eloquence. A keen analytical mind, great depth of
feeling, and wide range of fancy combined to make him a powerful and
impressive speaker. By some critics his style has been considered
unsurpassed in force and beauty. What he lacked in tenderness was made
up in masculine strength. He was a born satirist. Henry Rogers said of
him: "Of all the English preachers, South seems to furnish, in point
of style, the truest specimens of pulpit eloquence. His robust
intellect, his shrewd common sense, his vehement feelings, and a
fancy always more distinguished by force than by elegance, admirably
qualified him for a powerful public speaker." South became prebendary
of Westminster in 1663, canon at Oxford in 1670, and rector of Islip
in 1678. An edition of his writings was published in 1823. He died in
1716.

SOUTH

1638-1716

THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MAN

_So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him_.--Genesis i., 27.

How hard it is for natural reason to discover a creation before
revealed, or, being revealed, to believe it, the strange opinions of
the old philosophers, and the infidelity of modern atheists, is too
sad a demonstration. To run the world back to its first original and
infancy, and, as it were, to view nature in its cradle, and trace the
outgoings of the Ancient of Days in the first instance and specimen of
His creative power, is a research too great for any mortal inquiry;
and we might continue our scrutiny to the end of the world, before
natural reason would be able to find out when it began.

Epicurus's discourse concerning the original of the world is so
fabulous and ridiculously merry that we may well judge the design of
his philosophy to have been pleasure, and not instruction. Aristotle
held that it streamed by connatural result and emanation from God, the
infinite and eternal Mind, as the light issues from the sun; so that
there was no instant of duration assignable of God's eternal existence
in which the world did not also coexist. Others held a fortuitous
concourse of atoms--but all seem jointly to explode a creation, still
beating upon this ground, that the producing something out of nothing
is impossible and incomprehensible; incomprehensible, indeed, I grant,
but not therefore impossible. There is not the least transaction of
sense and motion in the whole man, but philosophers are at a loss to
comprehend, I am sure they are to explain it. Wherefore it is not
alwa