that " no man hath seen God at any time." Moses, when leading Israel in the wilderness, addressed the Deity thus, I beseech thee, show me thy glory." "And he said, I will make all my goodness to pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. "And he said, Thou canst not see my face for there shall no man see me, and live." Exod. xxxiii. : This absolute declaration made to Moses, and coming directly from God himself, who cannot lie, is at once decisive and confirmatory of this divine truth, that what the evangelist says "was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of Life," could not by possibility be any other substance or person than the natural image of the first Adam, and of Christ (as the seed of the woman), to the exclusion of mortal paternity, and who was eternally destined to bruise the head of the serpent. So that when Moses was divinely commissioned to tell us-"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness," these words contain the declared purpose of Christ's incarnation, uttered before the creation of the first man; in this same brief expression we behold the fall of man, and the entrance of death and sin at the same moment into our world, but yet the salvation of man asserted by the sacrifice of the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world;" and consequently see that "known unto God are all his works from the beginning," and that present to the omniscience of Christ the Creator were all events to occur in time, even before life was given to the origin of our race in the person of the first-made man. But further, that the word image finds its only just construction in the sense to which I have applied it, will be apparent on the investigation and comparison of many corresponding parts of scripture. Isaiah, xl. 18., puts these remarkable inquiries to the Israelites,-"To whom, then, will ye liken God, or what likeness will ye compare unto him?" clearly intimating the invisibility of that spiritual likeness. When, therefore, St. John, in reference to Christ's humanity, exhibits in the person of the Redeemer the qualities or properties of sound or speech, and then superadds those of hearing and touch, for the instruction of the early converts to Christianity and the church universal, he furnishes us with those tests, which the most fastidious scrutiny can assume to be requisite for the mental perception and information of rational beings, by exhibiting those essential qualities which an infinitely wise Creator deemed indispensable to man in a finite but sufficient measure to possess with himself, to the end that an accountable creature, destined both for time and eternity, created for the glory of God, and possessed of a rational mind, and thence exclusively designed, because thus supremely enabled, to hold communion with his Maker, might discern, first in the person of man himself, and then in the like human nature of God, the Word made flesh, all those same properties common to ourselves, and contained or concentrated in the mortal image of God and man in the person of one Christ. Although the written word of God furnishes us with many testimonies that by the word image is meant the material body of the Adam and of Christ, and that the word likeness, when taken in connexion with God and man, can alone be applied, with perfect propriety and sacred truth, to that spiritual likeness, or same Divinity of the Father, the Word, and the Spirit; yet one more proof in support of the signification of the words image and likeness will be given in this chapter,-which is in Deuteronomy xii. 4, where Moses, after exhorting the children of Israel to obedience, teaches the invisibility of the spiritual likeness of Jehovah, in a manner opposite, but yet apposite to that in which the evangelist speaks of the human nature of the Christ, the Son of God: "And the Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words; but ye saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice." Here Jehovah is earnestly explicit in guarding the Israelites against idolatry, by representing to them that the divine essence or spirituality of his nature is indiscernible, and man realizes in himself the possession and agency of that same spiritual, invisible, and incorporal essence or divinity of his Maker, and alike avowedly imperceptible. St. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, says, "What, ܕ܂ know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own And Christ, when speaking of his death and resurrection, says, "Destroy this temple, (his body,) and in three days I will raise it up again." So that when Moses uses this language, "And God said, Let us make man in our image," he spake in reference to the temple, or material image of Adam, and also of the like material temple, or bodily image of that seed of woman, excluding human paternity, inasmuch as the Word made flesh was the eternally begotten Son of the Father; and Saint John asserts the natural image of the second Adam, by commencing his first epistle general thus-"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life." Inasmuch, then, as the word "image" has relation to the corporality of the first Adam, and the Lord Christ, the consultation held by the Trinity before the creation of man comprehends or infolds the declared purpose of Christ's incar |