These are summed up in the phrase “the image of God.” In God’s image man is said to have been created (Gen. 1:26, 27). In what did this image of God consist? We reply that it consisted in 1. Natural likeness to God, or personality; 2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.

Gen. 1:26, 27—“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.... And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” It is of great importance to distinguish clearly between the two elements embraced in this image of God, the natural and the moral. By virtue of the first, man possessed certain faculties (intellect, affection, will); by virtue of the second, he had right tendencies (bent, proclivity, disposition). By virtue of the first, he was invested with certain powers; by virtue of the second, a certain direction was imparted to these powers. As created in the natural image of God, man had a moral nature; as created in the moral image of God, man had a holy character. The first gave him natural ability; the second gave him moral ability. The Greek Fathers emphasized the first element, or personality; the Latin Fathers emphasized the second element, or holiness. See Orr, God’s Image in Man. As the Logos, or divine Reason, Christ Jesus, dwells in humanity and constitutes the principle of its being, humanity shares with Christ in the image of God. That image is never wholly lost. It is completely restored in sinners when the Spirit of Christ gains control of their wills and they merge their life in his. To those who accused Jesus of blasphemy, he replied by quoting the words of Psalm 82:6—“I said, Ye are gods”—words spoken of imperfect earthly rulers. Thus, in John 10:34-36, Jesus, who constitutes the very essence of humanity, justifies his own claim to divinity by showing that even men who represent God are also in a minor sense “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). Hence the many legends, in heathen religions, of the divine descent of man. 1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ.” In every man, even the most degraded, there is an image of God to be brought out, as Michael Angelo saw the angel in the rough block of marble. This natural worth does not imply worthiness; it implies only capacity for redemption. “The abysmal depths of personality,” which Tennyson speaks of, are sounded, as man goes down in thought successively from individual sins to sin of the heart and to race-sin. But “the deeper depth is out of reach To all, O God, but thee.” From this deeper depth, where man is rooted and grounded in God, rise aspirations for a better life. These are not due to the man himself, but to Christ, the immanent God, who ever works within him. Fanny J. Crosby: “Rescue the perishing, Care for the dying.... Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter, Feelings lie buried that grace can restore; Touched by a loving heart, wakened by kindness, Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.”

1. Natural likeness to God, or personality.

Man was created a personal being, and was by this personality distinguished from the brute. By personality we mean the twofold power to know self as related to the world and to God, and to determine self in view of moral ends. By virtue of this personality, man could at his creation choose which of the objects of his knowledge—self, the world, or God—should be the norm and centre of his development. This natural likeness to God is inalienable, and as constituting a capacity for redemption gives value to the life even of the unregenerate (Gen. 9:6; 1 Cor. 11:7; James 3:9).

For definitions of personality, see notes on the Anthropological Argument, page 82; on Pantheism, pages 104, 105; on the Attributes, pages 252-254; and on the Person of Christ, in Part

self-consciousness + self-determination. Self-consciousness and self-determination, as distinguished from the consciousness and determination of the brute, involve all the higher mental and moral powers which constitute us men. Conscience is but a mode of their activity. Notice that the term “image” does not, in man, imply perfect representation. Only Christ is the “very image” of God (Heb. 1:3), the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15—on which see Lightfoot). Christ is the image of God absolutely and archetypally; man, only relatively and derivatively. But notice also that, since God is Spirit, man made in God’s image cannot be a material thing. By virtue of his possession of this first element of the image of God, namely, personality, materialism is excluded. This first element of the divine image man can never lose until he ceases to be man. Even insanity can only obscure this natural image,—it cannot destroy it. St. Bernard well said that it could not be burned out, even in hell. The lost piece of money (Luke 15:8) still bore the image and superscription of the king, even though it did not know it, and did not even know that it was lost. Human nature is therefore to be reverenced, and he who destroys human life is to be put to death: Gen. 9:6—“for in the image of God made he man”; 1 Cor. 11:7—“a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God”; James 3:9—even men whom we curse “are made after the likeness of God”; cf. Ps. 8:5—“thou hast made him but little lower than God”; 1 Pet. 2:17—“Honor all men.” In the being of every man are continents which no Columbus has ever yet discovered, depths of possible joy or sorrow which no plummet has ever yet sounded. A whole heaven, a whole hell, may lie within the compass of his single soul. If we could see the meanest real Christian as he will be in the great hereafter, we should bow before him as John bowed before the angel in the Apocalypse, for we should not be able to distinguish him from God (Rev. 22:8, 9). Sir William Hamilton: “On earth there is nothing great but man; In man there is nothing great but mind.” We accept this dictum only if “mind” can be understood to include man’s moral powers together with the right direction of those powers. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2:2—“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!” Pascal: “Man is greater than the universe; the universe may crush him, but it does not know that it crushes him.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 94—“God is not only the Giver but the Sharer of my life. My natural powers are that part of God’s power which is lodged with me in trust to keep and use.” Man can be an instrument of God, without being an agent of God. “Each man has his place and value as a reflection of God and of Christ. Like a letter in a word, or a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; but the sentence is meaningless without him; rays from the whole universe converge in him.” John Howe’s Living Temple shows the greatness of human nature in its first construction and even in its ruin. Only a noble ship could make so great a wreck. Aristotle, Problem, sec. 30—“No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.” Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, 15—“There is no great genius without a tincture of madness.” Kant: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, and never as a means only.” If there is a divine element in every man, then we have no right to use a human being merely for our own pleasure or profit. In receiving him we receive Christ, and in receiving Christ we receive him who sent Christ (Mat. 10:40). Christ is the vine and all men are his natural branches, cutting themselves off only when they refuse to bear fruit, and condemning themselves to the burning only because they destroy, so far as they can destroy, God’s image in them, all that makes them worth preserving (John 15:1-6). Cicero: “Homo mortalis deus.” This possession of natural likeness to God, or personality, involves boundless possibilities of good or ill, and it constitutes the natural foundation of the love for man which is required of us by the law. Indeed it constitutes the reason why Christ should die. Man was worth redeeming. The woman whose ring slipped from her finger and fell into the heap of mud in the gutter, bared her white arm and thrust her hand into the slimy mass until she found her ring; but she would not have done this if the ring had not contained a costly diamond. The lost piece of money, the lost sheep, the lost son, were worth effort to seek and to save (Luke 15). But, on the other hand, it is folly when man, made in the image of God, “blinds himself with clay.” The man on shipboard, who playfully tossed up the diamond ring which contained his whole fortune, at last to his distress tossed it overboard. There is a “merchandise of souls” (Rev. 18:13) and we must not juggle with them. Christ’s death for man, by showing the worth of humanity, has recreated ethics. “Plato defended infanticide as under certain circumstances permissible. Aristotle viewed slavery as founded in the nature of things. The reason assigned was the essential inferiority of nature on the part of the enslaved.” But the divine image in man makes these barbarities no longer possible to us. Christ sometimes looked upon men with anger, but he never looked upon them with contempt. He taught the woman, he blessed the child, he cleansed the leper, he raised the dead. His own death revealed the infinite worth of the meanest human soul, and taught us to count all men as brethren for whose salvation we may well lay down our lives. George Washington answered the salute of his slave. Abraham Lincoln took off his hat to a negro who gave him his blessing as he entered Richmond; but a lady who had been brought up under the old regime looked from a window upon the scene with unspeakable horror. Robert Burns, walking with a nobleman in Edinburgh, met an old townsfellow from Ayr and stopped to talk with him. The nobleman, kept waiting, grew restive, and afterward reproved Burns for talking to a man with so bad a coat. Burns replied: “I was not talking to the coat,—I was talking to the man.” Jean Ingelow: “The street and market place Grow holy ground: each face—Pale faces marked with care, Dark, toilworn brows—grows fair. King’s children are all these, though want and sin Have marred their beauty, glorious within. We may not pass them but with reverent eye.” See Porter, Human Intellect, 393, 394, 401; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:42; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:343.

2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.

In addition to the powers of self-consciousness and self-determination just mentioned, man was created with such a direction of the affections and the will, as constituted God the supreme end of man’s being, and constituted man a finite reflection of God’s moral attributes. Since holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, this must of necessity be the chief attribute of his image in the moral beings whom he creates. That original righteousness was essential to this image, is also distinctly taught in Scripture (Eccl. 7:29; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10).

Besides the possession of natural powers, the image of God involves the possession of right moral tendencies. It is not enough to say that man was created in a state of innocence. The Scripture asserts that man had a righteousness like God’s: Eccl. 7:29—“God made man upright”; Eph. 4:24—“the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”—here Meyer says: “κατὰ Θεόν, ‘after God,’ i. e., ad exemplum Dei, after the pattern of God (Gal. 4:28—κατὰ Ἰσαάκ, ‘after Isaac’ = as Isaac was). This phrase makes the creation of the new man a parallel to that of our first parents, who were created after God’s image; they too, before sin came into existence through Adam, were sinless—‘in righteousness and holiness of truth.’ ” On N. T. “truth” = rectitude, see Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257-260. Meyer refers also, as a parallel passage, to Col. 3:10—“the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him.” Here the “knowledge” referred to is that knowledge of God which is the source of all virtue, and which is inseparable from holiness of heart. “Holiness has two sides or phases: (1) it is perception and knowledge; (2) it is inclination and feeling” (Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:97). On Eph. 4:24 and Col. 3:10, the classical passages with regard to man’s original state, see also the Commentaries of DeWette, Rückert, Ellicott, and compare Gen. 5:3—“And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image,” i. e., in his own sinful likeness, which is evidently contrasted with the “likeness of God” (verse 1) in which he himself had been created (An. Par. Bible). 2 Cor. 4:4—“Christ, who is the image of God”—where the phrase “image of God” is not simply the natural, but also the moral, image. Since Christ is the image of God primarily in his holiness, man’s creation in the image of God must have involved a holiness like Christ’s, so far as such holiness could belong to a being yet untried, that is, so far as respects man’s tastes and dispositions prior to moral action. “Couldst thou in vision see Thyself the man God meant, Thou nevermore couldst be The man thou art—content.” Newly created man had right moral tendencies, as well as freedom from actual fault. Otherwise the communion with God described in Genesis would not have been possible. Goethe: “Unless the eye were sunlike, how could it see the sun?” Because a holy disposition accompanied man’s innocence, he was capable of obedience, and was guilty when he sinned. The loss of this moral likeness to God was the chief calamity of the Fall. Man is now “the glory and the scandal of the universe.” He has defaced the image of God in his nature, even though that image, in its natural aspect, is ineffaceable (E. H. Johnson). The dignity of human nature consists, not so much in what man is, as in what God meant him to be, and in what God means him yet to become, when the lost image of God is restored by the union of man’s soul with Christ. Because of his future possibilities, the meanest of mankind is sacred. The great sin of the second table of the decalogue is the sin of despising our fellow man. To cherish contempt for others can have its root only in idolatry of self and rebellion against God. Abraham Lincoln said well that “God must have liked common people,—else he would not have made so many of them.” Regard for the image of God in man leads also to kind and reverent treatment even of those lower animals in which so many human characteristics are foreshadowed. Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 166—“The current philosophy says: The fittest will survive; let the rest die. The religion of Christ says: That maxim as applied to men is just, only as regards their characteristics, of which indeed only the fittest should survive. It does not and cannot apply to the men themselves, since all men, being children of God, are supremely fit. The very fact that a human being is sick, weak, poor, an outcast, and a vagabond, is the strongest possible appeal for effort toward his salvation. Let individuals look upon humanity from the point of view of Christ, and they will not be long in finding ways in which environment can be caused to work for righteousness.”

This original righteousness, in which the image of God chiefly consisted, is to be viewed:

(a) Not as constituting the substance or essence of human nature,—for in this case human nature would have ceased to exist as soon as man sinned.

Men every day change their tastes and loves, without changing the essence or substance of their being. When sin is called a “nature,” therefore (as by Shedd, in his Essay on “Sin a Nature, and that Nature Guilt”), it is only in the sense of being something inborn (natura, from nascor). Hereditary tastes may just as properly be denominated a “nature” as may the substance of one’s being. Moehler, the greatest modern Roman Catholic critic of Protestant doctrine, in his Symbolism, 58, 59, absurdly holds Luther to have taught that by the Fall man lost his essential nature, and that another essence was substituted in its room. Luther, however, is only rhetorical when he says: “It is the nature of man to sin; sin constitutes the essence of man; the nature of man since the Fall has become quite changed; original sin is that very thing which is born of father and mother; the clay out of which we are formed is damnable; the fœtus in the maternal womb is sin; man as born of his father and mother, together with his whole essence and nature, is not only a sinner but sin itself.”

(b) Nor as a gift from without, foreign to human nature, and added to it after man’s creation,—for man is said to have possessed the divine image by the fact of creation, and not by subsequent bestowal.

As men, since Adam, are born with a sinful nature, that is, with tendencies away from God, so Adam was created with a holy nature, that is, with tendencies toward God. Moehler says: “God cannot give a man actions.” We reply: “No, but God can give man dispositions; and he does this at the first creation, as well as at the new creation (regeneration).”

(c) But rather, as an original direction or tendency of man’s affections and will, still accompanied by the power of evil choice, and so, differing from the perfected holiness of the saints, as instinctive affection and child-like innocence differ from the holiness that has been developed and confirmed by experience of temptation.

Man’s original righteousness was not immutable or indefectible; there was still the possibility of sinning. Though the first man was fundamentally good, he still had the power of choosing evil. There was a bent of the affections and will toward God, but man was not yet confirmed in holiness. Man’s love for God was like the germinal filial affection in the child, not developed, yet sincere—“caritas puerilis, non virilis.”

(d) As a moral disposition, moreover, which was propagable to Adam’s descendants, if it continued, and which, though lost to him and to them, if Adam sinned, would still leave man possessed of a natural likeness to God which made him susceptible of God’s redeeming grace.

Hooker (Works, ed. Keble, 2:683) distinguishes between aptness and ableness. The latter, men have lost; the former, they retain,—else grace could not work in us, more than in the brutes. Hase: “Only enough likeness to God remained to remind man of what he had lost, and enable him to feel the hell of God’s forsaking.” The moral likeness to God can be restored, but only by God himself. God secures this to men by making “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, ... dawn upon them” (2 Cor. 4:4). Pusey made Ps. 72:6—“He will come down like rain upon the mown grass”—the image of a world hopelessly dead, but with a hidden capacity for receiving life. Dr. Daggett: “Man is a ‘son of the morning’ (Is. 14:12), fallen, yet arrested midway between heaven and hell, a prize between the powers of light and darkness.” See Edwards, Works, 2:19, 20, 381-390; Hopkins, Works, 1:162; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:50-66; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 14:11.

In the light of the preceding investigation, we may properly estimate two theories of man’s original state which claim to be more Scriptural and reasonable:

A. The image of God as including only personality.

This theory denies that any positive determination to virtue inhered originally in man’s nature, and regards man at the beginning as simply possessed of spiritual powers, perfectly adjusted to each other. This is the view of Schleiermacher, who is followed by Nitzsch, Julius Müller, and Hofmann.

For the view here combated, see Schleiermacher, Christl. Glaube, sec. 60; Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, 201; Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:113-133, 350-357; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:287-291; Bib. Sac., 7:409-425. Julius Müller’s theory of the Fall in a preëxistent state makes it impossible for him to hold here that Adam was possessed of moral likeness to God. The origin of his view of the image of God renders it liable to suspicion. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 113—“The original state of man was that of child-like innocence or morally indifferent naturalness, which had in itself indeed the possibility (Anlage) of ideal development, but in such a way that its realization could be reached only by struggle with its natural opposite. The image of God was already present in the original state, but only as the possibility (Anlage) of real likeness to God—the endowment of reason which belonged to human personality. The reality of a spirit like that of God has appeared first in the second Adam, and has become the principle of the kingdom of God.” Raymond (Theology, 2:43, 132) is an American representative of the view that the image of God consists in mere personality: “The image of God in which man was created did not consist in an inclination and determination of the will to holiness.” This is maintained upon the ground that such a moral likeness to God would have rendered it impossible for man to fall,—to which we reply that Adam’s righteousness was not immutable, and the bias of his will toward God did not render it impossible for him to sin. Motives do not compel the will, and Adam at least had a certain power of contrary choice. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 119-122, also maintains that the image of God signified only that personality which distinguished man from the brute. Christ, he says, carries forward human nature to a higher point, instead of merely restoring what is lost. “Very good” (Gen. 1:31) does not imply moral perfection,—this cannot be the result of creation, but only of discipline and will. Man’s original state was only one of untried innocence. Dr. Robinson is combating the view that the first man was at his creation possessed of a developed character. He distinguishes between character and the germs of character. These germs he grants that man possessed. And so he defines the image of God as a constitutional predisposition toward a course of right conduct. This is all the perfection which we claim for the first man. We hold that this predisposition toward the good can properly be called character, since it is the germ from which all holy action springs.

In addition to what has already been said in support of the opposite view, we may urge against this theory the following objections:

(a) It is contrary to analogy, in making man the author of his own holiness; our sinful condition is not the product of our individual wills, nor is our subsequent condition of holiness the product of anything but God’s regenerating power.

To hold that Adam was created undecided, would make man, as Philippi says, in the highest sense his own creator. But morally, as well as physically, man is God’s creature. In regeneration it is not sufficient for God to give power to decide for good; God must give new love also. If this be so in the new creation, God could give love in the first creation also. Holiness therefore is creatable. “Underived holiness is possible only in God; in its origin, it is given both to angels and men.” Therefore we pray: “Create in me a clean heart” (Ps. 51:10); “Incline my heart unto thy testimonies” (Ps. 119:36). See Edwards, Eff. Grace, sec. 43-51; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 290—“If Adam’s perfection was not a moral perfection, then his sin was no real moral corruption.” The animus of the theory we are combating seems to be an unwillingness to grant that man, either in his first creation or in his new creation, owes his holiness to God.

(b) The knowledge of God in which man was originally created logically presupposes a direction toward God of man’s affections and will, since only the holy heart can have any proper understanding of the God of holiness.

“Ubi caritas, ibi claritas.” Man’s heart was originally filled with divine love, and out of this came the knowledge of God. We know God only as we love him, and this love comes not from our own single volition. No one loves by command, because no one can give himself love. In Adam love was an inborn impulse, which he could affirm or deny. Compare 1 Cor. 8:3—“if any man loveth God, the same [God] is known by him”; 1 John 4:8—“He that loveth not knoweth not God.” See other Scripture references on pages 3, 4.

(c) A likeness to God in mere personality, such as Satan also possesses, comes far short of answering the demands of the Scripture, in which the ethical conception of the divine nature so overshadows the merely natural. The image of God must be, not simply ability to be like God, but actual likeness.

God could never create an intelligent being evenly balanced between good and evil—“on the razor’s edge”—“on the fence.” The preacher who took for his text “Adam, where art thou?” had for his first head: “It is every man’s business to be somewhere;” for his second: “Some of you are where you ought not to be;” and for his third: “Get where you ought to be, as soon as possible.” A simple capacity for good or evil is, as Augustine says, already sinful. A man who is neutral between good and evil is already a violator of that law, which requires likeness to God in the bent of his nature. Delitzsch, Bib. Psychol., 45-84—“Personality is only the basis of the divine image,—it is not the image itself.” Bledsoe says there can be no created virtue or viciousness. Whedon (On the Will, 388) objects to this, and says rather: “There can be no created moral desert, good or evil. Adam’s nature as created was pure and excellent, but there was nothing meritorious until he had freely and rightly exercised his will with full power to the contrary.” We add: There was nothing meritorious even then. For substance of these objections, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:346. Lessing said that the character of the Germans was to have no character. Goethe partook of this cosmopolitan characterlessness (Prof. Seely). Tennyson had Goethe in view when he wrote in The Palace of Art: “I sit apart, holding no form of creed, but contemplating all.” And Goethe is probably still alluded to in the words: “A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, That did love beauty only, Or if good, good only for its beauty”; see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 331; Robert Browning, Christmas Eve: “The truth in God’s breast Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: Though he is so bright, and we so dim, We are made in his image to witness him.”

B. The image of God as consisting simply in man’s natural capacity for religion.

This view, first elaborated by the scholastics, is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. It distinguishes between the image and the likeness of God. The former (צלם—Gen. 1:26) alone belonged to man’s nature at its creation. The latter (דמות) was the product of his own acts of obedience. In order that this obedience might be made easier and the consequent likeness to God more sure, a third element was added—an element not belonging to man’s nature—namely, a supernatural gift of special grace, which acted as a curb upon the sensuous impulses, and brought them under the control of reason. Original righteousness was therefore not a natural endowment, but a joint product of man’s obedience and of God’s supernatural grace.

Roman Catholicism holds that the white paper of man’s soul received two impressions instead of one. Protestantism sees no reason why both impressions should not have been given at the beginning. Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 4:708, gives a good statement of the Roman Catholic view. It holds that the supreme good transcends the finite mind and its powers of comprehension. Even at the first it was beyond man’s created nature. The donum superadditum did not inwardly and personally belong to him. Now that he has lost it, he is entirely dependent on the church for truth and grace. He does not receive the truth because it is this and no other, but because the church tells him that it is the truth. The Roman Catholic doctrine may be roughly and pictorially stated as follows: As created, man was morally naked, or devoid of positive righteousness (pura naturalia, or in puris naturalibus). By obedience he obtained as a reward from God (donum supernaturale, or superadditum) a suit of clothes or robe of righteousness to protect him, so that he became clothed (vestitus). This suit of clothes, however, was a sort of magic spell of which he could be divested. The adversary attacked him and stripped him of his suit. After his sin he was one despoiled (spoliatus). But his condition after differed from his condition before this attack, only as a stripped man differs from a naked man (spoliatus a nudo). He was now only in the same state in which he was created, with the single exception of the weakness he might feel as the result of losing his customary clothing. He could still earn himself another suit,—in fact, he could earn two or more, so as to sell, or give away, what he did not need for himself. The phrase in puris naturalibus describes the original state, as the phrase spoliatus a nudo describes the difference resulting from man’s sin.

Many of the considerations already adduced apply equally as arguments against this view. We may say, however, with reference to certain features peculiar to the theory:

(a) No such distinction can justly be drawn between the words צלם and דםות. The addition of the synonym simply strengthens the expression, and both together signify “the very image.”

(b) Whatever is denoted by either or both of these words was bestowed upon man in and by the fact of creation, and the additional hypothesis of a supernatural gift not originally belonging to man’s nature, but subsequently conferred, has no foundation either here or elsewhere in Scripture. Man is said to have been created in the image and likeness of God, not to have been afterwards endowed with either of them.

(c) The concreated opposition between sense and reason which this theory supposes is inconsistent with the Scripture declaration that the work of God’s hands “was very good” (Gen. 1:31), and transfers the blame of temptation and sin from man to God. To hold to a merely negative innocence, in which evil desire was only slumbering, is to make God author of sin by making him author of the constitution which rendered sin inevitable.

(d) This theory directly contradicts Scripture by making the effect of the first sin to have been a weakening but not a perversion of human nature, and the work of regeneration to be not a renewal of the affections but merely a strengthening of the natural powers. The theory regards that first sin as simply despoiling man of a special gift of grace and as putting him where he was when first created—still able to obey God and to coöperate with God for his own salvation,—whereas the Scripture represents man since the fall as “dead through ... trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), as incapable of true obedience (Rom. 8:7—“not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be”), and as needing to be “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph. 2:10).

At few points in Christian doctrine do we see more clearly than here the large results of error which may ultimately spring from what might at first sight seem to be only a slight divergence from the truth. Augustine had rightly taught that in Adam the posse non peccare was accompanied by a posse peccare, and that for this reason man’s holy disposition needed the help of divine grace to preserve its integrity. But the scholastics wrongly added that this original disposition to righteousness was not the outflow of man’s nature as originally created, but was the gift of grace. As this later teaching, however, was by some disputed, the Council of Trent (sess. 5, cap. 1) left the matter more indefinite, simply declaring man: “Sanctitatem et justitiam in qua constitutus fuerat, amisisse.” The Roman Catechism, however (1:2:19), explained the phrase “constitutus fuerat” by the words: “Tum originalis justitiæ admirabile donum addidit.” And Bellarmine (De Gratia, 2) says plainly: “Imago, quæ est ipsa natura mentis et voluntatis, a solo Deo fieri potuit; similitudo autem, quæ in virtute et probitate consistit, a nobis quoque Deo adjuvante perficitur.”... (5) “Integritas illa ... non fuit naturalis ejus conditio, sed supernaturalis evectio.... Addidisse homini donum quoddam insigne, justitiam videlicet originalem, qua veluti aureo quodam fræno pars inferior parti superiori subjecta contineretur.” Moehler (Symbolism, 21-35) holds that the religious faculty—the “image of God”; the pious exertion of this faculty—the “likeness of God.” He seems to favor the view that Adam received “this supernatural gift of a holy and blessed communion with God at a later period than his creation, i. e., only when he had prepared himself for its reception and by his own efforts had rendered himself worthy of it.” He was created “just” and acceptable to God, even without communion with God or help from God. He became “holy” and enjoyed communion with God, only when God rewarded his obedience and bestowed the supernaturale donum. Although Moehler favors this view and claims that it is permitted by the standards, he also says that it is not definitely taught. The quotations from Bellarmine and the Roman Catechism above make it clear that it is the prevailing doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. So, to quote the words of Shedd, “the Tridentine theology starts with Pelagianism and ends with Augustinianism. Created without character, God subsequently endows man with character.... The Papal idea of creation differs from the Augustinian in that it involves imperfection. There is a disease and languor which require a subsequent and supernatural act to remedy.” The Augustinian and Protestant conception of man’s original state is far nobler than this. The ethical element is not a later addition, but is man’s true nature—essential to God’s idea of him. The normal and original condition of man (pura naturalia) is one of grace and of the Spirit’s indwelling—hence, of direction toward God. From this original difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrine with regard to man’s original state result diverging views as to sin and as to regeneration. The Protestant holds that, as man was possessed by creation of moral likeness to God, or holiness, so his sin robbed his nature of its integrity, deprived it of essential and concreated advantages and powers, and substituted for these a positive corruption and tendency to evil. Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is original sin; as concreated love for God constituted man’s original righteousness. No man since the fall has original righteousness, and it is man’s sin that he has it not. Since without love to God no act, emotion, or thought of man can answer the demands of God’s law, the Scripture denies to fallen man all power of himself to know, think, feel, or do aright. His nature therefore needs a new-creation, a resurrection from death, such as God only, by his mighty Spirit, can work; and to this work of God man can contribute nothing, except as power is first given him by God himself. According to the Roman Catholic view, however, since the image of God in which man was created included only man’s religious faculty, his sin can rob him only of what became subsequently and adventitiously his. Fallen man differs from unfallen only as spoliatus a nudo. He loses only a sort of magic spell, which leaves him still in possession of all his essential powers. Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is not sin; for this belonged to his nature even before he fell. His sin has therefore only put him back into the natural state of conflict and concupiscence, ordered by God in the concreated opposition of sense and reason. The sole qualification is this, that, having made an evil decision, his will is weakened. “Man does not need resurrection from death, but rather a crutch to help his lameness, a tonic to reinforce his feebleness, a medicine to cure his sickness.” He is still able to turn to God; and in regeneration the Holy Spirit simply awakens and strengthens the natural ability slumbering in the natural man. But even here, man must yield to the influence of the Holy Spirit; and regeneration is effected by uniting his power to the divine. In baptism the guilt of original sin is remitted, and everything called sin is taken away. No baptized person has any further process of regeneration to undergo. Man has not only strength to coöperate with God for his own salvation, but he may even go beyond the demands of the law and perform works of supererogation. And the whole sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church, with its salvation by works, its purgatorial fires, and its invocation of the saints, connects itself logically with this erroneous theory of man’s original state. See Dorner’s Augustinus, 116; Perrone, Prælectiones Theologicæ, 1:737-748; Winer, Confessions, 79, 80; Dorner, History Protestant Theology, 38, 39, and Glaubenslehre, 1:51; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 376; Cunningham, Historical Theology, 1:516-586; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:140-149.

1. Results of man’s possession of the divine image.

(a) Reflection of this divine image in man’s physical form.—Even in man’s body were typified those higher attributes which chiefly constituted his likeness to God. A gross perversion of this truth, however, is the view which holds, upon the ground of Gen. 2:7, and 3:8, that the image of God consists in bodily resemblance to the Creator. In the first of these passages, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust, and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. The second of these passages is to be interpreted by those other portions of the Pentateuch in which God is represented as free from all limitations of matter (Gen. 11:5; 18:15).

The spirit presents the divine image immediately: the body, mediately. The scholastics called the soul the image of God proprie; the body they called the image of God significative. Soul is the direct reflection of God; body is the reflection of that reflection. The os sublime manifests the dignity of the endowments within. Hence the word “upright,” as applied to moral condition; one of the first impulses of the renewed man is to physical purity. Compare Ovid, Metaph., bk. 1, Dryden’s transl.: “Thus while the mute creation downward bend Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend, Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes Beholds his own hereditary skies.” (Ἄνθρωπος, from ἀνά, ἄνω, suffix tra, and ὢψ, with reference to the upright posture.) Milton speaks of “the human face divine.” S. S. Times, July 28, 1900—“Man is the only erect being among living creatures. He alone looks up naturally and without effort. He foregoes his birthright when he looks only at what is on a level with his eyes and occupies himself only with what lies in the plane of his own existence.” Bretschneider (Dogmatik, 1:682) regards the Scripture as teaching that the image of God consists in bodily resemblance to the Creator, but considers this as only the imperfect method of representation belonging to an early age. So Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:687. They refer to Gen. 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground”; 3:8—“Jehovah God walking in the garden.” But see Gen. 11:5—“And Jehovah came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded”; Is. 66:1—“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool”; 1 K. 8:27—“behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee.” On the Anthropomorphites, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:103, 308, 491. For answers to Bretschneider and Strauss, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:364.

(b) Subjection of the sensuous impulses to the control of the spirit.—Here we are to hold a middle ground between two extremes. On the one hand, the first man possessed a body and a spirit so fitted to each other that no conflict was felt between their several claims. On the other hand, this physical perfection was not final and absolute, but relative and provisional. There was still room for progress to a higher state of being (Gen. 3:22).

Sir Henry Watton’s Happy Life: “That man was free from servile bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall, Lord of himself if not of lands, And having nothing yet had all.” Here we hold to the æquale temperamentum. There was no disease, but rather the joy of abounding health. Labor was only a happy activity. God’s infinite creatorship and fountainhead of being was typified in man’s powers of generation. But there was no concreated opposition of sense and reason, nor an imperfect physical nature with whose impulses reason was at war. With this moderate Scriptural doctrine, contrast the exaggerations of the Fathers and of the scholastics. Augustine says that Adam’s reason was to ours what the bird’s is to that of the tortoise; propagation in the unfallen state would have been without concupiscence, and the new-born child would have attained perfection at birth. Albertus Magnus thought the first man would have felt no pain, even though he had been stoned with heavy stones. Scotus Erigena held that the male and female elements were yet undistinguished. Others called sexuality the first sin. Jacob Boehme regarded the intestinal canal, and all connected with it, as the consequence of the Fall; he had the fancy that the earth was transparent at the first and cast no shadow,—sin, he thought, had made it opaque and dark; redemption would restore it to its first estate and make night a thing of the past. South, Sermons, 1:24, 25—“Man came into the world a philosopher.... Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam.” Lyman Abbott tells us of a minister who assured his congregation that Adam was acquainted with the telephone. But God educates his children, as chemists educate their pupils, by putting them into the laboratory and letting them work. Scripture does not represent Adam as a walking encyclopædia, but as a being yet inexperienced; see Gen. 3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”; 1 Cor. 15:46—“that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual.” On this last text, see Expositor’s Greek Testament.

(c) Dominion over the lower creation.—Adam possessed an insight into nature analogous to that of susceptible childhood, and therefore was able to name and to rule the brute creation (Gen. 2:19). Yet this native insight was capable of development into the higher knowledge of culture and science. From Gen. 1:26 (cf. Ps. 8:5-8), it has been erroneously inferred that the image of God in man consists in dominion over the brute creation and the natural world. But, in this verse, the words “let them have dominion” do not define the image of God, but indicate the result of possessing that image. To make the image of God consist in this dominion, would imply that only the divine omnipotence was shadowed forth in man.

Gen. 2:19—“Jehovah God formed every beast of the field, and every bird of the heavens; and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them”; 20—“And the man gave names to all cattle”; Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle”; cf. Ps. 8:5-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the field.” Adam’s naming the animals implied insight into their nature; see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 393, 394, 401. On man’s original dominion over (1) self, (2) nature, (3) fellow-man, see Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 105. Courage and a good conscience have a power over the brute creation, and unfallen man can well be supposed to have dominated creatures which had no experience of human cruelty. Rarey tamed the wildest horses by his steadfast and fearless eye. In Paris a young woman was hypnotized and put into a den of lions. She had no fear of the lions and the lions paid not the slightest attention to her. The little daughter of an English officer in South Africa wandered away from camp and spent the night among lions. “Katrina,” her father said when he found her, “were you not afraid to be alone here?” “No, papa,” she replied, “the big dogs played with me and one of them lay here and kept me warm.” MacLaren, in S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893—“The dominion over all creatures results from likeness to God. It is not then a mere right to use them for one’s own material advantage, but a viceroy’s authority, which the holder is bound to employ for the honor of the true King.” This principle gives the warrant and the limit to vivisection and to the killing of the lower animals for food (Gen. 9:2, 3.). Socinian writers generally hold the view that the image of God consisted simply in this dominion. Holding a low view of the nature of sin, they are naturally disinclined to believe that the fall has wrought any profound change in human nature. See their view stated in the Racovian Catechism, 21. It is held also by the Arminian Limborch, Theol. Christ., ii, 24:2, 3, 11. Upon the basis of this interpretation of Scripture, the Encratites held, with Peter Martyr, that women do not possess the divine image at all.

(d) Communion with God.—Our first parents enjoyed the divine presence and teaching (Gen. 2:16). It would seem that God manifested himself to them in visible form (Gen. 3:8). This companionship was both in kind and degree suited to their spiritual capacity, and by no means necessarily involved that perfected vision of God which is possible to beings of confirmed and unchangeable holiness (Mat. 5:8; 1 John 3:2).

Gen. 2:16—“And Jehovah God commanded the man”; 3:8—“And they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the cool of the day”; Mat. 5:8—“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”; 1 John 3:2—“We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”; Rev. 22:4—“and they shall see his his face.”

2. Concomitants of man’s possession of the divine image.

(a) Surroundings and society fitted to yield happiness and to assist a holy development of human nature (Eden and Eve). We append some recent theories with regard to the creation of Eve and the nature of Eden.

Eden—pleasure, delight. Tennyson: “When high in Paradise By the four rivers the first roses blew.” Streams were necessary to the very existence of an oriental garden. Hopkins, Script. Idea of Man, 107—“Man includes woman. Creation of a man without a woman would not have been the creation of man. Adam called her name Eve but God called their name Adam.” Mat. Henry: “Not out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled on by him; but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be beloved.” Robert Burns says of nature: “Her ’prentice hand she tried on man, And then she made the lasses, O!” Stevens, Pauline Theology, 329—“In the natural relations of the sexes there is a certain reciprocal dependence, since it is not only true that woman was made from man, but that man is born of woman (1 Cor. 11:11, 12).” Of the Elgin marbles Boswell asked: “Don’t you think them indecent?” Dr. Johnson replied: “No, sir; but your question is.” Man, who in the adult state possesses twelve pairs of ribs, is found in the embryonic state to have thirteen or fourteen. Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution, 148—“Why does not the male man lack one rib? Because only the individual skeleton of Adam was affected by the taking of the rib.... The unfinished vertebral arches of the skin-fibrous layer may have produced a new individual by a process of budding or gemmation.” H. H. Bawden suggests that the account of Eve’s creation may be the “pictorial summary” of an actual phylogenetic evolutionary process by which the sexes were separated or isolated from a common hermaphroditic ancestor or ancestry. The mesodermic portion of the organism in which the urinogenital system has its origin develops later than the ectodermic or the endodermic portions. The word “rib” may designate this mesodermic portion. Bayard Taylor, John Godfrey’s Fortunes, 392, suggests that a genius is hermaphroditic, adding a male element to the woman, and a female element to the man. Professor Loeb, Am. Journ. Physiology, Vol. III, no. 3, has found that in certain chemical solutions prepared in the laboratory, approximately the concentration of sea-water, the unfertilized eggs of the sea-urchin will mature without the intervention of the spermatozoön. Perfect embryos and normal individuals are produced under these conditions. He thinks it probable that similar parthenogenesis may be produced in higher types of being. In 1900 he achieved successful results on Annelids, though it is doubtful whether he produced anything more than normal larvæ. These results have been criticized by a European investigator who is also a Roman priest. Prof. Loeb wrote a rejoinder in which he expressed surprise that a representative of the Roman church did not heartily endorse his conclusions, since they afford a vindication of the doctrine of the immaculate conception. H. H. Bawden has reviewed Prof. Loeb’s work in the Psychological Review, Jan. 1900. Janósik has found segmentation in the unfertilized eggs of mammalians. Prof. Loeb considers it possible that only the ions of the blood prevent the parthenogenetic origin of embryos in mammals, and thinks it not improbable that by a transitory change in these ions it will be possible to produce complete parthenogenesis in these higher types. Dr. Bawden goes on to say that “both parent and child are dependent upon a common source of energy. The universe is one great organism, and there is no inorganic or non-organic matter, but differences only in degrees of organization. Sex is designed only secondarily for the perpetuation of species; primarily it is the bond or medium for the connection and interaction of the various parts of this great organism, for maintaining that degree of heterogeneity which is the prerequisite of a high degree of organization. By means of the growth of a lifetime I have become an essential part in a great organic system. What I call my individual personality represents simply the focusing, the flowering of the universe at one finite concrete point or centre. Must not then my personality continue as long as that universal system continues? And is immortality conceivable if the soul is something shut up within itself, unshareable and unique? Are not the many foci mutually interdependent, instead of mutually exclusive? We must not then conceive of an immortality which means the continued existence of an individual cut off from that social context which is really essential to his very nature.” J. H. Richardson suggests in the Standard, Sept. 10, 1901, that the first chapter of Genesis describes the creation of the spiritual part of man only—that part which was made in the image of God—while the second chapter describes the creation of man’s body, the animal part, which may have been originated by a process of evolution. S. W. Howland, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:121-128, supposes Adam and Eve to have been twins, joined by the ensiform cartilage or breast-bone, as were the Siamese Chang and Eng. By violence or accident this cartilage was broken before it hardened into bone, and the two were separated until puberty. Then Adam saw Eve coming to him with a bone projecting from her side corresponding to the hollow in his own side, and said: “She is bone of my bone; she must have been taken from my side when I slept.” This tradition was handed down to his posterity. The Jews have a tradition that Adam was created double-sexed, and that the two sexes were afterwards separated. The Hindus say that man was at first of both sexes and divided himself in order to people the earth. In the Zodiac of Dendera, Castor and Pollux appear as man and woman, and these twins, some say, were called Adam and Eve. The Coptic name for this sign is Pi Mahi, “the United.” Darwin, in the postscript to a letter to Lyell, written as early as July, 1850, tells his friend that he has “a pleasant genealogy for mankind,” and describes our remotest ancestor as “an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and was undoubtedly a hermaphrodite.” Matthew Arnold speaks of “the freshness of the early world.” Novalis says that “all philosophy begins in homesickness.” Shelley, Skylark: “We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those That tell of saddest thought.”—“The golden conception of a Paradise is the poet’s guiding thought.” There is a universal feeling that we are not now in our natural state; that we are far away from home; that we are exiles from our true habitation. Keble, Groans of Nature: “Such thoughts, the wreck of Paradise, Through many a dreary age, Upbore whate’er of good or wise Yet lived in bard or sage.” Poetry and music echo the longing for some possession lost. Jessica in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” All true poetry is forward-looking or backward-looking prophecy, as sculpture sets before us the original or the resurrection body. See Isaac Taylor, Hebrew Poetry, 94-101; Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 225, 226. Wellhausen, on the legend of a golden age, says: “It is the yearning song which goes through all the peoples: having attained the historical civilization, they feel the worth of the goods which they have sacrificed for it.” He regards the golden age as only an ideal image, like the millennial kingdom at the end. Man differs from the beast in this power to form ideals. His destination to God shows his descent from God. Hegel in a similar manner claimed that the Paradisaic condition is only an ideal conception underlying human development. But may not the traditions of the gardens of Brahma and of the Hesperides embody the world’s recollection of an historical fact, when man was free from external evil and possessed all that could minister to innocent joy? The “golden age” of the heathen was connected with the hope of restoration. So the use of the doctrine of man’s original state is to convince men of the high ideal once realized, properly belonging to man, now lost, and recoverable, not by man’s own powers, but only through God’s provision in Christ. For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt, Compendium, 115. He mentions the following: Hesiod, Works and Days, 109-208; Aratus, Phenom., 100-184; Plato, Tim., 233; Vergil, Ec., 4, Georgics, 1:135, Æneid, 8:314.

(b) Provisions for the trying of man’s virtue.—Since man was not yet in a state of confirmed holiness, but rather of simple childlike innocence, he could be made perfect only through temptation. Hence the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9). The one slight command best tested the spirit of obedience. Temptation did not necessitate a fall, If resisted, it would strengthen virtue. In that case, the posse non peccare would have become the non posse peccare.

Thomasius: “That evil is a necessary transition-point to good, is Satan’s doctrine and philosophy.” The tree was mainly a tree of probation. It is right for a father to make his son’s title to his estate depend upon the performance of some filial duty, as Thaddeus Stevens made his son’s possession of property conditional upon his keeping the temperance-pledge. Whether, besides this, the tree of knowledge was naturally hurtful or poisonous, we do not know.

(c) Opportunity of securing physical immortality.—The body of the first man was in itself mortal (1 Cor. 15:45). Science shows that physical life involves decay and loss. But means were apparently provided for checking this decay and preserving the body’s youth. This means was the “tree of life” (Gen. 2:9). If Adam had maintained his integrity, the body might have been developed and transfigured, without intervention of death. In other words, the posse non mori might have become a non posse mori.

The tree of life was symbolic of communion with God and of man’s dependence upon him. But this, only because it had a physical efficacy. It was sacramental and memorial to the soul, because it sustained the life of the body. Natural immortality without holiness would have been unending misery. Sinful man was therefore shut out from the tree of life, till he could be prepared for it by God’s righteousness. Redemption and resurrection not only restore that which was lost, but give what man was originally created to attain: 1 Cor. 15:45—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last man Adam became a life-giving spirit”; Rev. 22:14—“Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life.”

The conclusions we have thus reached with regard to the incidents of man’s original state are combated upon two distinct grounds:

1st. The facts bearing upon man’s prehistoric condition point to a development from primitive savagery to civilization. Among these facts may be mentioned the succession of implements and weapons from stone to bronze and iron; the polyandry and communal marriage systems of the lowest tribes; the relics of barbarous customs still prevailing among the most civilized.

For the theory of an originally savage condition of man, see Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and Origin of Civilization: “The primitive condition of mankind was one of utter barbarism”; but especially L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, who divides human progress into three great periods, the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized. Each of the two former has three states, as follows: I. Savage: 1. Lowest state, marked by attainment of speech and subsistence upon roots. 2. Middle state, marked by fish-food and fire. 3. Upper state, marked by use of the bow and hunting. II. Barbarian: 1. Lower state, marked by invention and use of pottery. 2. Middle state, marked by use of domestic animals, maize, and building stone. 3. Upper state, marked by invention and use of iron tools. III. Civilized man next appears, with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and writing. J. S. Stuart-Glennie, Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1892:844, defines civilization as “enforced social organization, with written records, and hence intellectual development and social progress.”

With regard to this view we remark:

(a) It is based upon an insufficient induction of facts.—History shows a law of degeneration supplementing and often counteracting the tendency to development. In the earliest times of which we have any record, we find nations in a high state of civilization; but in the case of every nation whose history runs back of the Christian era—as for example, the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians—the subsequent progress has been downward, and no nation is known to have recovered from barbarism except as the result of influence from without.

Lubbock seems to admit that cannibalism was not primeval; yet he shows a general tendency to take every brutal custom as a sample of man’s first state. And this, in spite of the fact that many such customs have been the result of corruption. Bride-catching, for example, could not possibly have been primeval, in the strict sense of that term. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48, presents a far more moderate view. He favors a theory of development, but with degeneration “as a secondary action largely and deeply affecting the development of civilization.” So the Duke of Argyll, Unity of Nature: “Civilization and savagery are both the results of evolutionary development; but the one is a development in the upward, the latter in the downward direction; and for this reason, neither civilization nor savagery can rationally be looked upon as the primitive condition of man.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“As plausible an argument might be constructed out of the deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove that man may have evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved upward from one.” Modern nations fall far short of the old Greek perception and expression of beauty. Modern Egyptians, Bushmen, Australians, are unquestionably degenerate races. See Lankester, Degeneration. The same is true of Italians and Spaniards, as well as of Turks. Abyssinians are now polygamists, though their ancestors were Christians and monogamists. The physical degeneration of portions of the population of Ireland is well known. See Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 146-160, who applies to the savage-theory the tests of language, morals, and religion, and who quotes Herbert Spencer as saying: “Probably most of them [savages], if not all of them, had ancestors in higher states, and among their beliefs remain some which were evolved during those higher states.... It is quite possible, and I believe highly probable, that retrogression has been as frequent as progression.” Spencer, however, denies that savagery is always caused by lapse from civilization. Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29:282—“Man as a moral being does not tend to rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be elevated and sustained by some force from without and above himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are apparently never developed from within.” Had savagery been man’s primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately, Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd. to A Century of Dishonor, 3—“The first missionaries to the Indians in Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes, clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams, skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power genuinely Christian.” So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol. 14:408-412. Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders. As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 245, speaks of “Prof. Clifford as pointing to the history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. “Some shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward into a state closely resembling that of the worms.” Drummond, Ascent of Man: “When a boy’s kite comes down in our garden, we do not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost.” Tennyson: “Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.” Evolution often becomes devolution, if not devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 104—“The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life, rising in a lofty elevation, and from pure springs, but plunging steadily down till it pours itself into that Dead Sea from which there is no outlet.”

(b) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian, though he may be a child.

On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see Arthur Mitchell, Past in the Present, 219: Rude art is often the debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest art in a nation may coëxist with the highest; cave-life may accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland, where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart, referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually. Rawlinson: “The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread tradition makes the cradle of the human race.” The Tyrolese peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274. Mason, Origins of Invention, 110, 124, 128—“There is no evidence that a stone age ever existed in some regions. In Africa, Canada, and perhaps Michigan, the metal age was as old as the stone age.” An illustration of the mathematical powers of the savage is given by Rev. A. E. Hunt in an account of the native arithmetic of Murray Islands, Torres Straits. “Netat” (one) and “neis” (two) are the only numerals, higher numbers being described by combinations of these, as “neis-netat” for three, “neis-i-neis” for four, etc., or by reference to one of the fingers, elbows or other parts of the body. A total of thirty-one could be counted by the latter method. Beyond this all numbers were “many,” as this was the limit reached in counting before the introduction of English numerals, now in general use in the islands. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 171—“It is commonly supposed that the direction of the movement [in the variation of species] is ever upward. The fact is on the contrary that in a large number of cases, perhaps in the aggregate in more than half, the change gives rise to a form which, by all the canons by which we determine relative rank, is to be regarded as regressive or degradational.... Species, genera, families, and orders have all, like the individuals of which they are composed, a period of decay in which the gain won by infinite toil and pains is altogether lost in the old age of the group.” Shaler goes on to say that in the matter of variation successes are to failures as 1 to 100,000, and if man be counted the solitary distinguished success, then the proportion is something like 1 to 100,000,000. No species that passes away is ever reinstated. If man were now to disappear, there is no reason to believe that by any process of change a similar creature would be evolved, however long the animal kingdom continued to exist. The use of these successive chances to produce man is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis of an infinite designing Wisdom.

(c) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of comparative culture.

Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev. Sept., 1882:194—“There is no cruel treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find the most of this cruel treatment among savages.” Tylor instances “street Arabs.” He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but savage tribes to a builder’s yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223; McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Gulick, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:517—“Cannibalism and infanticide are unknown among the anthropoid apes. These must be the results of degradation. Pirates and slavetraders are not men of low and abortive intelligence, but men of education who deliberately throw off all restraint, and who use their powers for the destruction of society.” Keane, Man, Past and Present, 40, quotes Sir H. H. Johnston, an administrator who has had a wider experience of the natives of Africa than any man living, as saying that “the tendency of the negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one—return toward the savage and even the brute. If he had been cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer human.” Ratzel’s History of Mankind: “We assign no great antiquity to Polynesian civilization. In New Zealand it is a matter of only some centuries back. In newly occupied territories, the development of the population began upon a higher level and then fell off. The Maoris’ decadence resulted in the rapid impoverishment of culture, and the character of the people became more savage and cruel. Captain Cook found objects of art worshiped by the descendants of those who produced them.” Recent researches have entirely discredited L. H. Morgan’s theory of an original brutal promiscuity of the human race. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 6, note—“The theory of an original promiscuity is rendered extremely doubtful by the habits of many of the higher animals.” E. B. Tylor, in 19th Century, July, 1906—“A sort of family life, lasting for the sake of the young, beyond a single pairing season, exists among the higher manlike apes. The male gorilla keeps watch and ward over his progeny. He is the antetype of the house-father. The matriarchal system is a later device for political reasons, to bind together in peace and alliance tribes that would otherwise be hostile. But it is an artificial system introduced as a substitute for and in opposition to the natural paternal system. When the social pressure is removed, the maternalized husband emancipates himself, and paternalism begins.” Westermarck, History of Human Marriage: “Marriage and the family are thus intimately connected with one another; it is for the benefit of the young that male and female continue to live together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than the family in marriage.... There is not a shred of genuine evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of promiscuity, instead of belonging to the class of hypotheses which are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is essentially unscientific.” Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions: “Marriage or pairing between one man and one woman, though the union be often transitory and the rule often violated, is the typical form of sexual union from the infancy of the human race.”

(d) The well-nigh universal tradition of a golden age of virtue and happiness may be most easily explained upon the Scripture view of an actual creation of the race in holiness and its subsequent apostasy.

For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 115; Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:205—“In Hesiod we have the legend of a golden age under the lordship of Chronos, when man was free from cares and toils, in untroubled youth and cheerfulness, with a superabundance of the gifts which the earth furnished of itself; the race was indeed not immortal, but it experienced death even as a soft sleep.” We may add that capacity for religious truth depends upon moral conditions. Very early races therefore have a purer faith than the later ones. Increasing depravity makes it harder for the later generations to exercise faith. The wisdom-literature may have been very early instead of very late, just as monotheistic ideas are clearer the further we go back. Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 171—“Precisely because such tribes [Australian and African savages] have been deficient in average moral quality, have they failed to march upward on the road of civilization with the rest of mankind, and have fallen into these bog holes of savage degradation.” On petrified civilizations, see Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 433-439—“The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law?” On retrogressive development in nature, see Weismann, Heredity, 2:1-30. But see also Mary E. Case, “Did the Romans Degenerate?” in Internat. Journ. Ethics. Jan. 1893:165-182, in which it is maintained that the Romans made constant advances rather. Henry Sumner Maine calls the Bible the most important single document in the history of sociology, because it exhibits authentically the early development of society from the family, through the tribe, into the nation,—a progress learned only by glimpses, intervals, and survivals of old usages in the literature of other nations.

2nd. That the religious history of mankind warrants us in inferring a necessary and universal law of progress, in accordance with which man passes from fetichism to polytheism and monotheism,—this first theological stage, of which fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism are parts, being succeeded by the metaphysical stage, and that in turn by the positive.

This theory is propounded by Comte, in his Positive Philosophy, English transl., 25, 26, 515-636—“Each branch of our knowledge passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.... The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a state of transition. In the theological state, the human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final causes, the origin and purpose, of all effects—in short, absolute knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings. In the metaphysical state, which is only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities, that is, personified abstractions, inherent in all beings, and capable of producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its proper entity. In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws—that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance.... The theological system arrived at its highest perfection when it substituted the providential action of a single Being for the varied operations of numerous divinities. In the last stage of the metaphysical system, men substituted one great entity, Nature, as the cause of all phenomena, instead of the multitude of entities at first supposed. In the same way the ultimate perfection of the positive system would be to represent all phenomena as particular aspects of a single general fact—such as Gravitation, for instance.”

This assumed law of progress, however, is contradicted by the following facts:

(a) Not only did the monotheism of the Hebrews precede the great polytheistic systems of antiquity, but even these heathen religions are purer from polytheistic elements, the further back we trace them; so that the facts point to an original monotheistic basis for them all.

The gradual deterioration of all religions, apart from special revelation and influence from God, is proof that the purely evolutionary theory is defective. The most natural supposition is that of a primitive revelation, which little by little receded from human memory. In Japan, Shinto was originally the worship of Heaven. The worship of the dead, the deification of the Mikado, etc., were a corruption and aftergrowth. The Mikado’s ancestors, instead of coming from heaven, came from Korea. Shinto was originally a form of monotheism. Not one of the first emperors was deified after death. Apotheosis of the Mikados dated from the corruption of Shinto through the importation of Buddhism. Andrew Lang, in his Making of Religion, advocates primitive monotheism. T. G. Pinches, of the British Museum, 1894, declares that, as in the earliest Egyptian, so in the early Babylonian records, there is evidence of a primitive monotheism. Nevins, Demon-Possession, 170-173, quotes W. A. P. Martin, President of the Peking University, as follows: “China, India, Egypt and Greece all agree in the monotheistic type of their early religion. The Orphic Hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities, celebrated the Pantheos, the universal God. The odes compiled by Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme Ruler. The Vedas speak of ‘one unknown true Being, all-present, all-powerful, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the Universe.’ And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship.” On the evidences of an original monotheism, see Max Müller, Chips, 1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, 2: no. 11; Legge, Religions of China, 8, 11; Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Philip Smith, Anc. Hist. of East, 65, 195; Warren, on the Earliest Creed of Mankind, in the Meth. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1884.

(b) “There is no proof that the Indo-Germanic or Semitic stocks ever practiced fetich worship, or were ever enslaved by the lowest types of mythological religion, or ascended from them to somewhat higher” (Fisher).

See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 545; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 36-115. Herbert Spencer once held that fetichism was primordial. But he afterwards changed his mind, and said that the facts proved to be exactly the opposite when he had become better acquainted with the ideas of savages; see his Principles of Sociology, 1:343. Mr. Spencer finally traced the beginnings of religion to the worship of ancestors. But in China no ancestor has ever become a god; see Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 304-313. And unless man had an inborn sense of divinity, he could deify neither ancestors nor ghosts. Professor Hilprecht of Philadelphia says: “As the attempt has recently been made to trace the pure monotheism of Israel to Babylonian sources, I am bound to declare this an absolute impossibility, on the basis of my fourteen years’ researches in Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions. The faith of Israel’s chosen people is: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’ And this faith could never have proceeded from the Babylonian mountain of gods, that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s bones.”

(c) Some of the earliest remains of man yet found show, by the burial of food and weapons with the dead, that there already existed the idea of spiritual beings and of a future state, and therefore a religion of a higher sort than fetichism.

Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object, though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however, identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, quoted in Dawson, Story of Earth and Man, 384; see also 368, 372, 386—“Man’s capacities for degradation are commensurate with his capacities for improvement” (Dawson). Lyell, in his last edition, however, admits the evidence from the Aurignac cave to be doubtful. See art. by Dawkins, in Nature, 4:208.

(d) The theory in question, in making theological thought a merely transient stage of mental evolution, ignores the fact that religion has its root in the intuitions and yearnings of the human soul, and that therefore no philosophical or scientific progress can ever abolish it. While the terms theological, metaphysical, and positive may properly mark the order in which the ideas of the individual and the race are acquired, positivism errs in holding that these three phases of thought are mutually exclusive, and that upon the rise of the later the earlier must of necessity become extinct.

John Stuart Mill suggests that “personifying” would be a much better term than “theological” to designate the earliest efforts to explain physical phenomena. On the fundamental principles of Positivism, see New Englander, 1873:323-386; Diman, Theistic Argument, 338—“Three coëxistent states are here confounded with three successive stages of human thought; three aspects of things with three epochs of time. Theology, metaphysics, and science must always exist side by side, for all positive science rests on metaphysical principles, and theology lies behind both. All are as permanent as human reason itself.” Martineau, Types, 1:487—“Comte sets up mediæval Christianity as the typical example of evolved monotheism, and develops it out of the Greek and Roman polytheism which it overthrew and dissipated. But the religion of modern Europe notoriously does not descend from the same source as its civilization and is no continuation of the ancient culture,”—it comes rather from Hebrew sources; Essays, Philos. and Theol., 1:24, 62—“The Jews were always a disobliging people; what business had they to be up so early in the morning, disturbing the house ever so long before M. Comte’s bell rang to prayers?” See also Gillett, God in Human Thought, 1:17-23; Rawlinson, in Journ. Christ. Philos., April, 1883:353; Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1886:473-490.