cunninger sort of animal, for
better for worse--and for worse as often as for better.'

Another says, not quite that. Man was in the likeness of God once,
but he lost that by Adam's fall, and now is only an animal with an
immortal soul in him, to be lost or saved.

There is more truth in that latter notion than in the former: but
if it be quite right; if we did lose the likeness of God at Adam's
fall, how comes the Bible never to say so? How comes the Bible
never to say one word on what must have been the most important
thing which ever happened to mankind before the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ?

And how comes it also that the New Testament says distinctly that
man is still made in the likeness of God? For St. Paul speaks of
man as 'the likeness and glory of God.' And St. James says of the
tongue, 'Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith' (to
our shame) 'curse we men, which are made in the likeness of God.'

But the great proof that man is made in the image and likeness of
God is the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ; for if human nature
had been, as some think, something utterly brutish and devilish, and
utterly unlike God, how could God have become man without ceasing to
be God? Christ was man of the substance of his mother. That
substance had the same human nature as we have. Then if that human
nature be evil, what follows? Something which I shall not utter,
for it is blasphemy. Christ has taken the manhood into God. Then
if manhood be evil, what follows again? Something more which I
shall not utter, for it is blasphemy.

But man is made in the image of God; and therefore God, in whose
image he is made, could take on himself his own image and likeness,
and become perfect man, without ceasing to be perfect God.

Therefore, my friends, it is a comfortable and wholesome doctrine,
that man is made in the image of God, and one for which we must
thank the Bible. For it is the Bible which has revealed that truth
to us, in its very beginning and outset, that we might have, from
the first, clear and sound notions concerning man and God. The
Bible, I say; for the sacred books of the heathen say, most of them,
nothing thereof.

Man has, in all ages, been tempted, when he looks at his own
wickedness and folly, not only to despise himself--which he has good
reason enough to do--but to despise his own human nature, and to cry
to God, 'Why hast thou made me thus?' He has cursed his own