(3) But the chief difficulty is sin and the fruits of it. What then ? Are we to abandon in despair our hopes for our fellows, and to smile with quiet incredulity at the rhapsodies of sanguine theorists like David ? If we are to confine our view to earth — yes. But there is more to see than the sad sights around us. All these men — these imperfect, degraded, half-brutified men — have their share in our Psalm. They have gone out and wasted their substance in riotous living ; but from the swine-trough and the rags they may come to the best robe and the feast in the father's house. The veriest barbarian, with scarcely a spark of reason or a flickering beam of conscience, sunken in animal delights, and vibrating between animal hopes and animal fears — to him may belong the wondrous attributes ; to be visited by God, crowned with glory and honour, higher than all stars, and lord of all creatures.
^ I see Jesus ; and my most vexing questions are answered, my most grievous misgivings dispelled.
I contrast my littleness and weakness with the vastness of the material world round about me, and with the inexorable action of natural law, and I am sorely disquieted ; what am I among these constellations and systems and irresistible forces ? But He redeems me at a tremendous cost, and I know that I must be a thing of price.
I look at my solitude in the midst of the millions who people the universe ; and again I am filled with perplexity and fore- boding. But He loves me and gives Himself for me ; He sanctifies and keeps and chastens and cleanses me — me apart from all others. So I am comforted, for I understand that I am not forgotten.
I think of my guiltiness and sin in the presence of the holy ' J. E. Hellier, Life of David Hill, 74.
t'SALM VIII. ^ 241
law; and this thought begets still keener doubts and worse alarms. But His Cross assures me that there are remembrance and forgiveness and welcome for guilty men. It justifies me altogether. It solves my every difficulty, victoriously, touch- ingly, divinely.
I am saddened by the shortness and transitoriness of my life ; once more trouble is born within my soul. But then there rises in front of me the sight of Him who has conquered death as my Eepresentative and Forerunner, leaving behind Him a rifled and empty grave. Here is the very consolation for which I yearn.
The vision of Jesus is indeed the medicine for all my dis- tresses. It never fails to effect a cure. It ends my every sick- ness, solves my every riddle, peoples my every desolation, defeats my every dread.^
2. Two facts are to be taken into account. And when both are reckoned with then we know that man is indeed and in truth " but little lower than God."
(1) The first fact is Creation. — Turn to that noble archaic record. Gen. i. 26-28, which transcends the imaginings of modern science as far as it does those legends of creation which make the heathen literature with which they are incorporated incredible. Its simplicity, its sublimity, its fitness attest its origin and authority to be Divine. " God created man in his own image " (Gen. i. 27). There we have the Divine likeness. Our mental and moral nature is made on the same plan as God's : the Divine in miniature. Truth, love, and purity, like the principles of mathematics, are the same in us as in Him. If it were not so, we could not know or understand Him. But since it is so, it has been possible for Him to take on Himself our nature — possible also that we shall be one day transformed to the perfect image of His beauty.
But we must notice that it is in relation to God, because of the Divine likeness, not in himself, that man is great. One of the ablest attempts to supersede Christianity is that which goes by the name of Positivism or the Eeligion of Humanity, which sets Man on the throne of the universe, and makes of him the sole object of worship. " A helper of men outside Humanity," said the late Professor Clifford, " the Truth will not allow us to see. The dim and shadowy outlines of the Superhuman Deity fade
^ A. Smellie, In the Hour 0/ Silence, 189. JOB-PS. XXX. — 16
24^ THE GREATNESS OF MAN
slowly away from before us, and, as the mist of His Presence floats aside, we perceive with greater and greater clearness the shape of a yet grander and nobler figure, of Him who made all gods and shall unmake them. From the dim dawn of history, and from the inmost depths of every soul, the face of our Father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in His eyes, and says, ' Before Jehovah was, I am.' "
^ The Great Being, Humanity, is only an abstraction. " There is no such thing in reality," Principal Caird reminds us, " as an animal which is no particular animal, a plant which is no particular plant, a man or humanity which is no individual man. It is only a fiction of the observer's mind." There is logical force as well as humorous illustration in the contention of Dean Page Roberts, that " there is no more a humanity apart from individual men and women than there is a great being apart from all individual dogs, which we may call Caninity, or a transcendent Durham ox, apart from individual oxen, which may be named Bovinity." Nor does the geniality of Mr. Chesterton render his argument the less telling : " It is evidently impossible to worship Humanity, just as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club : both are excellent institutions, to which we may happen to belong. But we perceive clearly that the Savile Club did not make the stars and does not fill the universe. And it is surely unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism, and then to ask men to worship a being who is ninety million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance." ^