” — the faith which stands “in the power of God” — “the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory.” It is ” the things which God hath prepared for them that love him,” which God “hath revealed unto us by his spirit,” — it is “the spirit which is of God.”
The soul must govern the body, the spirit made alive by religion and brought into tender and intimate communion with the Father of spirits must govern the soul. The spirit in immediate communion with God receives a holy in- spiration and life which qualifies it to govern the soul, to govern the body through the soul, to govern the world through the body and the soul. Indeed, through man is one of God’s ways to govern the world, and whenever mountains and floods, rocks and seas, winds and waves, lightnings and tempests, bow to man’s conquering hand they but capitulate to the God that is in man, and through man acknowledge Him as their rightful and all-potent Ruler. You see that none but the Christian, he that is so developed in his nature as to bring the lower parts, parts respectively under the higher, can fill man’s place in creation, and carry out God’s plan in governing the world through man.
But with respect to the sinner : the part in him which connects the Christian with God, investing him with a Divine significance, is dead in the sinner ; therefore the sinner sub- serves not this purpose of God through himself, gives God no glory, acquires no personal merit and individual grandeur in the scale of being, and is a miserable nought. Yea, worse : Refusing the means which God has appointed for the revivification of his spirit, and thus occupy his appointed place in the scale of being, God fastens him, willing or unwilling, to the car of His Providence as a mere beast, and lashes him into motion with His dreadful whip to carry out designs of which the sinner knows no more, and in the execution of which he derives no more merit than the horse in the cart driven by the huckster.
Constituted as man is, he is the whole universe, material and spiritual, in miniature. His body is the epitome of the world in which he lives, and over which he is king. The solid, the fluid, the aerial, the gaseous, have all met in his physical constitution, making him the most wonderful and complete physical compound in nature. His body is nature embodied in miniature, a little world of itself. Yea, more, epitomized in his body is the whole universe, in comparison with which our earth is but an atom. The solar system to which the earth belongs is three billions of miles from its centre to its circumference. How small the earth must appear in such a system — indeed, the sun, the centre around which it whirls is fourteen hundred thousand times larger than it is. Yet, I doubt not but that the earth sustains a much larger proportion to our planetary system, than our planetary system with its radius of three billions of miles sustains to the whole universe.
The fixed stars which peep through the ocean ether upon us at night, and hang a sheen of gossamery silver upon tomb- stones old and gray, and whose little rays creep though the ivy-curtained windows of castles antique and sport with the ultimate dust of the blushing rose long since dissolved which adorned the hair of the belle who danced along the floors of those halls, now deserted and gloomy, untold ages ago ; and whose twinklings have been flung through all the centuries upon rock and wall, and rill and river, are but the splendid suns of other systems, the nearest of which is seven thousand times farther off from us than Neptune.
But oh, let us borrow the wings of some celestial bird, and leave this terraqueous speck. Now, now, we mount aloof, counting as we go. We pass the moon, we pass the sun, and like an arrow from the bow of God spring beyond Neptune’s orb rolling to the music of the spheres — counting as we go. But we travel too slowly : in place of wings let us mount the vehicle of thought drawn by coursers swifter of foot than the lightning’s steeds whose flying hoofs roar in hollow thunder upon the arches of heaven’s black vault in the day of the storm — swifter of foot than the golden shafts of day flung by the god of light from Phoebus’ wheeled and rolling throne — and thus charioted ask God to send an arch- angel to drive us — and then in earnest let us go, mounting upward, counting as we ascend and marking the numbers on the sapphire floors, azure walls, and cerulean portals of every succeeding heaven whose stupendous heights we climb and pass in a moment. So rapid our flight, the zodiac’s glittering belt, and constellations undreamed of, flash into the rear like lightning, while onward and upward we speed, ploughing luminous tracks whose nebulous ranges enlarge into universes ; worlds revolving above and around our flight, and passing quickly die away in misty lines far behind us.
But the ultima Thule is still beyond. Earth is lost, its sun is lost, its system is lost, and astral fields immeasurable intervene, while constellations ever-springing out of space, and ever-multiplying in the track of Night’s retreat before an ever-pursuing creative God, in strangest beauty and newest form invite us on. But with count confounded, like our world sun and system we too are lost, and maddened with numbers to us infinite, we can but command a halt where we can never retrace our flight ; or in the utter recklessness of our despair, drive on till the wheels of the chariot of thought wear out their axes and go wheeling, and whirling, and whizzing to the four quarters of space, leaving us a helpless wreck lost in a wilderness of systems where God can only find us.
But however numerous other worlds may be, they are all similar to ours. If all worlds are similar to ours, and if man’s body may be regarded as an epitome of ours, then the same body is an epitome of the whole universe with all of its systems, suns, and planets. Man’s body is then indeed a little world of itself — a mikros cosmos, a microcosm, or epi- tome of this great world, the makros cosmos, macrocosm. Not only is man’s body an epitome of the material universe, but his spirit may be recognized as an epitome of the spiritual universe. Whatever is involved in the constitution and nature of a spirit, and whatever be the phenomena of the spiritual world, all have met in man’s spirit and constituted it the miniature embodiment of all spiritual being.
Man assumes the place before our minds as the whole universe in miniature. The material and spiritual worlds have united in his constitution, and compounded he stands forth the most wonderful and anomalous being in his constitution in universal being. He is the only being, so far as we know, that is so complex, and so perfect in his complexity, and in the constitution of whom the nature of every world and angel is represented — the precedence of the spiritual over the material as seen in the outside universe being preserved in him. He is the only being, so far as we know, in whose constitution the mystery of the union between spirit and matter in one personality is practically solved. He is the only being, so far as we know, where such a complexity is cognized by one consciousness. I say “my body” — “my spirit.”
Being both material and spiritual, man is the connective between the material and spiritual in the unity of the system of God. If man did not exist, God’s system would be in two parts, but as he does exist, the material and spiritual unite in him, he having both a body and a spirit, and God’s system is one. The material is a unity, and from all of its parts it sends up cords which unite in man’s body. The spiritual is a unity, and from all of its parts it sends down cords which unite in man’s spirit. Now man’s body containing all the ends of the material, and man’s spirit containing all the ends of the spiritual cords, are united in one being, one individual soul, and God’s system in virtue of the union is then one.
The created world is a grand building whose foundations were laid upon the crystalline rocks of the Azoic age, and with every element of nature, and every animal of earth, air and water employed, and with a thousand subterranean forges and volcanic furnaces in full blast, and with storms, and floods and drifting ice to assist, the edifice slowly arose through all the epochs and periods of the several geological ages to the splendid era of mind, when man the top-piece was made and laid in its place. Nature is a building and its top-piece is man. Upon this material building the spiritual rises to God, and its under-piece is man. Man is the highest in the material and lowest in the spiritual, lying between the two, and uniting the two, his spirit uniting with the spiritual above, his body uniting with the material below, and both spirit and body uniting together in his individual soul perfecting the unity of the whole — and a grander building than Babel’s tower reaches with unbroken wall from earth to heaven.
Everything ascends by regular gradations from inorganic dust to God. The whole constitutes a chain of life and being grappling on in close connection to inorganic rock by cryptogamic and protozoic links and ascending from vegetables through various classes, orders, genera, and species of the grand Radiate, Moluscan, Articulate, and Vertebrated divisions of the animal kingdom rise into the spiritual through man, the highest of the Vertebrata, and stretch away through the cherubic and seraphic ranks in heaven’s hierarchy to God, linking on to His nature and fastening all worlds to Him as their primal cause, their sovereign head, their royal Archetype, their essential Centre.
The chain connecting dust with God is composed of several minor parts. Its lowest part is composed of vegetable links, the next part of animal links, the next part of spiritual Jinks. If I may so express it there are compound links which bind the several parts together, and while the lines of distinction between the parts are real, though so fine sometimes as to be nearly invisible, yet there are links of connection between the parts which appear to partake in some degree of the nature of both the parts they connect. Though science says that every link in the chain must belong to only one of the parts, yet it cannot be disputed that rocks and vegetables are united by links which appear to be part rock and part vegetable, and that vegetables and animals are united by links which appear to be part vegetable and part animal. One thing is certain, the connection between the parts is so close that scientific men themselves have failed in unanimity to decide to which part of the chain many of the intermediate links belong, and furthermore it is certain that man, the link which connects the animal and spiritual in the chain, is a compound link partaking of the nature of the parts he connects, being both animal and spiritual. This fact seems to throw a significance upon the links in the connection of the parts below him. Some of the parts of the chain, how- ever, lap over and are doubled. For instance : rocks and animals are united directly with each other by intermediate links without the intervention of the vegetable links ; and God and man’s spirit are united directly with each other by our Immanuel the God-man, without the intervention of angelic links. Thus the chain of life and being pendulously dropping from God to the lowest forms of matter, is perfect in its unity, in the graduation of its descent and in the connection of its links.
Yet it is separable into two great divisions ; the lower end of the chain is material, the upper end is spiritual — two parts so unlike in their nature that the link which binds them into the unity of one chain must be the most important link in its entire length. In the angelic and spiritual division of the chain we have Psychical and Spiritual life, in the purely material division we have organic and animal life ; but the chain is in two parts — the lower part lies in tangled coil upon the Azoic rocks, the upper part dropping down from God is swinging in space a chain of connection with nothing to connect. Now man is that grand compounded connective which interlocks with the material, organic, and animal below him, and the immaterial, psychical, and spiritual above him, making the chain of life and being a beautiful and useful unity.
Behold the chain! First as a chain of being ; — its arch- angelic links ! its angelic links ! its animal links ! its vegetable links ! Behold the chain in its original and unimpaired unity as on the sixth demiurgic day completed, it dropped in order, symmetry, and light down through chaos and darkness, with the eye of God flashing down its entire length, kindling every link into beauty and glory. From Deity to dust down, down, it descended, and to and for it swung, instinct with harmony, a tuneful chain along which diapasons, from the softest note in sublime crescendo rose in thundering melodies to God. There it hung a thing of beauty, graceful, lovely, sublime, magnificent — the expression in the concrete of Heaven’s ideal, the embodiment in charming unity of Heaven’s design, the incorporation of the Infinite Benevolence 5 — the central link, man the little Kosmos, wondrously compounded, in the meanwhile holding in lawful wedlock the spiritual and material, heaven and earth, God and rocks, together. There it hung, its highest link eclipsed and invisible in the splendid glory of the Infinite glory waning yet dazzling down to man ; the subcentral and lower links scintillant and bright with the milder light of a created glory ; declining softly to its lowest link, where worlds and stars appendant shone in twilight yet golden beauty. Its highest link bathed in the splendors of noon, its lowest links slept in the lap of mellow evening.
Satan hated the God who conceived and made such a chain and who loved and blessed it — and separated from God, cast out of heaven, cut off from communion with the good, thrown out of the unity of the chain of normal being, sin-polluted, self-cursed, ostracized and damned, he stood back in darkness upon the grim arches of the gate of hell, beyond whose iron-ribbed, murky, and yawning arcades lie the bitumenous fields and sulphurous seas of reeking perdition, and gazed with eyes of kindled envy, burning malice, and hellish hate at the glorious consecutive series of inter- locking links, connecting basest matter with purest spirit ; and with fell and desperate purpose resolved to destroy the chain, to cut off all organic connection between the Crea- tor and his works, to thwart the plans of the God whom he detested, and in the highway of the universe to murder man, and rob heaven of man’s soul. To carry out his atrocious design he arrayed himself in Hephaestion armor wrought in infernal forges, with mailed coat of adamantine rings, with cuirass of solid fire, and horrid helmet plumed with the wing of the thunder and tremendous shield covered with Gorgon emblazonry. And mounting his hell-born steed, black as night and shod with fire and brimstone, he levelled his burning lance at man the central link. And with the speed of the whirlwind and the noise of the tempest, more terrible than Demogorgon foul or Orcus damned, he rushed upon the chain like a thunderbolt; his lance struck and shivered, ’twas true — but man was ruined. — Spirit and Matter uniting in man were separated and man’s body tumbled down to dust, and his disembodied spirit went shrieking into Hades — and the great chain of life and being was sundered in twain, and the upper end writhing in every shivering link swept in rapid vibrations clean across the sky; while stars and worlds below, their music all ruined, and jarring and groaning upon their axes, fell from God, roaring through the subtle ether in awful momentum as they plunged headlong down, down, down through space — and falling yet they would have been, had not Jesus caught the broken chain, and holding with the other hand to the throne of God, united it directly with heaven by an incarnation, in his own blessed nature, and addressed himself to the work of the restoration of a normal and original unity by providing for man’s redemption and resurrection.
Then, oh, then, spirit and matter united in closer bonds in man restored, the chain will be a unity forever.
