rists attempt to give all an equal interest in the preservation of public order, and thus to secure wealth against the impatience of want. For the accumulation of riches, and the increase of inventions produce no real augmentation in the happiness of mankind. Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, meekness, gentleness-these do not grow as society advances, and learning is increased. Rather do these graces adorn a simpler age of society, and a ruder state. The progress of society goes on heaping up a mass of misery, which no charity is able to penetrate and dissolve. And its worst feature is, that guilt assumes a more malignant intensity, as it ferments amidst the putrid mass of a corrupt community, so that the necessary evils of man's lot are increased tenfold by his voluntary sins. For every one of those thronging multitudes, for whom art and commerce afford sustenance and employment, is the reproduction of that ancient type of fallen humanity, on which all the children of Adam have successively been built. Each goes on, therefore, to add something to that mass of crime, which forms the connatural inheritance of his race. He was born in fallen Adam's image, how can he escape it? How can he get beyond that limit of his being, which his first forefather has fixed? In every race of animals there are modifications, but the normal type of the class cannot be overpassed. Adam must still reproduce himself in those who are born

his children. And thus, notwithstanding all the varied contrivances of skill and artifice, is there a perpetual propagation of misery and guilt. So that we may still say with Pascal, "what a chimera is man! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet a helpless worm of the earth— endowed with all truth, yet the very sink of uncertainty and error-the pride and refuse of the universe."

Now, if man's weakness be that he inherits the corrupt nature of his fallen parent, the strength of humanity must be looked for in some quarter which this far-reaching pollution has been unable to affect. And where shall this be found? In man natural it cannot be found anywhere. One man there has been, however, in whom were gifts above nature. "What is man," asks the Psalmist, "that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels, Thou crownest him with glory and honour, Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet." "But now we see not yet all things put under him; but we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour, that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man." In this perfect In this perfect example of the human family, in this Pattern Man, through whom the purpose of man's being was completely ex

hibited, in whom first of the children of Adam, the Father was well pleased, do we see humanity invested with all that strength and glory which was its intended portion and original right. How did these things pertain to it? Because in the Person of that Great Head of our race there entered into Adam's line the very Being in whose image Adam had at first been made; and thus was man's original form remodelled through the presence of his Maker. From that infinite source of self-existent Godhead, the cause and principle of all things, there issued the Eternal Son, and without ceasing to be one with the Father, to whom by the law of His Being He is indissolubly united, He entered into Adam's line, He took flesh of the Virgin Mary His Mother, and to the perfection of His Divine, added the completeness of human being. "When the fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." In His Person therefore did those gifts of grace and glory, which had been originally bestowed upon the family of man, attain their full perfection. The traces, which had faintly indicated their presence, had hitherto but mocked the vileness of that being, by whom these glorious ornaments had been lost. But they now shone forth again in their proper lustre, because the image of God was perfectly restored through the union between humanity and Himself. For the Eternal Son, who

was by nature God's true and perfect Image, in whom the Father's perfections were completely reflected, who was the full and entire participator of them all, had, by taking man's being, rendered it also the reflection and earthly image of God.

So that in His Person alone has the text its perfect fulfilment; in Christ is man truly and completely the image and glory of God. "God," says an ancient writer, "becoming a righteous man, interceded with God for man who was unrighteous." In Him, as the Head and Pattern of the human family, its whole kindred has been advanced. He has come into it, as some adopted member of a nobler lineage, in whom the whole stock of an inferior progeny has been advanced. But then His union with those whose nature He has taken must be real, and not imaginary; actual, and not pretended-in order that they too may share the blessings which He has introduced. He did not take our nature that by the mere external show and fictitious supposition of resemblance, He might increase the misery of our actual defects. His object was to effect such real union between Himself and His brethren, that the Apostle could declare, that "as He is, so are we in this world." If He, when He took man's nature, was "the firstborn of every creature," "the beginning of the creation of God," His purpose was that we might be made partakers of the Divine nature, "having escaped the corruption which is in the

world through lust."

This is the effect of putting

"on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him." The words imply, not merely that He must take our human nature, but that we too must take His. All renewed men have given up humanity to Him, to bear it as their Head and Chief, that they may take it back again of Him, in that purified and exalted form which He conferred upon it.

Now the nature of that union whereby we must be engrafted into the humanity of the Second Adam, is as mysterious as that whereby we inherit the qualities of the first. As we know not how the old Adam is reproduced in each of his descendants, why his properties of body and mind reappear in them, why lust and anger and selfishness are found on every soil and under every sky, because these are the characteristics which, after his fall, pertained to that ancient type in which man had been originally formed, so neither can we understand the manner of that influence whereby God the Holy Ghost mercifully fashions the brethren of the New Adam into the blessed

image of their Head. "For we all, reflecting like a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." But, though the manner of this renewal is secret, yet so much is revealed, that as its principle is to join Adam's children to that new and purified example of humanity, the