Now, let us turn to this, the best account of creation ever given, and see what it says. After enumerating all the types of living creatures, God said, "Let us make man in our image, and after' our likeness. and let them have dominion everything not ''a child of circumstances' at all, but "Jard of creation "Let them have dominion"—rule, lordship, power. That is what it means. It means that for some reason the whole earth has been put under the power of man. He is not 'a creature of environment" at all. That is the view of this great old book. It reminds one. in its view of man of a remark made by Mr. Gladstone of one of Mr. D'Israeli's cabinets, which consisted of 10 members only. Mr. Gladstone said, Mr. DiIsraeli is the one; the other nine make up the cipher." This story contains the idea of man's status in the world. He is first and all the rest nowhere compared with him. Moses tells us, that this is God's idea of man. Now notice how fully and completely the divine idea of man has been varied by man's treatment of the whole animated creation and of the world itself. Man has dominioni We are so used to it, that we have probably never noticed it. Let us see how extraordinarily absolute in many ways man's dominion is. We will follow the inventory of the world as given in my text. There is first: man himself. According to recent science man did start pretty low. Supposing that he did, how is it that he has reached his present power over creation? His rivals possess claws and muscles such as he never has had, to say nothing of teeth; yet he has managed to beat them all and place himself in the position of master, so that he rides the horse, puts the lion from the forest into a cage and makes the "king of beasts" into an ignominious sixpenny show. With all their strength, andi horns and teeth and muscles he has beaten them all; first with a primitive club and now with rifles. The very biggest of the ancient creatures are now mere curios for museums held together by wires. Man builds the museums to put them in. You cannot have more complete dominion that that.
MAN'S DOMINION, Now take the species of creatures in order, and we shall see that Moses is right. Man has dominion over them. "The fish of the sea" are named first. You would think that owing to the immensity of the expanse and depth of the sea there could be no possibility of any exhaustion of fish—that man could not make any apprecia able diminution of their numbers. But he can and he is doing so. I read only the other day this about the whale, "Nothing can save the whale from extine tion." Governments cannot. The whale could go on multiplying as long as he had only the Esquimaux with their javelins to fight, but now the white man with explosives can kill more in a year than the natives of the Arctic regions in ten thousand years. Nature cannot stand up against modern man's methods of destruction. Seals used to visit Selsea in Sussex; in fact, Selsea is Seal's Island. There would be no seals in Behring Straits, unless the British, American and Russian governments protected them. There is the North Sea for some reason more prolific in food fish of any sea. It has been fished for ages. But man with his modern methods of fishing is exhausting it. There are no big fish caught now in that sea. Torday the fishing boats remain at sea fishing without intermission sending their catch to port by steamer. The fish have no rest; man is so greedy of gain that he destroys his own business by his greediness. Even the egg-laying capacity of a cod laying 100,000 eggs at a time cannot cope with man's love of money. That is the reason why European fishers have had to go so far as the coast of Iceland and to the Faroes. As I have seen, they catch halibut weighing over 200 Iv. there now, but they know it cannot continue, Then it is not generally realized how small an area of the sea is fishable. Ona hundred fathoms is the limit of deep-sea fishing, and the area of that depth is absurdly small. The fact is man's dominion is 80, complete that he can almost exterminate the best fish. Salmon in the Fraser River are diminishing and will have to be more perfectly protected. When man is out to make money he can exterminate whole species. He does it, That, surely, is "having dominion.'"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.