IV MAKING MAN I can never read these early chapters of Genesis without being filled with wonder at their richness. The moment you try to make them dry literal prose they are full of impossibilities. Lift them from the dead level of prose and let them become to you poems, allegories, prophetic visions, and they throb with life. Has it never occurred to you how much of Nature itself is poetry and picture? There is so much in Nature that is not usable for growing vegetables and raising kitchen stuff. Indeed, you can do very little with it. The painter can paint it. The poet can sing it. Wordsworth, with an eye for the beauty and romance of the commonplace, becomes almost a mere literalist among poets, simply telling you, in the language of everyday life, what he sees, and lo! a new school of poetry starts into life. God has filled the world with unusable things- things I mean you can't eat, or make into clothes. And lo! the man whose faculties are all asleep-all except his money-making faculties — complains, as Judas Idid when the woman broke her box of aromatics and anointed the feet of Jesus, "Wherefore this waste?" If, when we get a Bible for humanity it should be, like the earth which lies outside us, full of poetry and allegory, is it not what we should expect? No end of confusion has come in the teaching of Bible truth from the non-recognition of its literary form. Our very reverence has misled us. The old Hebrews used to count every verse and every letter of every verse in their sacred scriptures, so that if anyone in transcribing them put in anything or left out anything they would know it. That was reverence. And it served its purpose. Superstition has not seldom been a most useful servant of Truth. The time comes, however, when everything has to stand on its own merits. From a great building the scaffolding is taken down. All the props and supports are removed. And if then the building cannot stand alone it falls. External evidence for the inspiration of Scripture is part of the scaffolding that has had to be removed. Eventually everything has to be judged by its internal evidence. And no one has yet been able to account for the marvelous, entirely unparalleled knowledge of human nature there is in Holy Writ except on the assumption that men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit. Of course, it goes without saying, that we must be under the guidance of the same Spirit, if we are to interpret it aright. "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give" the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? Now it is marvelous to find this sentence I have taken as the leading thought of our discussion at the very beginning of our Bibles. And yet that is its place. It tells us what God is going to do in all the human history which is to follow: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Prior to this there was another resolve — “Let us make an earth!" And what an earth it is! How long did it take to make it? We cannot tell. Creation is a process. Formerly men assumed it was an instantaneous appearance. "He spake and it was done; he commanded and it stood fast." It still remains true, however, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth." It still remains true that above all processes and behind all processes is a personal God, that being the great lesson of the early chapters of Genesis. Which is the greater, man or his habitation? Our Lord answers that question when he asks another: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" How long does it take to make a man? We know that it has taken ages of slow development to make a world; how long does it take to make a man, a man capable of holy thought and holy feeling which a world is not? Is the Adam of the book of Genesis the man contemplated? We are disposed to say, "Certainly not," any more than the first outline sketches of one of Turner's pictures is the completed canvas. Adam was only the foundation of the house, the |