We might here proceed to prove the immortality of the soul; but that we shall have occasion more particularly to do, under a following answer[36], when we consider the souls of believers, as made perfect in holiness, and thereby fitted for, and afterwards received into heaven, having escaped the grave, (in which the body is to be detained until the resurrection) which is the consequence of its immortality. And therefore we proceed, V. To consider another excellency of the human nature, as man was made after the image of God. To be made a little lower than the angels, as he is represented by the Psalmist, in Psal. viii. 5. is a very great honour conferred on him: But what can be said greater of him, than that he was made after the image of God? However, though this be a scripture-expression, denoting the highest excellency and privilege, yet it is to be explained consistently with that infinite distance that there is between God and the creature. This glorious character, put upon him does not argue him to partake of any divine perfection; nor is it inconsistent with the nothingness of the best of finite beings, when compared with God; for whatever likeness there is in man to him, there is, at the same time, an infinite dissimilitude, or disproportion, as was before observed, when we considered the difference between those divine attributes, which are called incommunicable, from others, which some call communicable. If it be enquired, wherein the image of God in man consists? It would be preposterous and absurd, to the last degree, to suppose that this has any respect to the lineaments of the body; for there is a direct opposition rather than similitude, between the spirituality of the divine nature, and the bodies of men. And, indeed, it would have been needless to have mentioned this, had not some given occasion for it, by perverting the sense of those scriptures, in which God is represented, in a metaphorical way, in condescension to our common mode of speaking, as though he had a body, or bodily parts; from whence they have inferred, that he assumed a body, at first, as a model, according to which he would frame that of man; which is not only absurd, but blasphemous, and carries it own confutation in it. There are others, who suppose that man was made after the image of Christ’s human nature, which, though it doth not altogether contain so vile a suggestion as the former, yet it is groundless and absurd, inasmuch as Christ was made after the likeness of man, as to what concerns his human nature, Phil. ii. 7. and man, in that respect, was not made after his image.