scoverer, is most amazing to the most gifted. His eye for fact
is divine. He notes the falling sparrow, and at once reaches the
universal fatherly foresight and control of God. His consuming vision
goes everywhere, turning the hidden truth of life into light and joy
in His parables. His teaching is revelation, the unveiling of the
aboriginal divine order. He makes nothing; He reveals what God made.
And when He increases life it is by showing the path to that increase
ordained of God, insight and obedience. The will of God is the final
law for heaven and earth; the vision of it and surrender to it are the
path of life. Here we touch the depth of the old faith. God the Father
creates, and the Son reveals. The order of the Spirit is eternal; the
revelation of it is in time and for sense-bound men. Here we see in
a mirror and dimly; there they behold face to face. And Christ drew
forth into light the divine significance of man's life, as God
originally made it; and that divine meaning of existence thus drawn
out is the gospel of Christ.

In the text we are carried by a true seer back of all traditions,
behind all conventions, beyond all beliefs about life to life itself
as it lies in its own freshness and fulness. We are led to look upon
human life newly made, still warm with the touch of the creative hand,
and yet containing in it that very hour all that the Lord eventually
drew out of it. If the first man had understood himself he would have
been essentially a Christian. And therefore I propose to evolve from
the original human situation, as described in the text, the outline of
what I take to be a great faith.

I. If the first man had understood himself, he would have seen in
himself the interpreter of nature. From the first command, "Let there
be light," to the final, "Let us make man in our image," there are two
things to be noted. There is continuity in the creative process, and
there is an ascension from the lower to the higher. The first duty of
our self-comprehending Adam will be to look backward. He will look
across the wide field whose farther limit lies in cloud and whose
hither border touches his feet. He will survey the creative process
that has led up to and that has come to its climax in him. And as he
thinks of himself as the product of nature, must he not conclude that
as reason is the result, reason must have preceded the process and
governed it? Humanity is the issue; therefore humanity must have
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