terior to the creation. The
devil is spoken of by John, with prominent consistency, as bearing
the same relation to darkness, falsehood, sin, and death that God
bears to light, truth, righteousness, and life, that is, as being
their original personality and source. Whether the belief itself
be true or not, be reconcilable with pure Christianity or not, in
our opinion John undoubtedly held the belief of the personality of
the source of wickedness, and supposed that the great body of
mankind had been seduced by him from the free service of heaven,
and had become infatuated in his bondage.

Just here in the scheme of Christianity arises the necessity,
appears the profound significance in the apostolic belief, of that
disinterested interference of God through his revelation in Christ
which aimed to break the reigning power of sin and redeem lost
men from the tyranny of Satan. "For this purpose the Son of God
was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil."

That is to say, the revelation of the nature and will of God in
the works of the creation and in the human soul was not enough,
even when aided by the law of Moses, to preserve men in the
truth and the life. They had been seduced by the evil one into
sin, alienated from the Divine favor, and plunged in darkness
and death. A fuller, more powerful manifestation of the
character, claims, attractions of the Father was necessary to
recall the benighted wanderers from their lost state and restore
them to those right relations and to that conscious communion with
God in which alone true life consists. Then, and for that purpose,
Jesus Christ was commissioned to appear, a pre existent being of
most exalted rank, migrating from the super stellar sphere into
this world, to embody and mirror forth through the flesh those
characteristics which are the natural attributes of God the Father
and the essential conditions of heaven the home. In him the
glorious features of the Divinity were miniatured on a finite
scale and perfectly exhibited, "thus revealing," (as Neander says,
in his exposition of John's doctrine,) "for the first time, in a
comprehensible manner, what a being that God is whose holy
personality man was created to represent." So Philo says, "The
Logos is the image of God, and man is the image of the Logos."35
Therefore, according to this view, man is the image of the image
of God. The dimmed, imperfect reflection of the Father, originally
shining in natu