And that the third command was, for the earth to bring forth the beasts
thereof, and every creeping thing thereon. Here the "rock-and
earth-forming" power of life ceased, and the language of the genesis
changes. It is no longer "Let the earth bring forth," but let the Divine
energy intervene!

"Let us (the divine Trinity in Unity) make man in our own image"--after
our own conception of what he should be--the being of two worlds, the
material and spiritual; and man was made accordingly. God breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a "living soul." This is
the record--brief, grand, historic. No "evolution," no "involution," no
word without sense or meaning. He who was to have dominion, in his limited
sphere, over all the earth, thus came in due time for a wiser and grander
purpose than man has yet seen; but which, in the providence of God and the
light of His word, he will yet come to see, as scientific truth advances
with the march of religious knowledge. Heaven speed the day when this
millennium of truth shall dawn upon us here!

In this remarkable genesis we have a bridge that spans the chasm between
the man and the anthropoid ape as no other bridge spans it. It is a bridge
over which is flung the living garment of God, and angelic hosts may pass
it to and fro, as well as the master-minds of our own and future ages. It
takes man out of the category of a "beast of the earth," and places him
where all soul-aspiration lifts us--lifts even Robert G. Ingersoll, in his
higher inspirational moods, or will lift him when his extreme material
dogmatisms and false teachings desert him, as we trust they some day will.
Let him read the "Student," by Bulwer, and he will learn how narrowly
Voltaire escaped becoming a "Reformer" in the Church of England, instead
of the violent antagonist he was of the corrupt Church of Rome in France.
We do not make ourselves; it is the environing circumstances and