l_
dynasty. In the first dawn of being, simple vitality was united to
matter: the vitality thus united became, in each succeeding period, of a
higher and yet higher order;--it was in succession the vitality of the
mollusc, of the fish, of the reptile, of the sagacious mammal, and,
finally, of responsible, immortal man, created in the image of God. 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 the 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 natures, 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. 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 recognise the adorable
Monarch of all the Future. It is, as urged by the Apostle, the especial
glory of our race, that it should have furnished that point of contact
at which Godhead has united Himself, not to man only, but also, through
man, to His own Universe--to the Universe of Matter and of Mind.

I remained for several months in delicate and somewhat precarious
health. My lungs had received more serious injury than I had at first
supposed; and it seemed at one time rather doubtful whether the severe
mechanical irritation which had so fretted them that the air-passages
seemed overcharged with matter and stone-dust, might not pass into the
complaint which it stimulated, and become confirmed consumption.
Curiously enough, my comrades had told me in sober earnest--among the
rest, Cha, a man of sense and observation--that I would pay the forfeit
of my sobriety by being sooner affected than they by the stone-cutter's
malady: "a good _bouse_" gave, they said, a wholesome fillip to the
constitu