GENESIS I. 26, 27 49
winds to help him in braving the sea. And marvellous as is man's rule over external, dead nature, more marvellous still is his rule over animated nature. To see the trained falcon strike down the quarry at the feet of his master, and come back, when God's free heaven is before him ; to see the hound use his speed in the service of his master, to take a prey not to be given to himself ; to see the camel of the desert carrying man through his own home: all these show the creative power of man and his resemblance to God the Creator. Once more, God is a God of order. The universe in which God reigns is a domain in which order reigns from first to last, in which everything has its place, its appointed position ; and the law of man's life, as we have seen, is also order.^
There is no progress in the world of bees,
However wise and wonderful they are. Lies the bar,
To wider goals, in that tense strife to please
A Sovereign Kuler? Forth from flowers to trees
Their little quest is; not from star to star.
This is not growth; the mighty avatar
Comes not to do his work with such as these.^
3. The image or likeness is not that of the body only, or of the spirit only, but of the whole personality.
(1) It is perfectly certain that the Hebrews did not suppose this likeness to God to consist in any physical likeness. It is the doctrine of the Old Testament as well as of the New that God is a Spirit ; and, although He may have manifested Himself to men in human or angelic shape, He has no visible form, and cannot and must not be represented by any. " Thou sawest no form or similitude" (Deut. iv. 12). The image does not, directly at least, denote external appearance ; we must look for the resemblance to God chiefly in man's spiritual nature and spiritual endowments, in his freedom of will, in his self-consciousness, in his reasoning power, in his sense of that which is above nature, the good, the true, the eternal; in his conscience, which is the voice of God within him ; in his capacity for knowing God and holding com- munion with Him ; in a word, in all that allies him to God, al that raises him above sense and time and merely material con- siderations, all that distinguishes him from, and elevates him above, the brutes. So the writer of the apocryphal Book of
* F. W. Robertson. ' E. W. Wilcox, Poems of Experience, 72.
GEN.-NUM. — 4
50 IN THE IMAGE OF GOD
Wisdom says : " God created man to be immortal, and made him an image of his own eternity " (ii. 23).
(2) On the other hand, that this Divine image expresses itself and is seen in man's outward form cannot be denied. In looks, in bearing, in the conscious dignity of rule and dominion, there is a reflection of this Divine image. St. Augustine tries to make out a trinity in the human body, as before in the human mind, which shall correspond in its measure to the Divine Trinity. Neverthe- less, he says modestly : " Let us endeavour to trace in man's out- ward form some kind of footstep of the Trinity, not because it is of itself in the same way (as the inward being) the image of God. For the apostle says expressly that it is the inner man that is renewed after the image of Him that created him ; and again, * Though the outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.' Let us then look as far as it is possible in that which perisheth for a kind of likeness to the Trinity ; and if not one more express, at least one that may be more easily discerned. The very term ' outward man ' denotes a certain similitude to the inward man."
(3) But the truth is that we cannot cut man in two. The inward being and the outward have their correspondences and their affinities, and it is of the compound being man, fashioned of the dust of the earth and yet filled with the breath of God, that it is declared that he was created after the image of God. The ground and source of this his prerogative in creation must be sought in the Incarnation. It is this great mystery that lies at the root of man's being. He is like God, he is created in the image of God, he is, in St. Paul's words, the " image and glory of God " (1 Cor. xi. 7), because the Son of God took man's nature in the womb of His virgin mother, thereby uniting for ever the manhood and the Godhead in one adorable Person. This was the Divine purpose before the world was, and hence this creation of man was the natural consummation of all God's work.
4. And it is important to remember that the " image of God," according to Hebrew thought, was not completely lost, however seriously it may have been impaired, by what is described as the Fall. In Gen. v. 1-3, we read, " In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him ; male and female created he