2O4 Traces of Unity in tlie Personal, 



law of his mind- days ' after which, saith the Lord : I 

 will put my laws into their minds, and write them in 

 their hearts ; and I will be to them a God, and they 

 shall be to me a people : and they shall not teach every 

 man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying 

 Know the Lord ; for all men shall know me, from the 

 least to the greatest/ 



And, lastly, I am driven to the same conclusion by 

 the conviction of my own personality. I know that I 

 have a perfect right to say / am. And why ? Surely 

 by no lower right than that which is conferred upon me 

 as the image of Him whose name is I AM ! On this 

 ground my right is indefeasible ; on any other ground 

 I am in the same predicament as " the beasts that 

 perish." And thus, in my name no less than in my 

 nature, I am constrained to believe that man is literally 

 what he is revealed to be the " image of God." 



Nor need the keen sense of my own shortcomings 

 prevent me from reasoning in this way. On the contrary, 

 these very shortcomings may be nothing more than the 

 necessary consequence of the state of death in which, 

 according to the Scriptures, I now am. I am required 

 to believe that Adam died on the day on which he fell, 

 and that thenceforth his state and that of his descend- 

 ants, has been a state of death a state which, for any- 

 thing that appears to the contrary, may mean obscura- 

 tion to any extent of the divine image in man, obscura- 

 tion to the extent at present met with even. And if so, 

 then, instead of being a stumbling-block in the way of 

 receiving what is revealed respecting man, the very im- 

 perfections at present met with in man only serve to 

 attest the trustworthiness of the sacred record. 



Taking this view of the personal life of man it is 

 easy to advance a little further and see why the philo- 



