Seed-Truths - Or Bible Views Of Mind, Morals, And Religion (1871) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ARCHETYPE OF MAN IN GOD. THE inspired idea of human nature may be seen from the model after which it was fashioned. That model is neither animal nor angelic, but is found only in God. An animal nature acts and is acted upon only by the outward world, or through the bodily senses and organs, while the angels are purely immaterial and heavenly. But God acts both in nature and in the realm of spirits. He is supreme in both kingdoms, and unites their sovereignty in Himself. So man is in communication with matter through his senses, and also with God and spirits through his interior or spiritual nature. The two kingdoms are united in him. In Moses' vision of creation God appeared, saying, ' We will make man in OUR image, after Our likeness.'1 There is no other instance, except in these first chapters of Genesis, in which God adopts the plural pronouns in speaking of Himself; and it gives the idea that the being in reference to whose creation He uses it was to have inherent differences of constitution suggesting plurality. How else are we to account for this mode of speaking ? To suppose that it was a slip of the pen, and without significance, would make this part of Moses' account different from all the rest. Elsewhere each statementrepresents a vast aggregation of facts, as in saying, ' Let light be;' ' Let the earth bring forth.' Each phrase of the kind is like a dot on the spectrum of a telescope, representing a continent on the sun's disk greater perhaps than our globe. 1 Gen. i. 26, iii. 22. This mode of speaking represents infinite truths. It indicates a basis in God for the distinction of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as He existed before all worlds,? a truth here hinted, but fully developed in subsequent revelations, especially of the New Testament. ...