The purpose of Jehovah seemed to be defeated when sin entered into the world, and the indispensable conditions of spiritual growth and pre-eminence ceased to exist, but it has
PSALM VIII. 5 231
never been abandoned. It is realized through Christ, as Head of a new humanity, who, by uniting them to Himself, as partakers of His own life, restores to men all they had lost, whether actual or possible. They become associated with Him in the highest glory and honour.
In the light of these comments we can understand the efifective use which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews makes of the 8th Psalm in chap. ii. 5-10. The splendid significance which he attributes to it is quite within its legitimate scope and meaning, in its historic connexion with the account in Genesis.
4. It is to be noticed that the familiar words of the fifth verse, "For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels," are changed by the Eevisers into, " For thou hast made him but little lower than God." No alteration can possibly be more significant. Seeing that its accuracy is indisputable, one may truthfully assert that this single correction is sufficient in itself to justify the replacement of the older version by the newer, wherever the Bible is read in public. Old association is nothing in comparison with truth. Nor can any truth be of greater importance than the difference between angels and God, as related to humanity. If it be asked why the writer of Hebrews in the second chapter refers to man as being " a little lower than the angels," the answer is very simple. He was evidently quoting from memory, and his remembrance was not of the Hebrew Scriptures, but of their translation into Greek in the Septuagint. This was a version made some two centuries before Christ by a number of Jewish scholars, for the benefit of their fellow-countrymen in North Africa who had lost the use of their mother-tongue. They were probably deterred by reasons of reverence from adopting what they knew to be the exact translation, and so fell back upon a secondary meaning of the word " Elohim." But timidity has no more right than rashness to rob us of that which is true. In matters of such vast import we need not only the truth, but the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There is little signifi- cance or inspiration for us in the suggestion of our kinship to angels ; but the whole meaning of our life, as well as all our hope beyond death, turns upon the question whether or not we are related to God. As the worth of every coin in this realm depends
232 THE GREATNESS OF MAN
upon the impress of the royal image, not that of any statesman, so does the intrinsic value of human nature, together with its present duty and eternal hope, depend, not upon kinship with angels, but upon the reality of that relationship to the Divine which is so graphically set forth in the first chapter of Genesis.^
If The race started high. At the beginning of his career man's moral and spiritual plane was but little lower than that of the Deity. Humanity is Jehovah's finest product. God's greatest work is not a planet, a shining sun, an ether sea, a potent law, a celestial city ; it is not singing angels and shining seraphim, but man. At the summit of creation God made man but little lower than God, stamped him with the Divine image, crowned him, and gave him dominion over all creatures. This is the Bible doctrine of the origin of man, and it takes us to the heights. To be a member of the human race, the Psalmist declares, is to come of a great line. It is to have Jehovah for an hereditary ancestor. It is to trace one's descent from altitudes but little lower than the lofty peaks whose dizzy heights lose themselves in the clouds of the infinite, where Divine Being has its explanation. To have the blood of man in your veins is to be dowered with a heritage of being past the price of all worlds and the glory of all angels.
One may be a very lowly, a very humble and obscure and unworthy member of this human race ; he may be some unfor- tunate defective or cripple ; he may be a vagabond on the streets, a waif without a home, a criminal in a dungeon, the victim of his own vices ; but upon him there lingers the tracery of the skies and about him is the livery, though in rags, of the life that is but little lower than God. He belongs to the first family of the realm. He possesses a dignity unequalled by all material things. He has a soul; and Jesus was speaking calmly and without exaggeration when He said : " What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? " ^
Hark ! the Eden trees are stirring, Slow and solemn to your hearing! Plane and cedar, palm and fir, Tamarisk and juniper, Each is throbbing in vibration Since that crowning of creation, When the God-breath spake abroad, Pealing down the depths of Godhead,
* F. Ballard, Does it Matter what a Man Believes ? 154.