nation; for no intervening matter foreign to that object is permitted to interfere with the continuity of detail; but individual personality agreeing with the entire amount of all future prophetical truth, is, made manifest by presenting us an epitome, containing an amount of the whole doctrine of Christianity in this brief form of expression. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created he them." Since then, the incarnation of Christ, as God and man, must necessarily precede his manifestation in the flesh, and death by crucifixion, &c., it is incontrovertibly evident that the declared purpose of Christ's assumption of his and our mortal nature, before the gift of life had been bestowed on the first Adam, is interwoven, connects itself, and is in accordance with all subsequent increase of prophecy, relating to the salvation of man by the sacrifice of the Word, the Son of God. What more impressive event can be offered for our contemplation, than the gift of the incarnate God. St. Paul in Romans viii. 32, exclaims, "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him

also freely give us all things? The co-equal love and assent of the Son to his own sacrifice must be added, and we have then a better view of the fearfully awful solemnity of the creation of man in Christ's natural image, assumed for our redemption.

CHAP. IV.

Reflections on the Language of Jehovah before the Creation of Man.

UNDER whatever aspect we regard this language of the Deity, when purposing to make man, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness," it will be found to contain a very evident and singular reduplication of matter. In the first place, we are presented with these two different words: "image," and "likeness;" their positive import being of a directly opposite nature and quality, the word,"image" having relation, in its primary sense, to the bodily materiality of that being about to be created, and whose origin was of the dust of the ground; but in its higher and conclusive connexion, this same word "image" infolding and exhibiting the human nature of that eternally divine Personage in the Trinity, whom the Father displays to us in his character of a redeemer and a restorer of that which was lost by the fall of man, under the name of the seed of the woman. But, further, the

word "likeness" used by Moses in the sacred history of the creation, connects itself alone with that co-eternal and same spiritual likeness, which co-equally formed the universal property of the Trinity in general, constituting Trinity in Unity, and Unity in Trinity, in virtue of coequal participation of that, their one and the same spiritual likenesss. When, therefore, the Adam was about to be created, a portion of that spiritual likeness, or of the divine essence of Jehovah, was, in the language of God himself, to be imparted to man; and which divine likeness is eternal and indestructible as the eternally self-existing Source from whom it emanated, and is a very plain demonstration, that man only, of all the Creator's works, was eternally destined to be both a creature of time and of eternity. Writers have uniformly spoken of the solemnity with which the Lord God enters upon his detail of the creation of the primitive Adam; but when we see the sacred text infolds in its narrative of truth the incarnation of the Word, the eternally begotten Son of the Father, can we unmoved, and with heedless indifference disregard the infinite love of that Father, in thus

announcing the determinate and declared purpose of his Son's incarnation, resulting in Christ's manifestation in the flesh, and finally terminating in his ignominious and painful death on the cross, a spectacle of voluntary humiliation for men and angels to contemplate? can we, unmoved by feelings of the deepest reverence and humility, omit to make the most beneficial (because of the most vital moment to the verity of the Christian faith) and openly-avowed assent to the Divinity of the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world? Nor, can we wonder that Jehovah approaches the creation of man with such intense and very evident feelings of high and peculiar interest, when we bear in mind that Christ and his church militant on earth constitute the objects of Jehovah's solicitude, for the prescience of the Deity (respect being had to his mental infinitude) had the fall of man and the salvation of the church of Christ before him, and therefore gave us, in his written word, the declared purpose of the incarnation of his divine word, the Son, of whose competence for the office eternally assigned to him, with respect to both his divine and human