h God Himself. There are no gods
of the heathen so far away from their worshippers, and there are none so
near them, as our God. There is no god that men have bowed before, so
unlike the devotee; and there is no system which recognises that, as is
the Maker so are the made, in such thorough-going fashion as the Bible
does. The arched heaven, though high above us, it is not inaccessible in
its serene and cloudless beauty, but it touches earth all round the
horizon, and man is made in the image of God.

True, that divine nature of which the ideal man is the possessor has
faded away from humanity. But still the human is kindred with the
divine. The drop of water is of one nature with the boundless ocean that
rolls shoreless beyond the horizon, and stretches plumbless into the
abysses. The tiniest spark of flame is of the same nature as those
leaping, hydrogen spears of illuminated gas that spring hundreds of
thousands of miles high in a second or two in the great central sun.

And though on the one hand there be finiteness and on the other
infinitude: though we have to talk, in big words, of which we have very
little grasp, about 'Omniscience,' and 'Omnipresence,' and 'Eternity,'
and such like, these things may be deducted and yet the Divine nature
may be retained; and the poor, ignorant, finite, dying creature, that
perishes before the moth, may say, 'I am kindred with Him whose years
know no end; whose wisdom knows no uncertainty nor growth; whose power
is Omnipotence; and whose presence is everywhere.' He that can say, 'I
am,' is of the same nature as His whose mighty proclamation of Himself
is 'I AM THAT I AM.' He who can say 'I will' is of the same nature as He
who willeth and it is done.

But that kindred, belonging to every soul of man, abject as well as
loftiest, is not the 'partaking' of which my text speaks; though it is
the basis and possibility of it; for my text speaks of men as
'_becoming_ partakers,' and of that participation as the result, not of
humanity, but of God's gift of 'exceeding great and precious promises.'
That creation in the image and likeness of God, which is represented as
crowned by the very breath of God breathed into man's nostrils implies
not only kindred with God in personality and self-conscious will, but
also in purity and holiness. The moral kindred has darkened into
unlikeness, but the other remains. It is not the gift here spoken of,
but it supplies the basis which makes that gift