I. Everything that is exhibits the impress of its maker or its origin. A building, a picture, a poem, a piece of mechanism, speaks of the epoch and nationality of the author, his intelligence, the object he had in view, his moral character perhaps; for his ideas are enshrined in it. The nature and qualities of God are necessarily reflected to a considerable extent in the multiform universe that He has made. It possesses good order, beauty, utility, grandeur, etc., and it reveals the existence of its Author, His immensity, eternity, omnipotence, goodness, wisdom. Much more is this the case with man. God says, “Let Us make man,” and not, “Let man be,” as He said of light; as if man were the special work of His hand; and He adds, “in Our own image and likeness.” Elsewhere we see the vestiges of God in creation; in man we see His living portrait. What dignity and splendour there must be in man when, in addition to the natural resemblance, he has acquired by virtue and grace the likeness to God’s most exalted perfections! But the higher and nobler a creature is, so much the more degrading and noxious is any serious deficiency. The absence of reason makes the baboon so loathsome because he stands so close to man. So it is with the image of God when the moral and spiritual likeness has been obliterated. The sinner is an unclean caricature of the Most Holy, a living blasphemy, the most noxious irregularity in creation.
II. Man is like to God as possessing in an eminent way all kinds of life that are found in creation: he has the vegetative life, which is perfected by sensation into the animal life, and this is ennobled by the addition of the rational life. Thus there is in man a triple life that represents the Blessed Trinity. Man resembles God also in the supremacy which he exercises over the material world. He is made lord of all things in order to guide them beneficently as God does, and to establish a divine kingdom among them. All creatures look to man as their master; and, not knowing God, they serve Him in that representation of Him which they see. Further, man is spiritual; he possesses a soul which can live apart from the body. The soul thinks, it can originate new ideas from itself, and so has a sort of creative force; it possesses will, and by its decree gives outward form and expression to the ideas. Thus man is doubly creative. By exercising these great powers as God directs, man may become vicegerent of God, an incarnation of the providence, the power, the wisdom, the beneficence of God; and effective ruler of the world. Disobeying God, man loses the resemblance to Him, and with it he loses in great measure his natural mastery over things temporal.
III. There are further kinds of resemblance to God which depend on our own efforts, with His grace. There is the moral likeness, by which we imitate the perfection of virtues in God. This is most admirable and beautiful, even when carried out in a merely natural way, imperfect as it then necessarily is. Far and away beyond this is the life of supernatural virtue, whereby God dwells in us, and infuses a facility for more splendid virtues than our natural faculties can attain. By this “the life of Jesus is made manifest in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor. iv. 11); and through its various degrees we may rise to the full perfection of the divine likeness that is possible on earth. But there is a more perfect resemblance still, which will be accomplished only in heaven. “We all, beholding the glory of the Lord with open face, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. iii. 18). This is the true line of human evolution, perfecting the likeness of God from the natural order through the moral and supernatural, until we arrive at the life of heaven. If the mere vestiges of God in creation are so splendid, and so full of absorbing interest, if the natural man is so far superior to the material world, how magnificent must our souls be when in the state of grace, and when they are made perfect in glory!
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