[#] Cf. Troward's Edinburgh Lectures.
So the first thought of to-day is that the world is ruled by Mind and not by Matter, that "there is a soul in all things, and that soul is God," that in the true philosophy of Creation every atom, every germ, has within it a principle, a life, a purpose, a degree of consciousness appropriate to its position in the scheme of things. That consciousness, that mind, differs in magnitude in its different manifestations; higher in the insect than in the vegetable, higher in the animal than in the insect, and occasionally there is evidenced in the animal a shrewdness which implies observation and close reasoning. For example, recently I was at Christchurch, in Hampshire, and was conducted by Mr. Hart over his unique museum of birds, representing the life-work of an expert and enthusiast. He told me many most interesting things, and amongst them the following:
It is well known that the cuckoo makes no nest of its own, but places its eggs in the nest of one of the smaller birds. Now, in order to deceive the bird amongst whose eggs the cuckoo intends to place its own egg, the cuckoo causes the egg it is about to lay to assume the colour and markings of the eggs of the small bird who is to be the foster-mother. Mr. Hart showed me over forty cuckoos' eggs, each one coloured to imitate the natural egg of the bird whose nest the cuckoo had commandeered. This had been done with extraordinary accuracy, from the bright blue of the hedge-sparrow's egg to the dull olive of the nightingale's egg, and even the peculiar markings, like notes of music, of the yellow-hammer's egg, had been imitated.
Consider the extraordinary mental power implied. The cuckoo has first to decide which nest she will lay under contribution. She has then to study the colouring of the eggs in that nest; then, with some amazing exercise of the creative power of thought, she has to cause her unlaid egg to assume that colour. She then lays it on the ground, and, carrying it in her beak, carefully places it amongst the eggs of the little foster-mother. What an intense, ever-present reality is the Infinite Mind! What a glorious thought it is that the Eternal Purpose is everywhere! When the heart grows faint and the hands weary, how sustaining it is to know that there is no chance, no mere machinery—everywhere purpose, intelligence, evolution, love!
Now, obviously the operation of the Originating Mind in all that is differs in quality of self-realization in proportion to the receptive capacity of the matter in which it is immanent. It is not sufficient for us intellectually to affirm the immanence of God in a blade of grass, but it is for us to carry the thought higher, and not to rest until we have realized that Divine immanence is in a far more intense degree in ourselves. Man is the crown of Creation, and when our Lord took that coin in His hand and asked the question, "Whose is this image and superscription?" He was stimulating thinkers to consider man's unique place in the cosmic order, and man's true relation to the Universal Originating Spirit; and when a man has really found that, he is well on his way to the region of understanding and realization.
These Pharisees were no obscurantists. Some of them were Essenes, some Therapeuts, some Mystics; and when the Lord asked "Whose is this image?" their minds would automatically have reverted to the profound declaration of human origins in the Book of Genesis: "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him." They would have realized that the question was a suggestion for a thought-excursion. It was. It was a hint at the transcendent truth of the elemental inseverability of God and man. It was an appeal to a Divine fact in man; it was a reiteration of His dogma, "The kingdom of Heaven is within you"; it was a reaffirmation of the truth that nothing can ever really change the central current of man's purpose, and regenerate man's nature, but the clear recognition of his dignity, his responsibility, his potentiality, as a vehicle for the manifestation of God. If they had brought to Jesus some utterly degraded specimen of the human race, as they brought Him that silver didrachma, and asked Him the question, "'Whose is the image and superscription' on this man?" (and they virtually did this when they brought Him the woman taken in adultery) there could have been but one reply—"In the image of God created He him"; and that which God has once impressed with His image, though that image may be defaced and overlaid, is His for ever, and the impress can never be obliterated.
You remember Tennyson's words:
"For good ye are and bad, and like to coins,
Some true, some light, but every one of you
Stamped with the image of the King."
"Stamped with the image of the King." The thought touches human life at many points, theological, personal, practical. The theological lesson from the human coin stamped with the Divine image is one of the utmost importance as a stimulus to spiritual growth. It is the transcendent twin-truth of the Eternal humanity in God, and the Eternal Divinity in man; that inasmuch as all that is must have pre-existed, as a first principle, in the mind of the Infinite Originator, and as the highest of all that is, so far as we at present know, is man, the archetypal original of man must be in the hidden nature of the Infinite Mind; and therefore man, however buried and stifled for educative purposes in the corruptible body, is in his inmost ego indestructible, and inseverably linked to the Father of Spirits. God needs man as a vehicle for Self-Manifestation. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork"; but only man—mental, moral, volitional man—can declare the nature of God and manifest the qualities of God. As God's power is revealed in the wheeling planet, God's nature is revealed in the thinking man. Man is therefore the special sphere of the self-manifestation of the Originating Mind. We humans are personal spirits who have proceeded from God into matter, and "the image and superscription" of the Creative Sovereign Power, whence we came, remains for ever indelibly impressed upon our inmost ego, and must work in us, and will work in us, until at last it unites our conscious mind fully with God. Inasmuch as humanity is the chosen vehicle of the self-expression of the moral qualities of the Originating Spirit, humanity will, through much initial imperfection and through many changes, evolve upwards and onwards, until at last it shall be complete in Him, and the preordained purpose of the Originating Spirit be completely fulfilled. He who believes this must be, theologically, a universalist.
There follows the personal lesson. The moral evolution of humanity is not automatic, it is not generic, it is not impersonal. It is individual, in accord with the personal equation of each one. Though it is a necessary philosophic truth that our true ego, our imperishable centre, is in the universal, and not in the imprisonment of what we now call personality, still we shall never lose our individuality, we shall always know that "I am I and no one else." "With God," said De Tocqueville, "each one counts for one," and each one must work out his own salvation. You and I will not drift onwards in a vague, impersonal stream called "the race." Each one of us is a responsible life-centre in which God has expressed Himself, and we have to become moral beings, and a moral being is not machine-made—he must be grown; he is the product of evolution, and for the purpose of evolution he must emerge triumphant from resistance, as every flower, every grape, every grain of corn in this church has emerged triumphant. In other words, he must be exposed to what, with our present imperfect knowledge, we call evil. It is just here that the analogy of the coin comes in. Man is a composite being—he possesses an inferior animal nature, a lower region of appetite, perception, imagination, and tendency; in other words, to carry on the analogy used by our Lord, there is a reverse side to every human coin. Don't overpress the analogy, but note that to every current coin there is a reverse side, and when you are looking at that side you cannot see the King's image. Generally on the reverse side there is some device representing a myth, or tradition, or national characteristic. For example, on the reverse side of this denarius, or silver didrachma, that they brought to our Lord, was a representation of Mercury with the Caduceus. Hold in your hand an English sovereign. Think of our Lord's analogy. Let the mind wander back into the distant past, and consider the ages during which that sovereign has been in the making: the precipitation of the chemical constituents of gold in prehistoric times, when the planet was emerging from the fiery womb that bore it; the forcing of the metal into the cells of the quartz under the incalculable pressure of the contracting, cooling world; the ages upon ages of concealment in the depths of the earth; the discovery of the metal, and all that was implied; the toil of the miners, the smelting, the refining, the alloying; and, at last, the stamping with the image and superscription of the reigning sovereign. And once stamped in the Mint it is an essential item in the economy of a great empire. It is legal tender—no man may refuse it in payment; at his peril does any man clip it or take from its weight. The image and superscription of the reigning sovereign gives it its dignity, its sphere of usefulness, even its name. Now turn it over; you can no longer see the image of the King. What is this on the reverse side? Another device, an heraldic design, symbolical of the traditions and myths of the nation; a transition from the real to the illusory, a representation of St. George fighting the dragon. "Whose is this image and superscription?" Whose handiwork is this? Examine closely the reverse side of a sovereign. Close to the date you will see some minute capital letters. They are the initials of the talented chief engraver to the Mint in the reign of George III., the designer of both sides of the coin which Ruskin said was the most beautiful coin in Europe, the English sovereign. Who is the engraver who has stamped the reverse of every human coin with the mythical designs of our human imagination, the pleasing illusions of our natural self-life, the device of our outer and common humanity, the conditions of our flesh-and-blood existence? Do you really believe that this was done by some powerful enemy of the Most High? The mythical, demonized objectification of what we call evil is greatly in the way of clear thought. St. Paul is careful to point out, in Romans viii., that there is only one Originator, and He can never be taken by surprise. Paul says man was "made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by God." The same omnipotent hand that stamped the King's image stamped also the reverse of the coin. The device on the reverse side of the human coin is the device of human heredity, the qualities of temperament, the race-memories which belong to the region of animal life-power. We have had "fathers of our flesh," the Apostle reminds us. They have transmitted to us, by human generations, tendencies appertaining to corporeal life. There is nothing to deprecate in these tendencies in themselves; they are all within the majestic lines of nature. Obviously, if we concentrate all our attention on the reverse side of the coin, if we persist in imagining that our animal nature is our real self, we forget that the King's image is on the other side. We can only see one side at a time, and while we gaze at the reverse side, and the other side is hidden, doubt, depression, pessimism, sense of separateness from God, are the inevitable result.