Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

386 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMexercised, He created all men and all things. Manso created has an abiding personal subsistence, whichin its unity, its intelligence, and its freedom is animage, however faint, of these attributes in God.These are the two great truths on which I havehitherto dwelt, as being re-implanted in the mindsof the Gentile nations by the action of the Church.From them follows another truth, the absoludominion of God on the one hand over the manso formed and sustained, and the duty of absoluteobedience to God by inan on the other. That, inother words, is the conception of creatureship. Nowit is not too much to say that this was the precisewant of the Gentile world. Prevalent untruths hadgreatly impaired the sense of dependence on thedivine power, and destroyed the complete loyalty ofheart which man owes to that power. These werethe debasement of God's nature by breaking Hisunity ; the diminution of God's sovereignty bysupposing Matter to stand over against Mind, asco-eternal or at least co-original whilst conceivingthe divine and the human intelligence to fall underone genus; and the loss of belief in man's futureeverlasting personal subsistence. The people indeedwere better than the philosophers in this respect.There was more reverence, more sense of a divinegovernment, in the popular and untutored mindthan in the Neoplatonic fabulist of a Primal Being.In a universe in which men and women weresupposed, by virtue of some force which was everythingand nothing, to grow like animals and plantswithout knowing whence they came or whitherthey were going, in such a world, the world of thelast Greek philosophy, the obedience of man to his