soul is a spirit. The essential attributes of a spirit are reason, conscience, and will. A spirit is a rational, moral, and therefore also, a free agent. In making man after his own image, therefore, God endowed him with those attributes which belong to his own nature as a spirit. Man is thereby distinguished from all other inhabitants of this world, and raised immeasurably above them. He belongs to the same order of being as God Himself, and is ^ therefore capable of communion with his Maker. This conformity of nature between man and God, is not only the distinguishing pre- rogative of humanity, so far as earthly creatures are concerned, but it is also the necessary condition of our capacity to know God, ^^ and therefore the foundation of our religious nature. If we were not like God, we could not know Him. We should be as the beasts which perish. The Scriptures in declaring that God is the Father of spirits, and that we are his offspring, teach us that we are partakers of his nature as a spiritual being, and that an essen- tial element of that likeness to God in which man J^'as originally created consists in our rational or spiritual nature. On this sub- ject, however, there have been two extreme opinions. The Greek theologians made the image of God in which man was created to consist exclusively in his rational nature. The majority of them taught that the ct/<wt' was eV XoytKrj ij/^xv > ^^ ^s John of Damascus ^ expresses it : to kut eiKova, to voepov SrjXoL KOL avre^ovcTiOV, And IrenaBus ^ says : " Homo vero rationabilis et secundum hoc similis Deo." Tiie Remonstrants and Socinians were disposed to confine the image of God in which man was created to his dominion. Thus Limborch '^ says : " Ilia imago aliud nihil est, quam eximia, quzedam qualitas et excellentia, qua homo Deum speciatim refert : haec autem est potestas et dominium, quod Deus homini dedit in
omnia a se creata Hoc enim dominio Deum proprie
refert, estque quasi visibilis Deus in terra super omnes Dei crea- turas constitutus." This dominion, however, was founded on man's rational nature, and therefore Limborch adds, that Adam's likeness to God pertained to his soul, " quatenus ratione instructa est, cujus ministerio, veluti sceptro quodam, omnia sibi subjicere potest." These views agree in excluding man's moral conformity to God from the idea of the divine image in which he was created. The Lutheran theologians were, in general, inclined to go to the opposite extreme. The image of God, according to them, was thai
1 II. 12; Strauss, Dogmatik, vol. i. p. 690.
2 IV. iv. 3 ; Works, edit. Leipzig, 1853, vol. i. p. 569.
2 Theologin Cliristinnn, ii. xxiv. 2, edit. Amsterdam, 1715, pp. 138, 184.