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. Continue Reading.
