LETTER XYIII. 



193 



ture on this subject is rather obscurely hinted at than 

 directly stated ; and by a satisfactory solution, I mean 

 such a solution as, when presented to her, though 

 beyond her power to discover, reason can recognise 

 as true— a solution which she can acquiesce in, as in 

 harmony with what she has herself discovered of the 

 Constitution and Course of Nature." 



8. So far, indeed, we may proceed in this inquiry 

 without any guidance from Revelation. Natural reason 

 can see that man is a spirit, endowed with understand- 

 ing and conscience, with emotional susceptibilities and 

 with voluntary power. And the commonest observa- 

 tion is sufficient to demonstrate that he is the highest 

 and the greatest of the living creatures that dwell on 

 this earth. But it is from Revelation alone that we 

 learn that he only, of all those creatures, has been 

 made in the image and after the likeness of God ; and, 

 vast as must ever be the distance between the creature 

 and the Creator, that he has been made as high as a 

 little lower than the Divine Nature * that he holds 



* Psalm viii. 5. — "A little lower than the angels." Milton has 

 it — " Scarce to be less than Gods." Not to enter on an exegetical 

 question which lies beyond my province, I would merely observe, 

 on the authority of my friend the Rev. J. G. Wright, of St An- 

 drew's Presbyterian Church, Southampton (to whom I am indebted 

 for the view taken in the text), that in the original Hebrew, the 

 word which our translators (herein foUov^dng the Septuagint ver- 

 sion) have rendered " angels," is the same plural noun (Elohim) that 

 occurs in the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, and is there 



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