in the Divine and human productions; nor can I doubt that, not only in
the pervading sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our
privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, but also in
that perception of harmony which constitutes the _musical_ sense, and in
that poetic feeling of which Scripture furnishes us with at once the
earliest and the highest examples, and which we may term the _poetic_
sense, we bear the stamp and impress of the Divine image. Now, if this
be so, we must look upon the schemes of Creation, Revelation, and
Providence, not as schemes of mere adaptation to man's nature, but as
schemes also specially adapted to the nature of God as the pattern and
original nature. Further, it speaks, I must hold, of the harmony and
unity of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity,--after
the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal should in
succession have terminated,--man should have at length come upon the
scene in the image of God; and that, at a still later period, God
himself should have come upon the scene in the form of man; and that
thus all God's workings in creation should be indissolubly linked to God
himself, not by any such mere likeness or image of the Divinity as that
which the first Adam bore, but by Divinity itself in the Second Adam; so
that on the rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being the
Son of God and the Son of Man should sit enthroned forever in one
adorable person. That man should have been made in the image of God
seems to have been a meet preparation for God's after assumption of the
form of man. It was perhaps thus secured that _stock_ and _graft_, if I
may venture on such a metaphor, should have the necessary affinity, and
be capable of being united in a single person. The false gods of the
Egyptians assumed, it was fabled, the forms of brutes: it was the human
form and nature that was assumed by the true God;--so far as we know,
the only form and nature that could have brought him into direct union
with at once the matter and mind of the universe which he had created
and made,--with "true body and reasonable soul." Yet further, I learn by
inevitable inference from one of the more distinctive articles of my
creed, that as certainly as the dynasty of the fish was predetermined in
the scheme of Providence to be succeeded by the higher dynasty of the
reptile, and that of the reptile by the still higher dynasty of the
mamma