Indeed the supremacy conferred upon man presupposed those spiritual endowments, and was justified by his fitness, through them, to exercise it.
c) Positively, We Learn from Certain Scriptures in What This Image and Likeness Consisted.
Eph. 4:23, 24—"And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness (B. V., holiness of truth)." Col. 3:10—"And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him." It is clear from these passages that the image of God consists in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness; moral, not physical likeness.
d) The Original Man Was Endowed with Intellectual Faculties.
He had sufficient intelligence to give names to the animals as they were presented before him (Gen. 2:19, 20). Adam had not only the power of speech, but the power of reasoning and thought in connection with speech. He could attach words to ideas. This is not the picture, as evolution would have us believe, of an infantile savage slowly groping his way towards articulate speech by imitation of the sounds of animals.
e) The Original Man Possessed Moral and Spiritual Faculties.
Consider the moral test in Genesis 3. Adam had power to resist or to yield to moral evil. Sin was a volitional thing. Christ, the second Adam, endured a similar test (Matt. 4).
From all this it is evident that man's original state was not one of savagery. Indeed there is abundant evidence to show that man has been degraded from a very much higher stage. Both the Bible and science agree in making man the crowning work of God, and that there will be no higher order of beings here on the earth than man. We must not forget that while man, from one side of his nature, is linked to the animal creation, he is yet supra-natural—a being of a higher order and more splendid nature; he is in the image and likeness of God. Man has developed not from the ape, but away from it. He never was anything but potential man. "No single instance has yet been adduced of the transformation of one animal species into another, either by natural or artificial selection; much less has it been demonstrated that the body of the brute has ever been developed into that of the man. The links that should bind man to the monkey have not been found. Not a single one can be shown. None have been found that stood nearer the monkey than the man of today."—Agassiz.
II. THE FALL OF MAN.
The doctrine of the Fall of Man is not peculiar to Christianity; all religions contain an account of it, and recognize the great and awful fact. Had there been no such account as that found in Genesis 3, there would still have remained the problem of the fall and sin.