of not only conceiving of God's contrivances, but even of reproducing them; and this, not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker. He may occasionally borrow the principles of his contrivances from the works of the Original Designer, but much more frequently, in studying the works of the Original Designer does he discover in them the principles of his own contrivances. He has not been an imitator: he has merely been exercising, with resembling results, the resembling mind, _i.e._, the mind made in the Divine image. But the existing scene of things is not destined to be the last. High as it is, it is too low and too imperfect to be regarded as God's finished work: it is merely one of the _progressive_ dynasties; and Revelation and the implanted instincts of our nature alike teach us to anticipate a glorious _terminal_ dynasty. In the first dawn of being, simple vitality was united to matter: the vitality thus united became, in each succeeding period, of a higher and yet higher order;--it was in succession the vitality of the mollusc, of the fish, of the reptile, of the sagacious mammal, and, finally, of responsible, immortal man, created in the image of God. What is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the past--an introduction a second time of "man made in the image of God?" No! The geologist, in the tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish--of the reptile--of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty--the "_kingdom_"--not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form of man. In the doctrine of the two natures, and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of Him in whom the natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been, a progress Godwards--not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union; and, occupying that point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable Monarch of all the Future. It is, as urged by the Apostle, the especial glory of our race, that it should have furnished that point of contact at which Godhead has united Himself, not to man only, but also, through man, to His own Universe--to the Universe of Matter and of Mind.