SERMON V. 87 A GENESIS I. 27. God created man in his own image. S the history of the Creation, deliver- SERM. ed down to us in the infpired writings, is on all accounts fitted to raise our wonder and astonishment, our praise and admiration of the great author of it; fo nothing, perhaps, could more forcibly strike the attentive mind, or fill it with greater fatisfaction, than to mark the gradual scale of beings, as they rose into existence; to trace the spirit of God moving over the face of nature, diffufing itself by flow degrees through the whole mafs of things, and rifing from the ani V. SERM. mate and inanimate creation, to the form V. ation of its last and greatest work, a crea¬ ture framed after the image of its maker, What but ineffable goodness could prompt a Being incapable of all additional happinefs, and bleft in the enjoyment of his own perfections, to call us from a state of annihilation to light and life?-But to ftamp his own image alfo, to imprint his own divine nature on this work of his hands, was an inftance of tranfcendent love and benevolence which we could not deferve, and which we can never repay. Let us look back, then, with eyes of admiration, and hearts full of gratitude and obedience, on the happy state of man, as he came out of the hands of his Creator, with the character of the Deity ftrongly impreffed upon him, a body spotlefs and unpolluted, an understanding capable of the the fublimeft truths, and a knowledge of SERM, every thing but fin. From the virtue, the happiness, the perfection of our first parents, to the vice, the weakness, and the decay of their pofterity, is, we must own, a melancholy tranfition; we are no longer the image, but the poor unsubftantial fhadow of our Maker; yet from this maimed and imperfect state, a reflecting mind may ftill trace out the art of the fculptor: though the beauties of the picture may be fullied, or the colours effaced by the injuries of time, yet the features are too diftinctly marked, the whole adorned with too much harmony and proportion, not to ftrike the eye with an admiration of the hand that drew it. There are some prejudices inherent in our frame, and interwoven with our conflitution, which the good would not, and the |