When our Creator had finished, or rather fulfilled his labours, and all the forms the beauteous earth presents had issued from his creative hands. He surveyed the wide creation, and, behold, every object in its kind was "very good." But there was still wanting one who should be to the inferior animals a sovereign—a lord, having all things on earth subjected to his authority and dominion. The Creator, therefore, took counsel with himself, and "Let us make man" issued from the divine mouth. Man was created. With paternal affection, God stretched forth his hand to the last, the most perfect creature he had formed, and said, "Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creature that moveth on the earth: and it was so."
With grateful eyes, then, let us contemplate our erect position. Let us strive to recover the likeness in which we were originally created, and imitate in all things that tenderness and forbearance to the creatures put under our authority, which distinguishes our heavenly Father towards us. Let us strive to be erect in love and wisdom, as well as in bodily conformation. Then we shall rise to a spiritual altitude, and the plumb-line of truth will be set in the midst of our wills and affections. (Amos vii. 7, 8.)
"The wisdom of the Creator," says a distinguished author, "is in nothing seen more gloriously than in the heart." An anatomist, who understood its structure, might say before-hand that it would play; but, from the complexity of its mechanism, and the delicacy of many of its parts, he must be apprehensive that it
would always be liable to derangement, and that it D
