Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/172

 structure. Their forms are inferior, and their wants and Capacities correspondingly limited. As we ascend the scale of animated nature, we find a gradual increase of wants; powers more varied; faculties enlarged and multiplied. And corresponding to this increase of desires and enlargement and multiplication of faculties, we find the forms of life also becoming more complex. We find them rising above the earth, provided with the means of locomotion, and simulating, in degrees more or less remote, the human form; until at length we arrive at man, the last link in the great chain connecting all below him with all above. Created to stand erect, with his feet upon the earth and his face toward heaven, he alone is capable of looking above himself, and of intelligently reciprocating or giving back the love and wisdom which flow from God. In man, therefore, the circle of life is complete. In a state of order he is the image and likeness of his Maker. He is the complex, therefore, of all the powers and gifts of other creatures, with the two human faculties—liberty and rationality—superadded.

Now it is because human life is the highest and noblest kind of life—because human wants are more numerous, and the human faculties more enlarged, exalted, and varied than those of any other creature, that the human form through whose instrumentality alone these faculties can manifest themselves, is the very perfection of all forms. God himself, who is the perfection of all that is human, is in this form. He is a perfect Divine Man. In Him everything truly human exists in infinite fulness, variety and perfection. Therefore when He manifested Himself on earth to the eye of sense. He appeared in the