takes a subordinate position, and measures its claim to our regard by the degree of its resemblance to the Divine Archetype. 5. Man's power of choosing, according to his appreciation of objects, and of corresponding voluntary action, discloses other objective relations. He is a creature of animal appetites; and external nature presents them with appropriate objects. He is capable of self-love-it is essential to his continued existence that he should be- and he, the subject of this regard, can, indirectly, become his own object. From the present, he can view himself objectively in the future, and can act from a regard to that future self. "Prudence is an active principle, and implies a sacrifice of self, though only to the same self projected as it were to a distance." He is susceptible of affections; and the external world presents him with objects calculated to keep them in perpetual play. He is capable of a sense of duty; and to this principle of action, the will of God, as the interpreter and enforcer of unalterable right, authoritatively appeals. Thus every part of his constitution finds its counterpart in the objective universe; from his appetites which stoop to gather up their objects from the dust, to his sense of duty which bears him away in homage to the throne of the Invisible. But how is the will of God, in the constitution of nature, ascertainable by man? We have found that it is expressed in the operation of general laws, that, in relation to these laws, he finds himself right or wrong in his every movement; and that having learned from experience what these laws are, he has learned the will of God respecting his conduct towards them; and, then, as a being made capable of voluntarily obeying that will, he is held responsible for pursuing that conduct, and is guilty or not guilty accordingly. And thus even when allowably gratifying appetite, or when rightly influenced by self-love, or by the affections, the fact that he is acting according to the will of God, is still to be the controlling and supreme consideration. Of course, if the Divine will be vocally and directly addressed to him, as in the instance of the primal prohibition, he can apprehend and yield to it at once. But even as far as he is referred for his knowledge of that will to the open volume of nature, so legibly is it written for the eye of conscience, that he may read that runs. There is, therefore, no part of his nature, and no moment of his existence, which is not met by the claims of duty. And the only condition on which he can be prepared to discharge the duty of any given moment is, that of his having fulfilled the obligation peculiar to every previous moment of his being. 6. Further, as man's powers of knowing, appreciating, and voluntarily acting in, the external world, bring him under obligation respecting the course and character of his action, we have found that he enjoys an amount of good, or well-being, proportioned to the discharge of his obligations. If the phenomena, mental and moral, which man exhibits, are not unconnected and capricious, but arranged in an orderly constitution, it follows that that constitution has a tendency and an end; that is, that its well-being is not only more apparent when it acts according to a certain plan, than when it is acting according to any other, but that its well-being entirely depends on its so acting. That end we believe to be the end for which everything else exists, and for which God himself wills and acts—the manifestation of the Divine excellence. Accordingly, as a part of the manifestation, man enjoys the advantage and pleasure of being in harmony with his relations to the great plan, even though acting in ignorance of them. As that distinguished part to whom the manifestation is made, his advantage is proportioned to the rank of the motive from which he acts. If he act rightly from any motive," verily, he has his reward." But he is capable of doing everything from the highest motive, from a regard to the same end for which God is conducting the great process of Divine manifestation; and, in proportion as he thus acts, he gains every inferior end, and shares with the Divine Being the happiness of realizing the highest end. Perhaps there is nothing which more convincingly shows that the nature of man is arranged on a plan, and that that plan harmonizes with the great objective plan which includes everything, than the various grounds assigned by different writers as the basis of moral obligation. If one aflirms, for instance, that morality is founded on the emotions, it indicates the fact that the whole of our emotional nature is harmonized with all the requirements of morality. If another contends that it is obligatory because it is agreeable to reason and the nature of things, this only shows that our intellectual nature is made to harmonize with it as well as our emotional. If the the selfist contends that the good of self is the only principle of virtue, this, at least, indicates that our sensitive nature has been made coincident with the laws of morality. If the utilitarian contends that only the useful is virtuous, this implies that we are under the economy of a Being who has made our duty and our welfare to coincide. Or, if it be affirmed that the will of God is the ultimate foundation of right, this obviously implies that obedience and happiness are relative terms. We have seen, indeed, that the true basis of morality is distinct from the exercise of mere will; that it has an independent existence anterior to law, and of which law is only the proclamation; that it had an eternal pre-existence in the character of the Godhead. But all these differing views conspire to show, at least, how essentially the laws of morality are inwrought into man's nature, into every part of it; how entirely "the man in the breast," answers to the objective economy on high; and how truly the human character is formed on the model of the Divine, and in order to its manifestation. God and man are, in this sense, relative terms. 7. Hypothetically speaking, man might have been constituted precisely as he now is, before the world for which he is made was called into existence. And, then, a being, adequately endowed might have inferred, had man's slumbering faculties and susceptibilites been disclosed to him, the constitution of the world he was destined to inhabit. Just as, perhaps, angelic beings, on the other hand, did vaguely infer, from an inspection of that world, the constitution of the being for whom it was designed. Not only, therefore, is every part of man's nature related to, and in analogy with, every other part, but the whole is in correspondence with the objective universe. He stands in the centre of the whole, with every law and influence meeting in him, every object and event leaving an impression on him, A celestial globe, on which every constellation and star has its place, and which is rectified for taking astronomical observations, is but an imperfect image of man's correspondence with the objective universe. He lives as within an illuminated globe - his own mind the flame which illuminates it, the light by which he reads it. Every object and event which he witnesses, and every law which he traces, writes the fact of its existence on his mind. So that if a supernatural being, as we just now remarked, could have synthetically conjectured what kind of a world the earth would be from looking at his powers and susceptibilities, just as well could such a being now infer, analytically, what kind of an economy, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, he has inhabited, by examining the prints and traces which it leaves upon the mind. 8. We have now to glance at certain analogies between the *Dr. Chalmers's Bridgewater Treatise, v. ii., p. 93; Warburton's Divine Legation, B. I., §§ iv. v. commencement of the human dispensation and those which preceded it. The creation of man interrupted the course of nature neither more nor less than it had been interrupted by prior creations. If there be one conclusion in philosophy more certain than another, it is that the material universe must have had a beginning. Equally evident is it, not only to reason but to sense, that since the period of that primary miracle-when first the possible became actual, and law became objective—a succession of changes and additions have taken place, each of a kind entirely unknown to all that had gone before. Great cosmical changes have occurred. Stars have appeared and disappeared. On the globe which we inhabit, geology shows that changes such as man's limited experience has never witnessed, have occurred, times without number. To say nothing of the eventful moment when the great mystery of Life first appeared on the earth, and of the equally-marked occasion when a sense of animal enjoyment was first added to life, whole races of animals have, since then, appeared and disappeared, and have been replaced by others in turn. Four times, at least, did these changes take place in the course of the tertiary era; and, to an extent which leaves hardly a species of the first period extant among the species now living. Now the present laws of nature, as known to man, will not account for the origination of these species. These laws announce themselves only as regulating the succession of species already originated-the production of similar beings from their parent stock. Something, therefore, must have taken place at the first appearance of these beings to which the laws of nature, as we see them in operation, are not adequate. The new consequent implies a new antecedent. The new effect to which nature is inadequate, implies a cause which is super-natural. The inference is, that every such effect is directly originated by the same Cause as that to which nature itself owes its origin. And this is, substantially, the Biblical statement respecting the origin of man. He takes his place on the earth as one in a progressive series of creations. An intelligent being of another order - the Cuvier of a different world if permitted to examine the animal remains in our earth's crust, could only infer that, at widely-separated periods, new classes of organized beings had been created, and that among the newest of such creations was one answering to the description of man. * Herschel's Astronomy, p. 383; Proc. R. Ast. Soc., No. iii., Jan. 1840. 9. In prior creations, respect had been had to the physical fitness of the earth's condition to the peculiar constitution of the new-made beings. If, indeed, the theory of creation or development by natural law be adopted, it would follow that as soon as ever certain natural conditions were present, certain creatures would start into life by inevitable necessity. But conditions are not causes; nor does the evidence adduced in support of the theory, prove anything more than the ease with which uniform conjunction may be mistaken for necessary connection. The uniform conjunction of which we speak is, not that the animal invariably follows the physical condition, but that the existence of certain forms of animal life uniformly presuppose certain adapted states of the element they inhabit. Though water did not create fish, the existence of marine tribes presupposes, not the sea merely, but the existence of a marine temperature and condition suited to their sustenance. Similarly, the period of man's creation was related to the physical condition of the earth. The probability is, indeed, that, as far as these conditions are concerned, he might have been created earlier or later, had the Creating will so determined; that is, that during, at least, the latter part of the tertiary period, the state of the earth was not unfitted for his existence. There was, however, a prior period when, with his present constitution, existence would have been impossible. And not until that condition of the earth had passed away, was man brought into being. The Mosaic account of the Adamic creation is, in one view, an exposition of the fitness of the earth for man's habitation. 10. But (it may be asked) is it not contrary to all analogy, and enough to shake our confidence in the uniformity of Nature, that, after the course of things had proceeded regularly for an indefinite series of ages, a being so unique as man should at length appear on the earth? Doubtless, we reply, his creation demonstrates how dangerous it is for a being who has only the experience of a thousand ages, to indulge in confident speculations respecting what contingencies will take place in the empire of an infinite and eternal Being. An intelligent creature who had observed the order of events during all those ages, and who had presumed dogmatically to predict the same order for all the future, would have felt Divinely rebuked by this unexpected innovation on his views, and might have derived from it the salutary lesson that his limited knowledge was hardly a fitting standard with which to measure beforehand the contents |