the declaration that God
made man in His own image. The poets take the idea up. MacDonald tells
us in that beautiful poem of his, that the babe came through the blue
sky and got the blue of his eyes as he came; Wordsworth, that the
child's imaginings are the recollected glory of a heavenly home; and
the author of the first chapter of Genesis, that God breathed his own
breath into the nostrils of man and made him in the image of God. All
fancy, all imaginings? But, my dear friends, there is a truth in fancy
as well as in science. We need not believe that this aspiration that
shows itself in the pure mind of a little child is a trailing glory
that he has brought with him from some pre-existent state. We need not
think that it is physiological fact that the sky colored the eyes of
the babe as the babe came through. Nor need we suppose that man was
a clay image into which God breathed a physical breath, so animating
him. But beyond all this imagery is the vision of the poet. God in
man; a divine life throbbing in humanity; man the offspring of God;
man coming forth from the eternal and going forth into the eternal.

This is the starting-point of the Bible. Starting with this, it goes
on with declaration after declaration based on this fundamental
doctrine that man and God in their essential moral attributes have the
same nature. It is human experience which is used to interpret divine
experience. According to pagan thought, God speaks to men through
movements of the stars, through all external phenomena, through even
entrails of animals. Seldom so in the Bible, save as when the wise men
followed the star, and then that they might come to a divine humanity.
In the Old Testament God speaks in human experience, through human
experience, about human experience, to typify and interpret and
explain Himself. God is like a shepherd that shepherds his flock.
God is like a king that rules in justice. He is like the father that
provides for his children. He is like the mother that comforts the
weeping child. All the experiences of humanity are taken in turn and
attributed to God. The hopes, the fears, the sorrows, the joys, the
very things which we call faults in men--so strong and courageous are
the old prophets in this fundamental faith of theirs that man and God
are alike--the very things we call faults in men are attributed to the
Almighty. He is declared to hate, to be wrathful, to be angry, to be
jealous; because, at the root,