A Sermon Preached on August 19 by the Rev. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin "And God said, Let us make man in owr image, after our like ness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."—Genesis 1.
To-day there is a strong tendency to rob man of what is the key word in this divine charter originally given him—the word "dominion." It is the great delight of many scientific and lite: ary people to "take man down peg or two." I am inclined to think that one reason for their delight in it is that it takes the "Christian and Bible view of man down a peg also. They speak and write of man as a "child of circumstances," a ''creature of environment." They speak of ''man and other animals;" that is, that he began as an ape and has remained an ape ever since as far as his fundamental nature and prospects are concerned. The implication is, that man is not such an important creature as the Bible has led him to believe he is. He is removed from the front seats to the cheaper and obscurer ones at the back. The idea has been and is to assimilate man to the creatures round about him and great contempt is poured on the idea that man has any right te consider himself the "lord of creation." For the last 50 years he has been undergoing a process of dis-establishment, a painful process which no one can possibly like. So we hear a great deal about the "conceit of man," a "mero speck in the universe," assuming so much to himself when he ought to be content to sit down the universal assembly of animated creatures as one of them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.