“Couldst thou in vision see Thyself the man God meant, Thou nevermore couldst be The man thou art—content.” Newly created man had right moral tendencies, as well as freedom from actual fault. Otherwise the communion with God described in Genesis would not have been possible. Goethe: “Unless the eye were sunlike, how could it see the sun?” Because a holy disposition accompanied man’s innocence, he was capable of obedience, and was guilty when he sinned. The loss of this moral likeness to God was the chief calamity of the Fall. Man is now “the glory and the scandal of the universe.” He has defaced the image of God in his nature, even though that image, in its natural aspect, is ineffaceable (E. H. Johnson). The dignity of human nature consists, not so much in what man is, as in what God meant him to be, and in what God means him yet to become, when the lost image of God is restored by the union of man’s soul with Christ. Because of his future possibilities, the meanest of mankind is sacred. The great sin of the second table of the decalogue is the sin of despising our fellow man. To cherish contempt for others can have its root only in idolatry of self and rebellion against God. Abraham Lincoln said well that “God must have liked common people,—else he would not have made so many of them.” Regard for the image of God in man leads also to kind and reverent treatment even of those lower animals in which so many human characteristics are foreshadowed. Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 166—“The current philosophy says: The fittest will survive; let the rest die. The religion of Christ says: That maxim as applied to men is just, only as regards their characteristics, of which indeed only the fittest should survive. It does not and cannot apply to the men themselves, since all men, being children of God, are supremely fit. The very fact that a human being is sick, weak, poor, an outcast, and a vagabond, is the strongest possible appeal for effort toward his salvation. Let individuals look upon humanity from the point of view of Christ, and they will not be long in finding ways in which environment can be caused to work for righteousness.” This original righteousness, in which the image of God chiefly consisted, is to be viewed: (_a_) Not as constituting the substance or essence of human nature,—for in this case human nature would have ceased to exist as soon as man sinned.