shall do after he has been made, what he shall govern; so that man partakes of his high honours even before his creation, and ere he has come into being he has obtained the dominion of the world."

2

Man is distinguished from the other animals, which have been mentioned hitherto, principally by the stress laid on his likeness to God. The plural form in the words, "Let us make man," might be supposed to be the pluralis communicativus, so that God in these words would be speaking to the angels; for man might be said to be created in the likeness of the angels, in so far as they also were made in the likeness of God. But as S. Augustine observes, this idea is excluded by the following verse, for Moses says, as if he could not lay sufficient stress upon it: "And so God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him." Therefore, S. Augustine continues, we must consider the plural here as referring to the Trinity. This is the prevailing opinion among the Fathers, and they lay stress on the manner in which the Trinity is alluded to in the words, "Let us make," and "in our likeness," and the unity of the Godhead in the singular "likeness," and in "God created man in His own image." The question as to how far this patristic exegesis is justified, is connected with the far larger question as to how far allusions to the Trinity are to be found in the Old Testament at all. This question has, however, no bearing on our present subject, and I shall not go into it further. I will only quote the words of a most able modern interpreter of Genesis, who 1 De opif. hom. c. 3.

2 Civ. Dei, xvi. 6.

embodies the theory which seems to me the right one in the following short sentence: "From the Old Testament point of view this is the pluralis majestatis, which if we look at it in the light of the New Testament, at least tends to become the pluralis trinitatis."1 The questions as to wherein man's likeness to God consists, and how far we are to distinguish between the image of God and the likeness to God, have been differently answered by theologians. If we entirely overlook the dogmatic side of the question, which does not concern us here, we must from the exegetical point of view say first, at all events, that man's likeness to God consists in the sovereign authority which has been given to him. S. Chrysostom observes strikingly that "God does not only say, Let us make man in our image, but He shows in the words which immediately follow in what sense the word image is used. He says, Let them have dominion, etc. Therefore He speaks of the image with reference to the dominion, and to nothing else." But the dominion of man involves the possession of an immortal, reasonable and free soul, so that the other Fathers and theologians are also right when they name this point as the one in which man's likeness to God consists.

2

The dignity of man as the ruler of the visible world, placed there by God, and made in the likeness of God, is the real cause of his being created last. It may be pointed out that all through the Hexameron there is progress from the lower to the higher, from

1 Delitzsch, Genesis, 2nd ed. 1, 109 (cf. above, p. 104). Delitzsch himself thinks that the plural is a pluralis communicativus.

2 Hom. 8. in Gen.

the imperfect to the more perfect, and that, therefore, the highest and most perfect of the visible creatures would naturally close the series. It may be also pointed out that man, as the Fourth Lateran Council declares, is the link between the purely spiritual beings which were created in the beginning, and the material beings whose creation was finished on the sixth day. But the main point is that on which S. Gregory of Nyssa lays stress in the following words: "It would not have been fitting had the ruler existed before his subjects; on the contrary, the king must appear after his dominion had been prepared for him. And for this reason man was created last, not as if he were insignificant, and therefore created at the end of everything, but because he was to rule as a king over his subjects as soon as he was created."

The existence of the earthly creatures for the sake of man, for his service and use, is, as I have already observed, one of the four religious truths which it is the object of the Mosaic Hexameron to convey to us. It is here expressed in the verses in which God names man as the ruler of the whole earth, and specially lays stress on the fact that although the vegetable world is not given to man alone, but to the animals also for food, the animals, on the other hand, are appointed for his service and use.

And here I may remove an objection which has been made against Genesis by some men of science. It is not clearly connected with the other objections which I shall discuss later all together, and as you will shortly see, it can be shown to be a pure mis1 De opif. hom. c. 2.

understanding. The Bible teaches, it is said, that death came into the world through the sin of Adam: further, it says expressly that vegetable food was originally assigned to both man and beast. But the remains of primæval animals which we find buried in the geological strata, show that even in the primæval world animals devoured each other; for instance, the great saurians were beasts of prey, they lived principally on fish; their petrified excrements, the so-called coprolites, prove their great voracity, and contain recognisable remains of animal food. Besides this, unmistakeable marks of disease have been found on the bones of primæval animals. "Thus evident are the proofs," says Oersted, "that bodily ills, destruction, disease, and death are older than the fall." "No resistance of faith," says Karl Vogt, addressing theologians, "no pious salto mortale will avail to remove this stumblingblock which lies in your way: death has existed from the beginning." W. E. Hartpole Lecky goes so far as to say that "to more scientific minds the most important effect of geology has been that it has conclusively disproved the belief that death was the result of disobedience in Paradise, and has proved countless congenial beliefs to be erroneous; that it has proved that countless ages before man trod this earth death raged and revelled among its occupants. To deny this," he says, "is now impossible; to admit it is to abandon one of the root doctrines of the past." Frohschammer also lays great stress on this point.3

1

1 Cf. Delitzsch, Genesis, p. 104.

2 History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, vol. i. 279. 3 Das Christenthum, p. 104 seq., 238 seq. (cf. Theol. Lit.-Bl. 1868, p. 195).

We may fearlessly admit that carnivorous animals existed before the fall, and that animals died and were killed, without thereby contradicting one single passage in the Bible, or being obliged to give up the Christian doctrine of the fall and its consequences. By the doctrine that death came into the world by the sin of Adam, Holy Scripture only means to teach us that through sin man has lost the gift of bodily immortality, which had been granted to him. The teaching of the Bible, therefore, is that man would not have died had Adam not sinned; but nowhere does it teach that immortality and exemption from suffering were originally given to the animals also. But Frohschammer's assertion, that "if the animals were subject to physical evils and death from the beginning, man who bears within him the same matter, the same chemical, physical, and organic forces and laws, cannot be exempt from this legitimate course of nature," and that, "scientifically speaking, there is hardly any alternative but to accept suffering, disease, and death for man from the beginning," is entirely arbitrary; for natural science is not in a position to prove that the body of man, which by nature was liable to disease and death, could not have been preserved from disease and death by a supernatural act of God. No doubt the sayings in Genesis, that God had made man to rule over the animals, and had given him the plants for food, and had also "given every green herb for meat" to all the animals, have been explained by many exegetes as meaning that God had originally assigned vegetable food to both man and

Similarly Pozzy, La mort et le Péché, Revue théologique (Montauban 1876), ii. 364.

K

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