m in this great work ye
may be elevated and saved. Made originally in the image of God, let God
be your pattern and example. Engaged in your material and temporal
employments, labor in the proportions in which he labored; but, in order
that you may enjoy an eternal future with him, rest also in the
proportions in which he rests.

One other remark ere I conclude. In the history of the earth which we
inhabit, molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession
their periods of vast duration; and then the human period began,--the
period of a fellow worker with God, created in God's own image. What is
to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the
past?--an introduction a second time of man made in the image of God?
No. The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records,
finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There
has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of
the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its
inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty--"the _kingdom_"--not of
glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form
of man. In the doctrine of the two conjoined natures, human and Divine,
and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be
peculiarly the dynasty of HIM in whom the natures are united, we find
that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. We find the
point of elevation never to be exceeded meetly coincident with the final
period never to be terminated,--the infinite in height harmoniously
associated with the eternal in duration. Creation and the Creator meet
at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead
matter to man has been a progress Godwards,--not an asymptotical
progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union;
and occupying that point as true God and true man,--as Creator and
created,--we recognize the adorable Monarch of all the future!

LECTURE FOURTH.

THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION.

The history of creation is introduced into the "Paradise Lost" as a
piece of narrative, and forms one of the two great episodes of the poem.
Milton represents the common father of the race as "led on" by a desire
to know

"What within Eden or without was done
Before his memory;"

and straightway Raphael, "the affable archangel," in compliance with the
wish, enters into a description of the six days' work of