SERMON IX – William Elbert Munsey
CHRIST THE WAY (DISCOURSE I.)
“ I am the way, the truth, and the life.” — John 14:6.
THE text is generally conceived to consist of three parts, each part independent of the other parts, and complete outside of its relations to the other parts. But this is not so. The text is a unity. Christ had told His disciples that He was going to prepare a place for them in His Father’s house, and that when the preparation was complete that He would come for them and receive them unto Himself, adding, ” and whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.” Thomas replied, ” Lord, we know not whither thou goest ; and how can we know the way?” The question of Thomas involved an inquiry with reference to a single thing. He did not interrogate Christ with reference to abstract truth and life, or with respect to Christ’s relations to either one or both in the abstract; but he simply inquired with reference to “the way.”
As the question of Thomas involved an inquiry only with reference to a single thing, so is the text which was Christ’s reply an answer involving only a single thing. Thomas in- quired only with reference to ” the way,” and Christ answered only that question — ‘: I am the way, and as the way I am the truth, and as the way I am the life.” The words truth and life were only used as they had reference to the great fact announced, ” I am the way ” — the word truth ex- pressing the character of ” the way j ” the word life as ex- pressing the direction and end of ” the way ; ” as if Christ had said, ” I am the truthful way which leads to life.” Hence, in the remaining part of the verse of which the text is the former part, Christ elucidates only the hist phrase in the text — ” I am the way ” — in the words, ” no man cometh unto the Father, but by me ; ” showing that this phrase contained the gist of the text as a whole, and that the other phrases were only to be understood in their relation to it, the preeminent, primal, and central truth in the unity of the text.
The doctrine of the text is necessary to the meaning, consistency, unity, power, and beauty of the Bible. It is the fundamental, central, and crowning truth of the Bible. It is that which explains every apologue, allegory, image, and type in the Bible. It is that which imparts significance to every genealogy, chronology, history, prophecy, idyl, and epic in the Bible. It is the master key which unlocks Revelation’s arcana. It is the master hand which unravels its mysteries and weaves the disentangled threads into a beautiful web of consistent and comprehensible truth. It is the chirurgeon which opens Revelation’s bosom, and reveals to our understanding eyes the great heart of the Bible, throbbing grandly and sending from its dilating ventricles streams of life and glory circulating through the arteries of a corporate Christian civilization, developing the world into the higher life of Christ. It is our guide along the labyrinthine corridors of Revelation’s temple to the internal Holy of Holies, where God in Christ in splendid Shekinah dwells. It is the keystone quarried by our Immanuel out of the diamond rocks of heaven, and hewn, chiselled, and polished by His artistic hand, while Calvary trembled beneath the blows of His weighty hammer which awakened the dead and frightened created light back into the womb of uncreated night, and now finished and duplicated glitters in the symmetric arches of the beautiful bridge of salvation stretching from the regions of death to the regions of life, spanning hell and Hades, its every stone cemented by the blood of its architect and builder.
The text is a unity. It contains but one great doctrine, and that is, “Christ is the way.” Such an announcement, however, in the abstract, conveys no intelligible idea to the mind. The mind naturally inquires to know something with relation to the character of the way, and especially from what and to what the way leads. Christ in the text recognizes the reasonableness of such inquiries, and acknowledges the necessity of such demands upon the part of the human mind as a condition to understand the fact announced, and with reference to the character of the way says it is ” the truth,” and with reference to the end of the way says it is ” the life.” The mind can reasonably demand nothing more, and as a matter of course if Christ is the truthful way to life, it follows that the way leads from death. Life and death are correlative terms, and when one is mentioned the other is necessarily implied either abstractly or concretely. When one is used in the concrete, as the word life is used in the text, as an end to be gained, it implies the existence of the other in the concrete ; and that the subject for whose bene, fit the way to life is opened is in a state of death.
When I tell you that I intend to visit a friend, who as to residence is my antipode, and that he lives in latitude North 39°, longitude East 103° from Greenwich, or near the west- ern terminus of the Chinese wall, as a matter of course you understand that I reside in latitude South 39°, longitude West 77° from Greenwich, or near Washington City. Unless I do reside at this place, myself and friend are not antipodes. Whenever I tell you the place where my friend resides, and tell you that he is my antipode, the place of my residence can be arrived at to a mathematical certainty. When I Saj that one of us is an antipode, the existence of the other is at once implied necessarily, for there can be no antipode with* out antipodes. The necessity for the existence of both is patent upon the face of the term. Now in virtue of the cor- relation between life and death, whenever the word life is used the existence of its correlative death in the abstract or concrete is implied necessarily. And as in the text, when the word life is used as expressing a state to be gained, death* as a state has a concrete existence — and Christ as the truthful way leads from death to life.
To evolve the significance and strength of the text — Christ the truthful way from death to life — let us elaborately examine the termini of the way : Life — Death — as they are related to us whom Christ came to save, and for the benefit of whom he became “the way.”
In the beginning God created the earth. After it was sufficiently elevated and refined for the present creation, God selected a beautiful district in the eastern part of a tract of country called Eden, and ornamented and planted it with every tree which was pleasant to the eyes and good for food. This district in Eden was aesthetically so beautiful, and contained such a variety of rich fruits, it was called preeminently ” the garden of Eden.” It was so adapted in its geography, geology, and temperature, as well as in its collection of animals, plants, and flowers, to make innocent beings happy, it was called the garden of Paradise. The breath of God cooled its fountains, and the fanning of seraphic pinions ventilated its bovvers. Dwelling among its superb beauties were the first man and the first woman, sublime in their loveliness, bearing the impress of Divinity upon their brows and the stamp of God’s image upon their hearts. God walked with them, talked with them, loved them. They were good, therefore happy.
In this garden were two trees. The first was the tree of life, upon the eating of the fruit of which man’s life appears to have depended. The second was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, upon the eating of the fruit of which man’s life was forfeited, and death ensued — hence, ” in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” And die man did that very day, and in the precise meaning of the penalty. The penalty of sin has not that trinal form which theologians give it, and which they express by the phrases, spiritual death, physical death, and eternal death. The penalty of sin is single, having only that one form necessary to the existence of anything. It is spiritual death, or the death of the soul. This is evident from the fact, that the penalty of sin, scripturally and philosophically, can only be inflicted upon the subject who sins. The consequences of the penalty may go further, but upon the sinning subject the penalty itself must expend all its force, and then stop.
Sin is the violation of moral law. Nothing can sin, and as a consequence incur the guilt of sin, and be liable therefore to the infliction of the penalty of sin, unless it be under the authority of the law of which sin is a violation. Nothing can be under law, unless it is a party to the relations out of which the law arises. And though the body is under physical law, yet it, as distinguished from the soul, does not sustain those refined and spiritual relations out of which moral law arises, therefore can be no more under the authority of moral law than trees, stones, clods, and dust. Again, sin is not only the violation of moral law, but the voluntary violation of moral law. This implies that the sinning subject must know the law, and that its violation of the law must be a matter of choice involving an alternative — otherwise the subject incurs no guilt, and is not liable to the infliction of the penalty. If the subject who sins must know the Lav, and its violation to the law must be voluntary, or it does not incur the guilt of sin, and cannot in justice be liable to the infliction of the penalty of sin, it, the subject, must be intelligent — and intelligence belongs not to matter, or body, but belongs to spirit, inhering in spirit or soul, and it only.
Now the body .not being a party to the relations out of which moral law arises, and not being intelligent, cannot of itself be under the authority of moral law, and cannot sin ; and as the penalty of sin can only be inflicted upon the sinning subject, and the body can be nothing more than a sinning instrument, never a sinning subject, and cannot incur the guilt of sin, therefore physical death or the death of the body is no part of the penalty of sin. But the soul being a party to the relations out of which moral law arises, and being intelligent, is under the authority of moral law, and can sin ; and as the penalty of sin is inflicted upon the sinning subject, and the soul is the sinning subject, and can incur the guilt of sin, therefore spiritual death or the death of the soul is the penalty of sin. But as the body is the instrument of sin, and physical immortality and spiritual death are inconsistent with each other, the body dies as the result of the death of the soul. Eternal death is nothing different in kind from spiritual death. The word eternal contains the gist of the difference, and that refers not to the fact but to the duration of the fact. It is the death of the soul, without the spirit of God — beyond probation — aggravated by the circumstances of the future.
The ideas of physical life and physical death are not primarily included in the penalty of man’s transgression announced in the beginning. Though man is essentially a com- plex being — a body and soul being necessary to his constitution as man — yet the soul being the seat of intelligent life, and its separation from the body seeming to involve the death of the body, it is the real man, and its life is the life of the man. The life of the body considered in the abstract is nothing but a low, unconscious vitality found in the circulation of fluids, the action of organic functions and Chemica* agents. Even its destruction seems not to affect the conscious intelligent life of the soul. It is the soul, that part of man which from its constitution and endowments is philosophically responsible to law, whose life was threatened in the first penalty, and whose life was destroyed by the first transgression.
Sin from its nature can philosophically destroy every element of spiritual life — which I will show you by and by ; but it has no such power upon the abstract life of the body. The body does not sustain the relations out of which the moral law arises, and is destitute of intelligence and cannot choose between right and wrong, therefore is not under the law of which sin is the violation and cannot sin, and being incapable to sin cannot incur the guilt of sin — and the penalty of sin is not arbitrary, but philosophically inseparable with sin itself, and philosophically inflicted simultaneously with the act of sin according to the laws of cause and effect, which I will endeavor to elaborate and demonstrate before I am done. The life of the soul is the true life, and the life about which Christ speaks when He says : “Whosoever liv- eth and believeth in me shall never die ” (John xi. 26). ” He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life ; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life ; but the wrath of God abideth on him ” (John iii. 36). Here spiritual life and spiritual death are both defined, and stand forth.
Many persons’ ideas never rise higher than their bodies, hence with them physical death is the greatest of all calamities, physical life the highest of all blessings, and the resurrection of their bodies the grandest provision in redemption as well as the most comforting doctrine in the Bible. Christ had to contend with such materialism when upon earth. When He was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, among other things He said : ” I am the living bread which came down from heaven : if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever. . . . Whoso eateth my flesh, and drink- eth my blood, hath eternal life.” Many of His disciples pronounced this a ” hard saying,” and ” went back, and walked no more with him.” Upon another occasion, when teach- ing in the temple, He said, in allusion to His own teach- ings : ” If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death.” The materialistic Jews thought He meant the death of the body as matter of course, when as a matter of course He did not, and replied substantially, controverting His doctrine, “Abraham and the prophets kept thy sayings and they are dead.” Christ alluded to the life and death of the soul, which are the ideas involved in the penalty of transgression announced in the beginning. And whenever I use the words life and death in this discourse, I use them in their prime and original signification, without any reference to the life and death of the body unless so stated at the time.
With reference to the reality of the two trees in the garden, as literal trees, and to which allusion has already been made : they were the representatives of two antipodal states — Life and Death — each generic and causative of respective and appropriate phenomena, ever departing until they both ultimate in their extreme divergence in a state of future rewards, and future punishments. Life and death are both states, and constitute what may be called the foci in the grand ellipse of moral retribution, and in a qualified sense are the correspondent results respectively of good and evil, the foci of God’s moral system.
Life is the normal state of spiritual intelligent being. It was the state in which God made all the angels, and in which He made man prior to man’s subjection to any of the conditions of probation. Indeed it was inconsistent with God’s nature to make them otherwise. But that their good char- acter might not be the necessary result of their creation, but might be a matter of choice upon their parts — without which choice they could not be said to have any character at all, or be subjects of retribution — He subjected His work to the voluntary endorsement of their unbiased moral agency, and made the perpetuity of their life depend upon conditions. With relation to man the conditions appear to have been complex — he must do something on the one hand, and not do something on the other; he must eat of the fruit of the tree of life, and not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Life being his normal state, however, there was no express command enjoining him to eat of the fruit of the tree of life — it was treated as a kind of privilege — but there was an express prohibition with reference to the other — ” But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.”
Life is the normal state of man — the state in which God created him. The whole system of God including the material, spiritual, and moral — the respective governments and laws of the three, constitute a compact, symmetric, magnificent unity. There are no heterogeneities, anomalies, isolations, independencies. Every principle, element, and thing, is constitutionally adjusted and adapted to every other element, principle, and thing, harmonizing into one great whole of which God is the royal Archetype, the governing Head, the vital Centrality, the intelligent Sensorium, the essential Substratum. Man in a state of life, in his normal state as God made him, was a unity in the unity of God’s system, and his complex and multiform relations were adjusted to the phenomena of universal being — the unity of the whole being but the transcript of the unity of Deity, in the constitution of whose nature our minds find the ultimate reason for all that is good, right, and proper, in the universe.
Such being Man’s relations to universal being in his nor- mal state, or in a state of life, he was in harmony with God. Man’s capacity for moral character is threefold — expressed by the words intellect, sensibilities, and conduct. Spiritual life is also threefold in its character — having a principle, an essence, and a development. The principle of spiritual life is faith in God, the essence of spiritual life is love to God, the development of spiritual life is obedience to God. Tha*- faith in God is an element of spiritual life Christ taught, when He said : ” He that belie veth on him that sent me hath everlasting life.” That love to God is an element in spiritual life James taught by a philosophical implication, when he said the Christian should receive the crown of life, “which the Lord had promised to them that love him.” That obedience to God is an element of spiritual life Christ taught, when He said : ” If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.”
Man’s capacity for moral character is threefold ; the character of spiritual life is threefold. Between man’s capacity for moral character, and the character of spiritual life there is a correspondence. Each part of man’s threefold capacity for moral character has its corresponding and appropriate element in the threefold nature of spiritual life. Faith in God the principle in spiritual life is lodged in man’s intellect ; love to God the essence of spiritual life is lodged in man’s sensibilities ; obedience to God the development of spiritual life is lodged in man’s conduct. The state of such a man is expressed by the word life. I have shown you that faith in God, love to God, and obedience to God, are all elements of spiritual life. I have also presented you these elements in their relations to spiritual life — defining one to be the principle, another the essence, and the third to be the development. In this I am philosophic.
Faith in God must be the principle of spiritual life, because of its intellectual character, and of its relations to love and obedience. From its nature it lies at the root of both the others, and must have a priority of existence in the mind to the others, or the others cannot exist at all. Can you conceive of love to God, and obedience to God, without the prior condition of faith in God ? It is equally clear that love is the essence of spiritual life. Love is the essence of God’s moral character — that character which is the standard of perfection to which man was made to ever assimilate in his character — that character which is the Archetype from which all laws possibly binding upon man must necessarily be copied. Love is the essence of God’s moral character, the essence of God’s moral law, the vis vitce of God’s moral system. Could it be otherwise than that love should be the essence of man’s spiritual life, who, is himself, but a miniature copy of the Creator, and sustaining the relations he does is necessarily under moral law ? That obedience to God is the development of spiritual life is too clear to admit of a doubt, and will be received as truth from the mere statement. In the lodgment of the elements of spiritual life, placing faith its principle in the intellect, and love its essence in the sensibilities, I do not mean to circumscribe them by the Psychological circumscriptions of the intellect and sensibilities, for they both have to do with the mind, more or less, as a whole ; and considering the present defective analysis of mind I could do no better — and as long as mental philosophers continue to ignore the unity of mind we can hope for but little improvement in that direction.
Now this was man’s normal state. Faith in God was in his mind, love to God in his heart, and obedience to God was the characteristic of his conduct — and man was spirit- ually alive. Man possessed spiritual life, but not in virtue of his constitution, not as an effect of nature. His life de- pended upon some cause distinct from himself, and independent of himself. This cause was symbolized by the tree of life, showing that the source of man’s life was outside man’s constitution, and being outside of his constitution he might be separated from it, and as life and existence are not convertible terms, yet continue to be. God after He made man breathed into him spiritual life as well as animal life. The text is, “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives (the plural is used in the Hebrew) ; and man became a living soul.” God breathed into the first man more than one life, and in more respects than one ” man became a living soul.” God not only as the great First Cause originated man’s spiritual life, but that life depended for its continued existence upon God’s constant intercourse with the soul, upon man’s union and communion with God, upon the enthronement of indwelling Deity in man’s heart. The life of plants did not depend more upon the earth maintaining its proper relations to the sun, than did man’s spiritual life depend upon him maintaining such aspects with relation to Deity that he could constantly receive the vital influence of God upon his nature and faculties.
As man’s spiritual life depended upon his union with God, there must have been a cognizable and namable bond of con- nection between man and God. This bond could not have been faith and obedience, the principle and development of spiritual life ; for God did not have them in common with the creature, and also because for such a use they were philosophically incompetent. Such a bond must have been something which was common to the nature of both ; some- thing whose philosophic reasons were found in the relations of both ; something which expressed the essence of the moral character of both ; something which expressed the nature of the law emanating from God as a lawgiver, and binding upon man as a subject. What then must have constituted this bond of union between God and man, in virtue of which man’s spiritual life was, and was perpetuated? I answer Love. In this, every philosophic condition involved necessary to make it the bond of union between God and man was fully met. Love was the essence of God’s high moral life. Love was the essence of man’s spiritual life. Like attracts its like — love attracts love — the smaller mov ing to the greater in proportion as it is smaller, and man was drawn to his God, and from the very heart of Deity received his life.
In our solar system planets revolve around the sun. The proximate cause of their abstract motion along their orbits we do not know. But their motion around the sun as the centre is the effect of a compromise between the centripetal and centrifugal forces. The centripetal force is the result of the attraction between the sun and the planets, and its tendency to draw the planets into the sun. The centrifugal force is the result of the planets’ momenta as they move through space, and its tendency is to fling the planets from the sun, “in the direction of the tangent to the paths ” they describe. Centripetal literally means to seek the centre — the centripetal force draws the planets towards the centre ; centrifugal literally means to flee the centre — the centrifugal force is “the force with which a revolving body tends to fly from the centre of motion.” The power of these two forces in their operation upon the planets is equalized. Being op- posed to each other, and being equal, the peculiar power of each is countervailed by the power of the other, and the planets obey both — neither departing from the sun, or going into the sun, but moving on a line of compromise between both, going round the sun.
This equalization of these two forces is better understood when thus expressed : The planets are attracted to the sun in proportion to the quantity of matter they contain. To prevent them, however, from being drawn into the sun by this attraction, these planets are put in motion, and the velocity of the motion is proportioned to the sun’s attraction^ that the tendency to depart from the sun generated by their speed is made to equalize that power. In the proportion as a planet is nearer the sun the power of the sun’s attraction over it is greater, hence the motion of the planet in proportion as it is near the sun, in which motion the opposing power is generated, is always greater. Planets move more rapidly along their orbits in their perihelion, and more slowly in their aphelion.
Now as the sun is the Centre of our solar system, so God is the Centre of the moral universe, around which all moral beings were created to move according to laws as real, unalterable, fixed, and mathematical as the laws governing the revolutions of the planets. Man’s individuality constituted the centrifugal force, his love to God constituted the centripetal force. Both forces were properly equalized, and man moved around God as his natural Centre. His axis properly adjusted to the plane of his orbit, and bearing mirrored in the depths of his beautiful nature, the face and char- acter of God, in company with other orbs of various magnitudes all moving upon orbits concentric, he flew sublimely along the pathway of his towering destiny. Man’s relations to God in a state of life were a perfect harmony. His will the highest power in his intelligence, the governing principle in his nature, the point at which character is created, with the spontaneous consent of his whole nature, submitted to the will of God. His will was free, but in the exercise of the high prerogative of its inherent freedom it chose har- mony with the will of God as the noblest end of human liberty. So harmoniously perfect were man’s relations to Deity, he could, from the very depths of his being, hold sweet communion with God every moment of his blissful existence. O, this was life — life indeed !
Man, in a state of life, was in harmony with the universal system of God. Being in harmony with God, the system’s Head and Archetype, he could not be otherwise than in harmony with the system itself. Being in harmony with the Great Moral Sun, he could not be otherwise than in harmony with his brother orbs. His body was in complete harmony with the material below him, his soul was in complete harmony with the spiritual above him. Having a soul and body he was, as he is now, the central link in the unity of the chain of universal being connecting inorganic dust to uncreated God. In the perfectly adjusted duality of his original nature the spiritual and material met in harmony, and the lines of sympathy between the two threaded his constitution and were there woven into organic unity. He was in sympathy with both worlds, and capable of communion with both. Complex in his constitution he was complex in his powers, capabilities and senses. He was the brother of angels and the king of the mammals — he was both, without a contradic- tion.
Man in a state of life, was in harmony with the laws of the universal system of God. As a physical being he was under the physical law, or the laws of nature. As a spiritual being he was under the subtile and immutable laws of mind or spirit. As a moral being he was under moral law. Yet the different administrations of the Divine Government in the physical, spiritual, and moral departments of that government were so harmonious and reciprocal; and the conjunction-of physical, spiritual and moral causes was so natural, and universal being so perfectly transcriptive of the constitutional unity of God’s nature, in which all primal causes are found ; and man’s relations to all so perfectly adjusted and balanced ; that man’s obedience to physical law as a subject of God’s physical government, his obedience to spiritual law as a subject of God’s spiritual government, and his obedience to moral law as a subject of God’s moral government, was harmonious and perfect. In fact, his obedience to one harmonized with his obedience to both the others. Indeed, had he disobeyed one it would have been an infrac- tion of the spirit of all, and brought him under the censure of all.
Man, in a state of life, was in harmony with all his social and domestic relations. Had man continued in the state in which God had created him till his race had multiplied into communities, every individual’s character and life would have harmonized with reference to every other individual in the great social body corporate. Universal human society would have been a universal harmony, every individual naturally adjusting himself to the great whole according to the peculiarities, value, and power of his character. But when God created man He created him already male and female, in the presence of the holy angels, surrounded by the splendid beauties of the world’s Eden, heaven’s choir singing the hymeneal, instituted the marriage relation, celebrated the nuptials of the world’s first bride with the world’s first bridegroom, Himself, and formed the family constitution — adjusting according to reason found in the peculiar natures of both the masculine and feminine sides of the genus to each other, crowning the male the head of the family, and investing him in an important sense with the high prerogatives of God’s vicegerent in the government of the world, subordinating in the arrangement the emotional to the intellectual.
Man, in a state of life, was a harmony in and of himself. All his physical, spiritual, and moral powers were adjusted with relation to each other. If one power had the prece- dence over another power, or one class of powers had the precedence over another class, the degree of the precedence was in exact proportion to the superiority of the nature of the powers in question. As the soul was the superior part of the man, the spiritual in man was elevated above the mate rial, the intellectual above the sensual. He was not only ” made upright ” in the sense of moral rectitude, the true meaning of Solomon’s expression, but he was made right’ side up. A considerable part of virtue, now, consists in maintaining the original order of man’s constitution. According to these principles God constituted man a perfect harmony in and of himself. Indeed, man was a miniature duplicate of God, and God was, and is, essentially a harmony in and of Himself. Man was made like God, in many noble and sublime respects. Like God he was spiritual; like God he was intellectual; like God he was immortal; like God he was “good” — not only good, but “very good.” This was God’s pronunciamento, when, after man’s creation, He inspected him. Man was like God, but that image of God in which the Scriptures teach man was made was not God’s natural image, for such an image could not be lost and regained by the creature, but God’s moral image — the image of God’s moral perfections, an accurate miniature representation of God’s character. — (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:2.)
Man was created in Gods image* There was a period, however remote, when there was no material thing — not a breath of air, not a ripple of ether, not a particle of matter, not a minim of water, nothing ponderable or imponderable, tangible or intangible, visible or invisible, no elementary or monadic thing — an inconceivable and indescribable nihility — nothing. Being no material causes there were no material effects; hence there was no light as the result of a material agency, but universal and absolute darkness rilled all space — darkness as black as the ebon pall of the dead, black as hell’s sable badge and pitchy scowl ; darkness unrelieved by the briefest spark or feeblest glimmer ; darkness as measureless, boundless, and infinite as space. In it God only was, and He filled it, and His Spirit floated instinct with latent creative power upon every Cimmerian wave which rolled through the boundless and bottomless void.
* It it proper to state that this elaborate description of the creation of man is inserted against the taste and intention o. its author, as I find it crossed out of the sermon.— J. C. K.
But God resolved to commence a grand and stupendous work, and in the plenipotency of His triune Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — for the text reads, ” In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ” — by the almightiness of His overcoming power, and the triumph of His invincible ” Let it be done ” commencing in the darkness in the awful solitude of Himself, He laid creation’s foundations deep, wide, vast, solid, heavy, incumbent on Night’s brawny back, and told the conquered king that prostrate upon the ruins of his own shattered throne, he must bear the ponderous load without a quiver or a groan, and bear it forever. Worlds were made, mountain vertebrated, with hearts of fire, with granite bones and nerves of richest ore, with flesh of softest mould, and clothed with verdant turf fringed with forests and thrown around their broad shoulders and tied there by rivers whose fountain lakelets lay glittering upon their bosoms like great medallions of solid crystal, embossed with miniature images of their planetary sisters shining away in the zenith. Thus arrayed, and their huge waists girded with oceanic zones, they whirled out into space, sought their appropriate orbits, and commenced the run of their eternal circuits.
In harmonious accompaniment were the attendant moons circumvolving, their primaries shaking from their argentine locks sheeny silver rattling down the sky and baptizing sea and land with beauty. While from God’s great anvil, with every stroke of His mighty hammer suns sprangr blazing, and habited with fiery splendor and dazzling magnificence, ascended to their central thrones. And as Atlas of old was forced by Jove to support the heaven on his head and hands, so imperial Night being conquered, and forced by his con- queror to bear up the foundations of all creation, his black squadrons were utterly confounded and fled, and Light, Beauty, and Glory, flung their mantles of azure, gemmed with stars, over their retreat to hide their dusky forms, and singing angels overpowered the discordant thunder of their panic, with lullabies over the cradle of an infant universe. Order, full panoplied like Athene from the head of Zeus, sprang from the mind of God, and completed the work by the geometrical adjustment of all creation’s parts, and hung the whole instinct with motion and propless out in space magnificently balanced.
But was creation’s work completed ? To announce it so is rather premature — it was nearly finished, but not quite creation had no crown. The work had ascended in gradational grandeur, and sublimest method from nought to organic being, but it lacked one piece to magnificently cap the whole, perfecting creation as to architecture and design, and connecting it in one solid system with the spiritual above. Every line of order, every thread of unity, every chain of degrees had been carried up the climax, but one piece was lacking to fasten all the ends of the lines, and threads, and chains, welding them together in itself, and ensuring the unity and permanency of the whole. Creation lacked its microcosmical masterpiece, man. Now, God called a council — a formal convocation of the persons of the adorable Trinity. Notwithstanding creation’s stupendous scheme, and the problems to solve in its building, and though God in Trinity conceived the scheme, and God in Trinity executed it, yet such a council appears not to have been necessary before ; but now, God in Trinity counselled: ” Let us make man,” so they resolved: but How?
The evening star gently opened a window of her splendid home in the far-off Hesperian, and stepped out upon a cerulean balcony balustered with sapphire, her beautiful robe of ethereal azure, with” borders glinted with vermilion falling gracefully about her lovely form, her fair brow wearing a crown of diamonds, her luxuriant tresses of glittering gold dropping to her silver sandals, her sweet, sweet face upturned, all the stars applauding, and said, “Make him like me.” But God said ” No.” Now, fair Selene, the gentle moon, queen of the night, her robe of hoary light fringed with aureate and trailing in the ocean’s brine, escorted by the constellations and coming in royal procession along the sky, turned her cold chaste face radiant with beauty, and looked with her fine eye of conscious purity and unfeigned reverence at God her maker, and said, *’ Make him like me.” But God blessed her, and then said, ” No.”
Next Eos, the Latin-named Aurora, the superb goddess of the dawn, robed in saffron attire embroidered with crimson, opened the gates of the Orient with, her rosy fingers, and mounted her chariot which came rolling along the amber- paved highway of the Levant, her beautiful veil floating in the breath of Eurus, and pinned upon her brow with the star of the morning, and pearly dew trickling down her cheeks, and sifting through the air upon pastures floral and green, and said, “Make him like me.” But, again, God said, ” No.” Next, golden-slippered Iris, the charming daughter of Thaumus and Electra — Wonder and Brightness — standing upon the arch of the rainbow, flinging kisses at the rumbling thunder, and penciling blushes upon the cheeks of the storm and smiles upon the ugly face of the tempest, the pattering rain dancing to the music of her laugh, said, ” Make him like me.” But, again, God said, ” No.”
Next, Helios, the grand god of the sun, and king of the firmament, the material type of the immaterial God, arrayed in his imperial robes woven with polychromatic woof into a warp of splendid fire, whose scepter was a solid carbuncle tipped with flame, and whose imperial crown threatened to kindle the universe into one wide inextinguishable conflagration, mounted his burning chariot-throne rolling upon wheels of torrid amber and drawn by steeds shod with lightning, whose quivering manes dropped golden frost, and whose lustrous trappings were ablaze with jewels and gold, and magnificently attended, ascended the east. At his coming the Evening Star turned pale with reverence, lifted her diadem, and retired to her boudoir ; fair Selene, abashed, retreated to her palace ; Aurora fled westwardly ; and Iris stood away on a distant cloud — in after-times the sailor’s warning as well as the seal of the Noachian promise — respectfully keeping her proper distance ; while all the stars, affrighted, ran out of his path and hid themselves. But this monarch of the planets, unconscious of the reverence paid him, and ambitious of a greater honor, with steady rein drove along the ecliptic, and halting upon the summit of its towering arch, whose keystone is now worn smooth by the feet of descending and ascending angels resting midway between earth and heaven, turned his dazzling face and fiery eye to God in council, and said with confidence, ” Make him like me.” — Though splendid he was, yet he met not God’s ideal of a man, and God said, ” No.”
Next, an Archangel shining with the pure ethereal light of the spiritual and heavenly, unfolded his broad wings of dazzling splendor, and faster than ever comet flashed through the constellated fields of immeasurable space, shaving by turns in his rapid flight heaven’s horizontal floors and firmamental domes, flew to Deity, and pausing let down his wings and stood sublime in beauty and effulgent with glory, and said, ” Make him like me.” But, still, Heaven’s ideal of a man was unrealized, and again, God said ” No.” The Trinity in council resolved to make man, but they had a higher Archetype than all these — ” Let us make man.” — How?
Hear it ye swimming tribes which sport in scaly silver and lamellated gold in pellucid floods ; hear it ye winged denizens of the air which soar in polished quills and glittering plumage ; hear it ye muscular tenants of the forest whose haughty tramp crushes your mother sod, and whose lordly roaring shakes the hills ; hear it ye dashing comets in whose ethereal tracks your outwent glories trail, and glimmer, and scintillate, and die ; hear it ye stars which shine away upon your lofty towers of azure beauty ; hear it ye effulgent suns which fling your splintered pencils of resplendent light throughout universal nature ; hear it ye angels of God who vie in glory around Heaven’s high throne ; — hear all of you in what will constitute man’s real worth and truest grandeur, and which will make him a fit diadem to crown creation with : ” Let us make man ” — How ? ” In our image, after our likeness.” And God took man His own image, His own likeness, man the micro theism, man the little God, and placed him at the head of creation.
Made like God, all the powers of the normal man were in blissful accord with each other ; and himself a harp of more than a thousand strings, Divinely keyed and tuned and struck by heaven’s plectrum, music inborn and spontaneous floated from every trembling string in such wondrous octaves that all heaven’s hosts shouted with rapture. And man’s relations to universal being were so harmoniously adjusted that every string of unity in the system of God responded if but one chord in the harmonious man vibrated — and man’s every thought and impulse set the harp a going. Subjectively, man was a harp of symphonious chords upon which the slightest touch elicited the sweetest music. Objectively, he was but a solitary string in the harp of the universe, which discoursed its consenting part in that universal diapason generated in the harmonies involved in the unity of things, which came rolling in blended strains from all creation’s parts and poured its thundering octaves at the foot of the royal mount upon which God sat, the inimitably holy and sublimely glorious Archetype. Made like God, he was a harmony in and of himself, and also was in harmony with God and everything else — and in the harmonious adjustment of his subjective and objective relations was found the logical ground of his happiness. His powers constitutionally a harmony and placed himself in consonance with the constitutional harmony of the universe, he was constitutionally happy. Brimful of music, he was brimful of happiness. He was made in a state of life, and life may not be improperly defined in its application to him then, as signifying happy existence. Blessed State! Happy man! Glory to God.