Sermon Preached in the Union Church, Tientsin, by the Rev. C. E. Darwent, M. A. on April 24.
Gen, I, 27.
"And God created man in His own image."
And Gen. 1, 7.
"And the Lord Gud junned man of the dust of the and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."
Here are the two accounts given tu Genesis of the creation of man. The one emphasizes the higher divine side of human nature; there is something of God in him. The other passage divells on the physical element in him; he is made of the dust of the earth. And so he is. And all our troubles and problems in regard to human nature arise out of the enormous difficulty of getting these two elements to work harmoniously together. That—indeed. is the problem of religion. Now, unless T am much mistaken, this beautiful and hopeful account of man's origin given in Genesis is under a cloud today. I have always read every book that I could get hold of on the origin of man, and the reading of them has had a tendency towards depression of the spirits.
Man, as he is now, is held to have slowly evolved out of brutal state, much like that of the animals; and the whole impression made is to' reduce man in importance, to bring him down to a. lower level. And it is likely enough that some, at least, of the prevailing indifference to Christianity is due to the idea that it makes too much of man, that it is hardly likely that a divine Saviour was needed to bring him into harmony with God. Task you tonight to consider a point of view which lifts man up again. What I believe is that man, as geology seams to show, is not so old a creature. He is comparatively recent. If so, great and comforting conclusions can be drawn from
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.