om its
beams, while my knowledge, like the lesser light, shines by reflected
radiance, serves but to make the night visible, and is crescent and
decaying, changeful and wandering? No. All such distinctions based upon
what people call the sovereign attributes of God--the distinctions of
creator and created, infinite and finite, omnipotent and weak, eternal
and transient--make no real gulf between God and man. If we have only to
say, 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are' His 'ways higher
than' our 'ways,' that difference is not unlikeness, and establishes no
separation; for low and flat though the dull earth be, does not heaven
bend down round it, and send rain and sun, dew and blessing? But it is
because 'your ways are not _as_ my ways'--because there is actual
opposition, because the _directions_ are different--that there is
unlikeness. The image of God lies not only in that personality which the
'Father of Lies' too possesses, but in 'righteousness and holiness.'

But besides this reference to the original creation of man, there is
another reason for the representation of the new nature as being a work
of divine creative power. It is in order to give the most emphatic
expression possible to the truth that we do not make our righteousness
for ourselves, but receive it as from Him. The new man is not our work,
it is God's creation. As at the beginning, the first human life is
represented as not originated in the line of natural cause and effect,
but as a new and supernatural commencement, so in every Christian soul
the life which is derived from God, and will unfold itself in His
likeness, comes from His own breath inbreathed into the nostrils. It too
is out of the line of natural causes. It too is a direct gift from God.
It too is a true supernatural being--a real and new creation.

May I venture a step further? 'The new man' is spoken of here as if it
had existence ere we 'put it on.' I do not press that, as if it
necessarily involved the idea which I am going to suggest, for the
peculiar form of expression is probably only due to the exigencies of
the metaphor. Still it may not be altogether foreign to the whole scope
of the passage, if I remind you that the new man, the true likeness of
God, has, indeed, a real existence apart from our assumption of it. Of
course, the righteousness and holiness which make that new nature in me
have no being till they become mine. But we believe that the
righteousness an