age. Regenerating grace is the almighty sceptre of the Prince of peace, by which, in the fulness of time, he will miraculously accomplish all the glorious purposes of his incarnation, and extend his dominion" from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.”* * Psalms lxxii. 8. CHAPTER XV. THE MORAL INCONGRUITIES OF MAN. Man in his moral being destitute of harmony of organization belonging to other creations of God-Is compound of meanness and majesty at once brutal and godlike--Elements of his contrarious nature in collision with each other-Philosophy could not explain the enigma-Bible explains it-Man made upright and pure-but sinned and fell-Thoughts on the apostasy-The fall the only solution of the mysteries of our being-Sin unnatural evil-Usurper of human heart-Man an enemy to God-hence he takes his name in vain-and worships idols-Man not originally made a God-hater by God himself-Conscience and sin not twin brothers of the same birth-Gospel's solution of mysterics of our being, proof of its divinity—Cause suggested of God's delay in final punishment of sin. In the constituents of humanity there is not found the harmony of organization discoverable in the structure of inferior animals. The lord of this lower world is compounded of heterogeneous and jarring elements. Of him the great poet of nature said; "What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God!" The poetic picture is truthful. So is the delineation of man in the scriptural pages, where he is represented as saying, "to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister."* With the tiger's ferocity, he commingles "the milk of human kindness;" he is a strange compound of meanness and of majesty; at once brutal and godlike. The lightning of heaven has become his submissive apprentice. And yet this master of the oak-cleaving bolt has bowed himself down in abject worship to stocks and stones, to "birds and four-footed beasts, and creeping things." Man is an anomaly in the creation. In all the other visible works of God, harmony of organization is the distinctive feature. It imparts majesty and grace to each wheeling orb of the solar and stellar systems; it forms the music of the spheres. As we pass downward to the humblest thing that lays claim to animal life, we find harmony of organization in each descending grade. Every bird that wings the air, every four-footed beast that roams the field, every fish that swims the sea, every worm that crawls upon the earth, is perfect "after his kind." In the vegetable province, too, harmony of organization is stamped on every tree, shrub, plant and flower, as the sure signet of the almighty hand. Even in the mineral kingdom, each substance proclaims, by the *Job xvii. 14. harmony of its organization, that God is its author. From this great law of nature, man is a mysterious exception. In him wild disorder ever reigns; between the bestial and the divine elements of his being, an intestine warfare is ceaselessly maintained. Thus heterogeneous and discordant in his composition, man is "like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.”* The ox, when he has satisfied his hunger, and slaked his thirst, deliberately chews the cud of contentment as he reposes under the shade of the spreading oak. Contentment awaits not the lord of the lower creation. Ambition proclaims, "It is not in me;" the wealth of Croesus could not buy it; the cottage knows it not, and it is a stranger to the palace. Heathen philosophy once sought to explain the phenomenon of our contrarious nature by the supposition that each of human kind has two distinct souls, the one inclined to soar, and the other to sink; the one bent on the abject, the other aspiring to the sublime. The Persian Zoroaster vainly endeavored to solve the enigma by placing over the race of mortals two ruling and discordant deities, personifying respectively the two opposing principles of good and of evil. * Isaiah lvii. 20. The contrarieties of humanity constitute a prodigy at which philosophy has gazed and wondered ever since she began to think. But with all her boasted sagacity, she was unable to expound the marvel. Without Revelation's clue man stands forth, in the midst of the wonders of the visible universe, himself the greatest wonder. It is the Bible alone that can instruct him in the deep and dark mysteries of his own being. The scriptural solution is a simple one. It announces that in the beginning God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life from the pure fountain of his own vitality; that, made in the image, and after the likeness of his Creator, man speedily apostatized and fell from his primeval state of innocence; and that sin "Brought death into the world and all our woe." That man is now a sinful creature, is a truth written, as it were, with a sunbeam upon the tablets of the human heart. Candor must needs read it there if she will but turn her vision inward. That God is a wise and holy being is another truth which the modern skeptic will not presume to deny. Revelation, though it touches not the heart, must, nevertheless, enlighten the understanding of all who are brought up in a christian land. christian land. None thus enlight |