About the Book
Excerpt from The Life, Services, and Character of Edward Everett: A Sermon Preached in the First Church, Jan; 22, 1865 The words of the Psalm are strong beyond our Eng lish rendering of them. T hou hast made him, we read, a little lower than the angels but the Psalmistsang, A little lower than God. And, from first to last, the Bible speaks very bravely, and, if it were not the Bible, there are those who would say, with a certain audacity, of man. He is made in the image of God; he is not merely a creature, but a son of God; his na ture and his capacity supplying the ground for that stern and persistent arraignment of him as a sinner, which makes the book so solemn for that steady prophecy of his redemption, which, as a line of light, threads the pages of Scripture, and makes them one, from Genesis to Revelation. There is a revering and religious study of human nature and human character. The Eternal Light is not yet revealed, save in symbols and types, until it becomes the life of men. When dust was fashioned into man; when, in the fulness of the times, after those long and weary though needful ages, whose record of vegetable and animal existences is written only on the rocks, man became a living soul, with speech for God and speech for his fellows, and knowledge and love and peace and the hope of immortality all infolded in his wondrous being, looking upward, looking forward, the world's high priest, heaven's prophet from the first, lo, at length the true light, an imperishable being in a perishing form! Nature reveals God, but only to the soul of man. Only so much of that mystery as is already written Upon our minds and hearts are we able to decipher. Until the great astronomers come, there is no true celestial mechanism for man. God tells his thought to a favored soul, and then we find it in the universe, and praise the Creators wisdom, wrought into his works, - the crystal, the sunbeam, the sun. And the mind of man brings to light no wonder so wondrous as the mind itself, though it were the humblest human intelligence. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise. The argument for the divine attributes is radically incomplete until our own being has testified. Both God care for oxen? Asks the earnest apostle to the Gentiles. Nay, it is upon man that he expends himself; no creature between God and man is the teaching of the highest religion, the mystery of ages and generations, the revealed fact of the gospel; and when we speak in the truest and highest strains, I do not say of what man is, but of what he was created to become, it may seem to the world that the good matter which we are inditing is a Messianic Psalm, though indeed we have regard only to our com mon humanity. How this humanity, even in its ruins, witnesses for God - reason, conscience, aspiration, affection, marvellous even then, - how indestructible is the moral nature! How ineffaceable the moral image And thus far in the divine providence there have always been those to whom He has given most abun dantly of the gifts which He denies altogether to none. He groups his children about one and another son of man. His revelations are through persons, his teachings through examples; and, to our great joy and edification, He places before us those whom we can revere and love. There are who tell us, that the age of great men is passed, and that we must reconcile ourselves hence forth to ages of mediocrity, as to a new divine order. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
