world to the Church herself. The destinies of His chosen servants, the patriarchs, and of Israel, His chosen people, were fashioned and moulded, under His superintending guidance, by the free, and independent wills and actions of themselves, or of those around them. God's faithful ones carried out, without understanding them, those great plans of His with which they were connected; and even of those who opposed His law and will, as far as it was given them to know it, it might be said, "The fierceness of man shall turn to Thy praise and the fierceness of them shalt Thou refrain." The irreverence of Ham, and the tyranny of Pharaoh, were His appointed instruments for good to His chosen, as well as the faith of Abraham, or the meekness of Moses. Even the great empires of the world, the "beasts" of prophecy which successively subjugated the chosen people and their land, were raised

up, and endued with much strength, not for their own power or glory, but that they might smooth and prepare the way for the heavenly kingdom of Him Whose goings forth had been from everlasting, and of Whose dominion there was to be no end. And with all their fierceness, and rage, and cruelty-viewing them in the light of servants and executors of His designsHe Who had made them could pronounce their creation "good."

26. AND GOD SAID, LET US MAKE MAN IN OUR IMAGE, AFTER OUR LIKENESS.

The mysterious force of the expression "God said" has been already alluded to, as bringing before us that great and awful truth, the distinction of Persons in the Godhead; between Whom a sublime colloquy, so to speak, is shadowed forth as taking place on the occasion of this great event, the completion and development of the whole scheme of creation, the forma

tion of man.

The following words, "in Our image, after Our likeness," bring this plurality of Persons yet more vividly before us. God is in substance One; yet, in this adaptation to our faculties of things ineffable, He is represented as saying, "Let Us make man in Our image." And, though the phrase itself is indeed such as, of itself, to preclude the idea of the Almighty having thus spoken to any beings less than Divine, to Cherubim, for instance, or to Seraphim, yet, as though to give that idea an explicit contradiction, the words "in Our image" are in the next verse followed by these, "so God created man in His own image: in the image of God created He him."

It is needless to dwell on those distinctions between man and the other creatures of God's hand, which impressed on him the image of his Maker; on the powers of mind, and thought, and reasonable action;

on the capacities given him beyond and exceeding the visible system in which he was placed; or on the immortal destinies, which distinguished him from the beasts that perish. In all these man is God's image, but there is a higher sense, in which he bears that image yet more closely; that is, as regarded in connexion with the true, the second Adam, our blessed Lord and Saviour. He, saith St. Paul, is in His Divine nature "the brightness" of the Father's glory, "the express image" of His person; and when He deigned to assume the form of a creature, and to take His place, so to say, in the world of things visible, He exhibited to it that holy image after a manner ineffable and inconceivable, with such clearness as that he who had seen Him, had seen the Father, for in Him did and doth "all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," dwell.

Taking then the passage before us in

its spiritual meaning, we find in it the record of the great truth that, when the fulness of time was come-when history had sufficiently run its course, when the working of the laws of nature in things inanimate, and the operation of the designs, and thoughts, and passions, and schemes of many generations, mingling, combining and conflicting with each other, had produced that course of events throughout the world which was to precede, and to prepare the world for the Messiah's coming the Advent took place, the Man, the great Head of the human race, appeared in the world, the Word Which had been from everlasting, was "made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."