LECTURE VIII.
MAN, THE IMAGE OF GOD.
BY REV. HENRY GILES.
“FOR A MAN INDEED OUGHT NOT TO COVER HIS HEAD, FORASMUCH AS HE IS THE IMAGE AND GLORY OF GOD.”—1 Cor. xi. 7.
“AND WHEN HE CAME TO HIMSELF, HE SAID—HOW MANY HIRED SERVANTS OF MY FATHER’S HAVE BREAD ENOUGH AND TO SPARE, AND I PERISH WITH HUNGER. I WILL ARISE, AND GO TO MY FATHER, AND WILL SAY UNTO HIM,—FATHER, I HAVE SINNED AGAINST HEAVEN AND BEFORE THEE, AND AM NO MORE WORTHY TO BE CALLED THY SON; MAKE ME AS ONE OF THY HIRED SERVANTS.”—Luke xv. 17-19.
We are often told that man was originally created in the image of his Maker; and, in the same connection, we are told that, in his fall, he lost it. If this be true, we might expect that Scripture writers, in alluding to fallen man, would never ascribe to him so holy a resemblance. Paul, however, does it in one of the texts I have quoted; and Paul is not alone in this ascription. In an ordinance to Noah, immediately after the deluge, we find the same truth made the foundation of a most solemn injunction. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”[[518]] Had the resemblance of God been effaced from the soul of man in the fall of Adam, there had been in this ordinance neither meaning nor solemnity. Since, therefore, the sacred writer uses the fact of man’s likeness to God to stamp deeper guilt on the crime of murder; since, moreover, that fact is alleged after the narration of the fall,—we are justified by Scripture in claiming this high and glorious distinction for our universal nature.
I have quoted the second text, because the principle implied in it is identical with that which I stand here to maintain, namely, that sin is not of our nature, but against it; that it is not consistent with it, but contradictory to it; that to be sinful, is not to be natural, but unnatural. Sin, properly speaking, is moral delirium; and the progress towards that last paroxysm which, by revulsion, arouses the soul from its madness, is eloquently symbolised in the parable from which my second text is taken. Having tried all that sin could offer him; having sunk to the very husks of carnal appetites, and vainly sought thus to satisfy the hunger of an immortal soul, wearied, disappointed, and disgusted; satiated, but not satisfied, the prodigal arises from his torpor; he awakens from his wildering dream; the delirium that so long beset him is dispersed; with a calm and clear brain he finds himself in open day-light, and discerns the empty and unsubstantial vanities for which, in a false hope, he spent his labour and his strength, to reap at last, in the bitterness of a repentant heart, nothing but grief, tribulation, and anguish.
Sin is not a following of nature, but a violence on it; not conformity, but contradiction to it. And so, as when returning life beats in the palsied heart, or the dawn of reason bursts again on the madman’s brain, the prodigal is said “to come to himself;” when the spirit of moral renovation opens on him with compunctuous visitings of nature, and reveals to him a full sense of his condition. In his guilt he was at variance with all the moral instincts of humanity; and, in the sorrow of repentance, he needed as much to be at peace with himself as with his father. It is universally thus. God has established a certain order and harmony in our nature, appointed to each faculty a place and a purpose; and, in disturbing this arrangement, we become transgressors. We cannot sin against God without also sinning against our own souls, for in them is the primitive revelation of God; and in thus sinning against our own souls, we may practically resist all the divine attributes of which our weak faculties are the dim reflection; God’s wisdom in the abuse of our intellect; his greatness in the loss of our moral dignity; his goodness in the destruction of our charities; his purity in the corruption of our hearts. Unitarians are accused of making sin a light matter. We protest against the justice of the accusation. We hold sin to be the greatest of evils, and the most dire of miseries. We hold it not as a mere social impropriety, but we regard it as a dark disloyalty against conscience and against God. Much suffering, we know, it inflicts on society; but slight, indeed, is it compared with the ruin and devastation it works in our own souls. Here, at first, God impressed his image; here, at last, he fixes his tribunal: it is here his voice was heard in kindness, it is here it shall be also heard in judgment. God’s government is, like himself, spiritual. Man rules by outward power, God by inward inspiration; and it is the peculiarity of the divine legislation that, in the same individual, it attaches the condemnation to the crime; forces transgression, to pronounce its own sentence, and to inflict its own punishment. Human society has set up various bulwarks to guard its security; human law-givers have accompanied their enactments with fiercest penalties; and before Draco, and since, millions upon millions of God’s erring creatures have been offered, a sanguinary sacrifice to justice: superstition has personified all hideous evil in Satan,—the mighty sinner of creation,—the minister of eternal vengeance,—the great executioner of the universe; superstition has spread the limitless prisons of hell, and filled them with tortures, and lit those flames which it asserts are kept burning by the breath of an angry God, and are never to be quenched during his everlasting existence; but we assert, there is no scorn of society, there is no torture of most cruel laws, there is no hell of superstition, deep, burning, and eternal as it may be, that can equal the agonies which man’s own sense of wrong and degradation heap upon his overwhelmed and sunken spirit. The glory of an immortal soul is beyond all outward glories; the majesty of empires and crowns, the splendour of the sun, the beauty of the firmament, the riches of the universe, are nothing in comparison. We say to those to whom it is our privilege to minister, though you were stripped of all that constitute your frail and present happiness; though saddest reverses became your lot; though God laid his hand heavily upon you and your family, tore you from that rank and station that now make your glory; though your children and friends were one by one snatched from you, until you stood in the world-wilderness like a branchless and a blasted tree; though all illness of body and grief of mind were yours,—having an upright soul, it is but a light affliction compared with a guilty conscience, which could wield over earth a universal sceptre. The wages of sin is death,—death in the most tremendous meaning of that tremendous word,—death of purity, death of holy confidence, death of self-respect, death of inward and outward peace. Sin is misery, and the worst of miseries,—one that carries with it its own vengeance, is self-punished and self-cursed. True, we recognize no omnipresent and invisible tempter; true, we hold no gross and eternal punishment; we preach no original malediction, and no inherent depravity; we proclaim no sin which blots out all light and hope around the mercy-seat of God, and scathes the heart of man with everlasting despair. True, we show you no maniac penitents, bewildered in the madness of remorse, shrieking on the death-bed which conscience peoples with furies. We announce no deity coming from heaven, putting on the frail existence of humanity, and expiating on the cross the sin which had closed all access to peace. We cannot, and if we could we would not, freeze your hearts with ideas of torture, nor appal you with threatenings, nor echo on your ears the groans that never cease, the weepings, the wailings, the knashing of teeth, the sighs and hopeless complainings that swell for ever and ever a thickening smoke of torment. Independently of these things, there are other considerations more solemn,—more solemn, because more true,—there is our conscience; there is our peace; there is the dignity of our whole spiritual nature; there is reverence for duty; there is the power to enjoy what is pure and beautiful; there is fitness for communion with God, with all the righteous and the excellent,—these may be lost, or clouded by sin; and they may be so lost as never fully to be recovered. We count sin no slight evil, either as to its inward spirit or outward influence: as I have stated, so we preach. And here, once for all, I enter my protest against the impeachment which charges us with stripping guilt of its danger and its awfulness.
I. Human nature, according to the point from which we regard it, has a good or an evil aspect, each perfectly distinct, and each perfectly true. The whole truth is then in neither separately, but in both conjointly. Fixing too intently on either, and carrying our ideas to extremes, we may, on the one side, flatter human nature above its merits; or, on the other, be guilty towards it of injustice: on the one side see in it all possible good, and on the other nothing but incorrigible evil: on the one side soar into Utopianism, and on the other descend into Calvinism. The Calvinistic view we hold to be false, the Utopian impossible. We have no idea of any perfect goodness or perfect happiness in this world, either possessed or to be attained. Whilst we pace our way in this earthly pilgrimage, sin and suffering must more or less track our steps; the prodigal’s confession, and the publican’s prayer, must still be ours; the most favoured of God’s children have to meet, and bear their allotted griefs,—to see their glory grow dim, the desire of their eyes vanish, and to look onward and backward through the mist of tears. Sufficient of stern realities press upon us to crush at once the vision of a painless and sinless beatitude. Physical wants and sufferings, the inevitable condition of our mortal nature, were there no other, are of themselves equal to the purpose. While an hospital exists among men, breathing with groans and sickly in its very look; while a death-bed is found, steeped in the weepings of affliction; whilst a stone marks and commemorates a spot where the dust is sacred to affection and to sorrow; the wildest dreamer has enough to rebuke his enthusiasm, and to cool it into soberness. And extreme or exaggerated expectations of our nature, are in still stronger contradiction to our moral constitution than our physical. In every individual, however humble his grade, and however sluggish his faculties, there is abundance to make him aware that perfection here is neither his condition nor his destiny,—numberless desires, passions, hopes, fears, expectancies; and no one imagines that all his desires are to be gratified, all his passions fulfilled, all his hopes accomplished, all his fears removed, all his expectancies realized. Want and wish pursue their strife to the end. As it is with the individual, so is it with society: for as society is an aggregate of individual persons, social character is an aggregate of individual characters. Evils, sins, and sorrows, must always, we fear, exist, both in the depths and on the surface of the great community: we look for no period in future time, when those antagonist passions and rivalries shall be extinct—which place man into resisting contact to man, when riches, and fame, and power, shall not be sought for with avidity and strife, and create the throng of passions which spring from their desire and their abuse: we look for no period when the strong universally will use their strength in righteousness and mercy, when the poor and the weak shall cease to be victims, and have full justice done to them: we dare scarcely hope for a period when the massive throne of tyranny, whether political or sacerdotal, should be swept away upon the flood of emancipated progression; and, with equal fear, we think of the tyrannies of caste and creed, not less dark or obstinate; and although not entirely in despair, we look forward with timid anticipation to a time when the war of opinion shall be changed for Christian peace, and the fierce cry of bigotry give place to the hymn with which the angels sung our Saviour’s birth. We see no prospect that men shall lay aside their selfishness, and act in the spirit of universal charity, or that they shall so curb it as to harmonize it with the good of others! that they shall become universally disinterested, forbearing, candid, and generous; that the proud man will put off his scorn, and the oppressor break or throw away his sceptre. Moral and social evils will unquestionably be mitigated, but the sources of them lie too deep for extinction,—were extinction desirable, which it is not: for these elements of our nature are wrong only accidentally; while, essentially, they are right. Knowing that an argument gains nothing by concealing the objections to it, I have thus far been liberal in admissions: I will make one admission more. I acknowledge that an over-estimate of the actual condition and prospects of human nature, as well as their undue depreciation, is likely to have injurious consequences. One of the worst is this: that, creating vivid and unreal hopes, they rebound with harsh and cruel disappointments; the fervour of expectation turns into despair; the glow of generous, but blasted enthusiasm, cools down into apathy, if it does not wither into cynicism; exstacy that was too intense to last, and too extravagant to be well founded, either renounces altogether its early faith, or, casting away its hope, complains through life in grief and despondency. Desires, bright and beautiful, are broken, and their light scattered in the dust. Aspirations, once too big for utterance, turn back to the bosom that nourished them,—hitherto their palace, now their prison,—and there waste away in hopeless thinking, or die in the echoes of unavailing murmurs. Such mistakes are to be lamented, but not to be scorned; for that suffering is not to be despised which has its foundation in profound and extensive sympathy. And it is not in the power of minds more obtuse and slow to measure or conceive the pain of those who, with a moral imagination that goes out to the very limits of humanity, and a piercing sensibility that enters into the hidden places where suffering weeps unnoted, and sin lies down unredeemed, that in the spirit of unselfish love feels the woe and guilt of a race, as though they were personal afflictions, it is not easy, I say, to estimate the pain such men undergo: when some conjuncture of events, which seemed the dawn of virtue, of liberty, of peace, of brotherhood, turns out a mockery and a contradiction; when they live to see that their noblest aspirings were but as the babblings of vanity; that the circumstances of which they augured most hopefully, proved as empty as shapes of vapour painted by the rising sun; that changes, of which they prophesied in most exulting strains, reversed all their calculations. This is no vague speculation; there have been many instances in fact, and we can imagine many more. Had Luther been defeated in his attempt for religious reformation; had Howard departed to his rest with the sorrowful conviction that he left cells as dark, and prisoners as hopeless, as he found them; had Wilberforce closed his life in despair of all redemption for the slave; had Washington fought in vain the fight for independence, seeing no prospect for his country, but submissively to bear the yoke for ever; we have no doubt that each would have experienced a more oppressive anguish than from the keenest of personal afflictions. In such cases there were, of course, the soundness of conception and wisdom of execution which ensure success; but in others, it often happens that the disappointment is not the less bitter because the expectations were baseless.
Opposed to this scheme is that of rigid Calvinism. By the latter system the whole nature is described as hopelessly corrupt, and language affords no colouring which can give shades deep enough for the theological picture. Minutest analysis is used to prove man such a being, that when considered you find him to be a compound of fiend and brute—such a being that you wonder God would allow him to disgrace existence, to pollute creation, and not annihilate, and blot him out from the universe, such a being that if correctly described the very continuance of society becomes a miracle and a marvel. His intellect, we are told, is utterly and spiritually darkened, his will the slave of sin, set to work iniquity greedily, his imagination corrupt, his passions rebellious, his affections perverted, incapable of good in thought, word, or deed, and completely devoted to evil. Taking this view as correct, we might suppose the prime use of man’s understanding was to devise wickedness, of his memory to prolong the thoughts of it, of his will to form only guilty resolves, and of his passions to riot in all that is vile and ungodly. We have thus the whole spiritual and moral man steeped in black and hateful infamy. To sustain these assertions, appeal is made to experience; and proof is found of entire and universal depravity in history, laws, and literature. Any conclusion drawn from these goes but to testify what we are ready to concede, that man is an imperfect being, and that the evidence of his imperfection is stamped upon most of his actions and productions. But the testimony is partially and unjustly quoted. Another estimate of the same evidence would argue as strongly, and even more so, for the inherent goodness of man. If we take the instance of human laws it will at once illustrate and confirm my assertion. If laws prove the existence and universality of crime, they prove also the existence and universality of the sense of justice, for laws, so far as they embody general principles, are the expression of common and collective sentiments. Indirectly, they prove yet more: for, after all, the great mass of truth and rectitude exists independently of laws, is such as no law could reach, is in fact such that without it no laws could have a moment’s force. In the effort to make good an indictment against human nature, an industry and labour are expended, as perverse as they are pertinacious; the lowest purlieus of depravity are raked, the deepest mines of wickedness are worked with a zeal as ardent as the veriest miser would seek for hidden treasure, the blackest evils of the worst times are adduced, the pages of history that are the most darkly stained, are torn out and severed from the context; and for what purpose is all this? Why, to make the noblest work of God odious; to vilify that nature which was glorified in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. If human nature is so thoroughly depraved and vile, as so frequently asserted, the scheme of orthodoxy is most improbable, and a fallen humanity, as it paints humanity, instead of giving Christianity consistency, renders it the most perplexing of paradoxes. For if man be thus naturally vile and depraved—corrupted in every faculty, whence these high counsels in heaven concerning him; whence the union of three infinite and co-eternal persons to save a wretch, the extinction of whom would have been mercy to the universe; whence the counsels of the Father, the incarnation of the Son, and that death of a God-man on Calvary, at which we are told the angels trembled and creation stood aghast; along with all, the constant and supernatural agency of the Holy Spirit? If man be really as worthless and as wicked as we are often told he is, all this, (with reverence I speak it,) seems a want of wisdom and a waste of strength. Though it may be considered over bold I will go a step further. If the one sin of Adam was to work such complete ruin in all his countless posterity; if it was to be the source of such an irremediable wickedness, and unrelieved misery, if notwithstanding the united work of three infinite agents, there was still to be a bottomless pit and an everlasting smoke of torment, a black and boundless ocean of guilt and pain, swelled by gloomy streams ever and ever flowing in from earth, for which infants were sealed in their birth, to which the lost are consigned in their death—if this be the lot to which the great mass of our species is destined—of which the first tear is a symbol, and the last sigh a passport,—if hell still is more peopled than heaven, then the infinite agencies of redemption might have been spared, this hopeless and illimitable anguish might have been extinguished, and the annihilation of our first parents would have been the greater mercy and the greater salvation.
Appeal is made to scripture with still greater confidence than to experience. There is one to whom reference is never made for testimony to this doctrine, and that is our Lord Jesus Christ; and if such doctrine were true, it is strange that he who needeth not that any should testify of man, because he knew what was in man, did not reveal it, and stamp it with all the solemnity of his authority. It may with confidence be asserted that such a dogma as the inherent and universal corruption of human nature is neither asserted nor justified by any Scripture from Genesis to Revelations. The Bible, I admit to be a moral, and also a providential history; and in this relation, I admit also, that it contains many strong statements of human wickedness; but they all refer to periods of peculiar degeneracy, and a fair study of the context will plainly show they have defined limitations. In the appendix to this lecture I will subjoin a list of texts usually pleaded for this doctrine, the mere exhibition of which is sufficient to expose its utter want of a Scriptural foundation.[[519]] On the present occasion I shall confine my remarks to the proofs alleged from Paul to the Romans. Stripping the subject of all the mysticism with which it has been encumbered, and identifying ourselves with the mind and times of the apostle, let us clearly see what was his object, and then we shall truly apprehend the nature of his argument. Paul’s object was twofold: first, to show that the Gospel was universal. This was opposed to the circumscribed nationality of Judaism. Secondly, that it was inward and spiritual. This was again opposed to the ritual and legal exactitude of Judaism. The General course, therefore, of the argument is directed against Jewish thoughts and Jewish prejudices, and to maintain the admissibility of the Gentiles to the Christian church. He has then to make good two propositions:—namely, “that God is impartially and equally the God of all men; and that fidelity of heart is the essence of all true religion.” We might sum up the whole system of the Apostle in two simple sentences of his letter: “Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.” The other assertion is, that “with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” Proving these two principles, he utterly demolishes all Jewish claims. The Apostle proceeds to open the new aspect which Jesus presented of the character of God—that of grace or mercy. Moses proclaimed Jehovah as a God of law, Jesus revealed him as a God of grace. Paul cautiously, but with power, argues most convincingly that in this relation only can men confidently approach him, but in this relation there is free access for all. None have a claim from merit, for all are guilty. With remarkable prudence, he takes, first, the case of the Gentile, and the state of the world in his own time supplied him examples in melancholy abundance. There was, therefore, no ground for Gentile exultation or Jewish jealousy, for the gospel was offered to the Heathens, not as a thing of merit but of favour, not as reward for their holiness, but as a remedy for their sin. To the Jews, who looked with bitter contempt on all men but themselves, who imagined every spiritual advantage was for them alone, this would be most offensive. The next question which thence arose was this:—As the Gentiles obviously were accepted before God, only on the ground of his mercy, whether the Jews could claim acceptance on any other ground? The Apostle had most convincingly shown that the Gentiles had violated the sense of duty inscribed upon their hearts, with equal force of reasoning he proves that the Jews had violated the precepts written in their law; one, therefore, had no right to accuse the other—both were guilty in the sight of God, and both had equal need of his mercy.—But, the Jews were not only wrong in their ideas on the extent of the Creator’s goodness, but also on the true nature of human virtue. As they considered his special providence confined to themselves, so they imagined the only acceptable obedience was in the rigid observance of their own minute precepts and ceremonies. In opposition to this Paul contends that justification is by faith, and not by the works of the law—not a faith which implies a mere assent to a series of scholastic propositions, but a faith which consists in a trusting and confiding spirit. The Apostle places saving holiness, not in outward and measured precepts, but in living and inward principles—in allegiance to God and Christ, in the loyalty of a true and pure heart—in the spirit that makes obedience more a life than a law. To say then that God holds man sternly to a code of inevitable condemnation, to say that any one transgression, however slight, sets at naught the whole tendency of the character and life, not only leaves Paul’s reasoning without force, but subverts the gospel to its very foundations. Our Lord in the parable represents a master as thus addressing his unforgiving servant, “O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt because thou desiredst me—shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?” The character of God as described by orthodoxy is the contradictory of this. But we are informed that God is a Judge, and, analogous to human judges, on the tribunal of the universe, lays aside all private considerations. The assimilation is at once low and false. God has no evidence to examine, no probabilities to balance, no decision to arrive at, no formal sentence to pronounce—there is no distinction in the case between God and man, analogous to that between an earthly judge, and his accused fellow-mortal; there is no such distinction with God as a personal relation and a public one, for God is the same in all relations. His dominion is in the spirit; there he rewards, and there he punishes; there is no reward separate from the direct results of righteousness itself issuing in blessedness, and no penalty separate from the results of sin itself issuing suffering, and each in the proportion in which the character is sanctified or depraved. Forgiveness of sin then, is peace of conscience, springing from a regenerated heart, and when man with a thoughtful and enlightened spirit can forgive himself, God forgives him. We, at least those of us personally engaged in this controversy, maintain no such doctrine as the pardon of sin on condition of repentance—as if repentance were something offered and remission an equivalent received instead. On the contrary, we see in repentance but the painful revulsion of a soul from a moral state found by sad experience to be unworthy of it: a struggle upward in many sighs and fears to the high estate from which it has fallen, in repentance itself we see but an additional instance of the anguish which sin never fails to entail. We regard it not as a merit, but a penalty. We grant the universality of sin, as fully as any can assert it. We know it is written, “all men have sinned and come short of the glory of God”—and we admit the truth of the assertion. Wherever man is, there will be sin, for we expect in no place—no, not in heaven itself—to find in man the perfection of a deity. It has been asserted, that every man has an ideal in his soul above his actual conduct. This has been used for condemnation of our nature, we take it as the glory of it—as an evidence that the spirit of God is extinguished in no man. We are ready to concede, not that the open transgressor comes short of the glory of God, but the best men come far short of the glory of their own ideal, and the sense of that short coming is acute, in the degree that their apprehensions of moral loveliness are clear and purified. Every man with his conscience in a right state laments with more heart-felt sorrow the sins which are inward than those which are outward, not those which have been exposed to the world, but those which only God has seen. We desire in no sense to mitigate the deep injury of sinfulness; but when we are told, that God, in vindication of his holy law, must subject man to an unsparing standard of judgment, orthodoxy to be consistent should have the unmitigated penalty inflicted on every personal transgressor. We are unable to conceive how the righteousness of any law can be vindicated by contriving an escape for the guilty by the suffering of the innocent. We do not make void the law—nay, we establish it, for we hold, and we preach it also, that transgression vindicates in the person of the sinner the claims of holiness, righteously and completely, in anguish and tribulation. I here close the polemical division of this lecture, and now for the remaining time I shall dwell on views more positive.
II. Having elucidated two extreme and false systems of human nature, I shall now adduce some of these essentials which properly entitle it to be considered in the likeness of God. I shall pass over the faculties of mere intellect and taste, for these are not denied. I do this for the sake of brevity, for it would be easy to prove that without sense of moral beauty in the soul, even these could have no high developement, philosophy would lose its wisdom, science its uses, painting its glow, architecture its majesty, sculpture its grace, poetry and eloquence their inspiration. It would be easy, I maintain, to show, that without conceptions of the divine, the true, the right, and the beautiful, there would be neither power nor materials in human nature from which to create a single great work of mind, nothing to evince the might of genius or the immortality of thought. I shall, however, in all my subsequent remarks, confine myself to what without dispute is strictly moral. We contend not for an infallibility in man’s reason, neither do we assert impeccability in his will; as we admit error in the one, we can admit sin in the other. But when we speak of the moral nature of man, we regard it not partially, but as a whole, not in its accidental exceptions, but in its essential constitution. Of this constitution we assert that virtue and goodness are the true and native attributes. For the position that sin is not natural but unnatural, not in accordance with humanity but contrary to it, we have the testimony of the great bishop Butler.[[520]]—“Every work,” he says, “of nature and art is a system; and as every particular thing, both natural and artificial, is for some use or purpose, out of or beyond itself, one may add to what has already been brought into the true idea of a system, its conduciveness to this or more ends. Let us instance in a watch: Suppose the several parts taken to pieces and placed apart from each other; let a man have ever so exact a notion of these several parts, unless he considers the respect and relations which they have to each other, he will not have any thing like the idea of a watch. Suppose these several parts brought together, and any how united, neither will he yet, be the union ever so close, have an idea which will bear any resemblance to that of a watch. But let him view these several parts put together, or consider them as to be put together in the manner of a watch—let him form a notion of the relation which these several parts have to each other, all conducive in their several ways to this purpose, showing the hour of the day,—and then he has the idea of a watch. Thus it is with the inward nature of man. Appetites, passions, affections, and the principle of reflection, conscience, considered severally as the inward parts of our inward nature, do not at all give us an idea of the system of this nature. And this our nature is adapted to virtue, as from the idea of a watch it appears, that its nature, that is, constitution or system, is adapted to measure time. What in fact commonly happens is nothing to the question. Every work of art is apt to be out of order: but this is so far from being according to its system, that let the disorder increase, and it will destroy it.” The author then goes on to say, that—“Nothing can possibly be more contrary to our nature than vice, meaning by nature not only the several parts of our internal frame, but also the constitution of it. Poverty and disgrace, tortures and death, are not so contrary to it. Misery and injustice are indeed equally contrary to some different parts of our nature taken singly, but injustice is moreover contrary to the whole constitution of the nature.” And here I will repeat a fine remark from the same noble thinker, used already, in a note by one of my fellow-labourers in this discussion.—“We should learn,” says the philosophical prelate, “to be cautious lest we charge God foolishly, by ascribing that to him, or the nature he has given us, which is wholly owing to its abuse. Men may speak of the degeneracy and corruption of the world, according to the experience they have had of it, but human nature considered as the divine workmanship should, methinks, be treated as sacred: for in the image of God made he man.”[[521]]