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 more or less remote, the human form; until at length we arrive at man, the last link in the great chain connecting all below with all above him. 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 fullness, variety, and perfection. Therefore when He manifested himself on earth to the eye of sense, he appeared in the human form. And when in more ancient times he filled the body of an angel with his own Divine life, and thus became manifest to the spiritual senses of his