You will, I trust, bear with me should I seek, in depths where the light shed by science becomes obscure, to guide my steps by light derived from another and wholly different source. In an assembly such as that which I have now the honor of addressing, there must be many shades of religious opinion. I shall, however, assail no man's faith, but simply lay before you a few deductions which, founded on my own, have supplied me with what I deem a consistent theory of the curious class of phenomena with which this evening we have been mainly dealing. First, then, I must hold that we receive the true explanation of the _man_-like character of the Creator's workings ere man was, in the remarkable text in which we are told that "God made man in his own image and likeness." There is no restriction here to moral quality: the moral image man had, and in large measure lost; but the intellectual image he still retains. As a geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, as an astronomer,--in short, in all the departments of what are known as the strict sciences,--man differs from his Maker, not in kind, but in degree,--not as matter differs from mind, or darkness from light, but simply as a mere portion of space or time differs from _all_ space or _all_ time. I have already referred to mechanical contrivances as identically the same in the Divine and human productions; nor can I doubt that, not only in the pervading sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, but also in that perception of harmony which constitutes the _musical_ sense, and in that poetic feeling of which Scripture furnishes us with at once the earliest and the highest examples, and which we may term the _poetic_ sense, we bear the stamp and impress of the Divine image. Now, if this be so, we must look upon the schemes of Creation, Revelation, and Providence, not as schemes of mere adaptation to man's nature, but as schemes also specially adapted to the nature of God as the pattern and original nature. Further, it speaks, I must hold, of the harmony and unity of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity,--after the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal should in succession have terminated,--man should have at length come upon the scene in the image of God; and that, at a still later period, God himself should have come upon the scene in the form of man; and that thus all God's workings in creation should be indissolubly linked to God himself, not by any such mere likeness or image of the Divinity as that which the first Adam bore, but by Divinity itself in the Second Adam; so that on the rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being the Son of God and the Son of Man should sit enthroned forever in one adorable person. That man should have been made in the image of God seems to have been a meet preparation for God's after assumption of the form of man.