Our blessed Lord, at leaving the world, saith, “These signs shall follow them that believe; in my name, they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” Now let it be asked, what could invest the believers in Christ with this dominion de facto, as well as de jure, but their reason? Both this question, and the solution of it, is just as sound, and theological as the Doctor’s.
For it was not any thing of their own, but solely the name, that is, power of Christ dwelling, and operating in them, that invested them with the dominion over devils, serpents, diseases, and all outward deadly, or hurtful things. Now that which gave this power, to the believers in Christ, was that very same, which gave to the first perfect man, a power of ruling over all the creatures of this world, and of living in full superiority and dominion over all that was, or could be hurtful, and deadly, in fire, or water, heat or cold, or any elementary things. So that Adam whilst standing in his first state of glory, and power, had the same reason to say of all that he was, and did, that which St. Paul said, yet not I, but Christ that liveth in me.
And how the Doctor came to think of any other power, as the ability of man to rule over the creatures, is very strange, since the gospel has so plainly told him, that they only are the children of God, who are led by the Spirit of God. If therefore the first man, created in the image and likeness of God, may be supposed by his creation, to have been a child of God, then sure is it, that he had the Spirit of God, living and working in him. And that surely may be allowed to have been his true and his only qualification, to have and exercise a dominion over the rest of the creation.
The Doctor, in order to find out that image, and likeness of God in man, of which Moses writes, looks into the constitution of that two-legged animal, who is the disputer of the world. As likely to succeed, as if in order to find out that paradise, of which Moses writes, he should search for it in the hundreds of Essex, or in the wilds of Kent.
For Moses, to prevent the folly of looking for the divine image in any thing, that is natural to the present state of man, has given us assurance, that this first man, created in the image of God, died the very day that he did eat of the forbidden tree. And that nothing of this divine man remained but terrors within, and such a figure of himself, as filled him with shame and confusion.
And a greater than Moses has told us, that man, in his present natural state, is so dead to that first divine glory, that he has no possibility of entering into the kingdom of God till he is born again from above. This sufficiently shews that he who will find out in what the image of God in man consisted, must as the apostle saith, walk by faith and not by sight.
The next text of Moses, which the Doctor miserably injures, is thus quoted by him, “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him the breath of life, and man became a living soul; that is, say the objectors, had an immortal soul.”
Who the objectors are, I know not; but the truth of the text requires us to say, that therefore man had a divine and godlike soul, a true offspring of the divine nature. Because the breath or Spirit of the holy triune God, was that breath by which he was made a living soul. —And therefore the riches of this first life in man, were the riches of the divine nature manifesting itself in the soul.
But the Doctor will have it, that only an unlearned English reader, can collect any thing to be divine in the soul, from the words of Moses, as not knowing that what is translated a living soul, signifies, in the original, only a living animal. But this, every English reader may know to be a vain criticism; for no stress is laid upon the expression, a living soul, no more than if it had been said, a living animal. But the full proof of the divine greatness of the human soul, lies solely in this, that the breath or spirit of the holy Trinity was breathed into it, and was that which made it to be a living soul, and therefore the life that arose in it, was the life of God in the soul.
The Doctor thus comments upon the words of the text. “God, the great plastic artist, is here represented, as making and shaping out a figure of earth and clay, which he afterwards animates or inspires with life. He breathed into this statue the breath of life, and the lump of clay became a living creature.”