ld only the hem of God's garment; he seeks God above him,
because he feels Him within himself. He must pass, however, through the
various stages of growth, until his self-knowledge leads to the knowledge
of the God before whom he kneels in awe. Then finally he feels Him as his
Father, his Educator in the school of life, the Master of the universal
plan in which the individual also has a place in building up the divine
kingdom of truth, justice, and holiness on earth. For centuries he groped
for God, until he received a Book to serve as "a lamp to his feet and a
light to his path," to interpret to him his longing and his craving.
Israel's Book of Books must ever be re-read and re-interpreted by Israel,
the keeper of the book, through ages yet to come. Well may we say: the
mediator between God and the world is _man_, the son of God; the mediator
between God and humanity is _Israel_, the people of God.

PART II. MAN

Chapter XXXIII. Man's Place in Creation

1. The doctrine concerning man is inseparably connected with that about
God. Heathenism formed its deities after the image of man; they were
merely human beings of a larger growth. Judaism, on the contrary, asserts
that God is beyond comparison with mankind; He is a purely spiritual being
without form or image, and therefore utterly unlike man. On the other
hand, man has a divine nature, as he was made in the image of God,
fashioned after His likeness. The highest and deepest in man, his mental,
moral, and spiritual life, is the reflection of the divine nature
implanted within him, a force capable of ever greater development toward
perfection. This unique distinction among all creatures gives man the
highest place in all creation.

2. The superiority of the human race is expressed differently in various
passages in Scripture. According to the first chapter of Genesis the whole
work of creation finds its culmination in man, whose making is introduced
by a solemn appeal of God to the hosts of heaven: "Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness."(628) This declaration proclaimed that man was
the completion and the climax of the physical creation, as well as the
beginning of a new order of creation, a world of moral aims and purposes,
of self-perfection and self-control. In the world of man all life is
placed at the service of a higher ideal, after the divine pattern.

The second chapter of Genesis depicts man's creation differently. Here he
appear