Our whitest pearls we never find, Our ripest fruit we never reach; The flowering moments of the mind, Drop half their petals in our speech And in this probation I do not believe it is given to man to comprehend all the force, the excellence, beauty and power of the gospel. These things will be revealed in their fullness only in eternity. SUPPLEMENT. MAN'S RELATIONSHIP TO DEITY. MAN'S RELATIONSHIP TO DEITY. WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM? AND THE SON OF MAN THAT THOU VISITEST HIM.[A] I. In order to a clear understanding of man's redemption through the atonement of Jesus Christ--the grand central truth of the gospel--it is necessary to know something of the relationship between God and man. The very fact that such a sacrifice was made for his redemption-- being no less than the immolation of him, who in heaven bore the second name--argues at once some special relationship between man and Deity. In view of the greatness and importance of that sacrifice, we may well ask, with the Psalmist, "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him?" These questions lead to the investigation of man's origin; for upon his origin his relationship to God depends. [Footnote A: Psalms viii: 4.] A discussion of this subject must be very imperfect, not to say partial, that does not give some attention to the various theories--at least to the most prominent ones--of man's origin. It is scarcely necessary to say that theories on the subject are quite numerous and widely different; and that in each school of philosophers are men eminent for their learning and intelligence. All existing theories, however, may be arranged under three headings: First, the monogenists, who hold that mankind have descended from a single human pair, created by Deity; and their descendants, modified by climatic influences, food, habits of life and thought constitute the various races of men--this is the theory of those who accept the Bible as authority on the subject; second, the polygenists, who insist not only on one act of creation, but upon a number of independent creations, "each giving birth to essential, unchangeable peculiarities of a separate race, thus constituting a diversity of species with primal adaptation to their geographical distribution;" third, the evolutionists, who believe all existing species are but developments of pre-existing and lower forms of life; which, in their turn, were but developments of still lower forms, and so on back, back until you reach the spontaneous generation of the lowest types of vegetable and animal life, "as the accumulation of mold upon food, the swarming of maggots in meat, * * * the generation of insect life in decaying vegetable substances, the birth of one form arising out of the decay of another; the slow and gradual unfolding from a lower to a higher sphere, acting through a long succession of ages, culminating in the grandeur of intellectual manhood."