The Majesty Of Man Series

King Louis XIV of France was once reminded by the chaplain of his court that he was a sinner and

in danger of damnation. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "All true, no doubt, but the good God

will think twice before He casts out so good of Prince as I am." Here was a man of pride who

thought of himself more highly than he ought. On the other hand, when the medical student defines

man as "A highly developed vertebrate, a more or less clever and successful ape, who has worsted his

competitors in the struggle for existence," we say this is foolish pessimism, and an all together too

low a view of man. What is man anyway?

J. S. Whale wrote, "What is the truth about the nature and end of man? This is the ultimate

question behind the vast debate, the desperate struggle of our time. Ideologies- to use the ugly

modern jargon-are really anthropologies. They are answers to that question which man has not

ceased to ask ever since he began asking questions at all: Namely, what is man?" This question

becomes even more relevant when we think of the Incarnation, for our attention is focused on the fact

that God became a man. This adds a whole new dimension to our thinking, for whatever man is in

his essential nature God became that, and because of it we have a human Savior.

Several millenniums ago David asked this question from the point of view of a believer. He

looked into the starry sky and gazed attentively at the moon, and suddenly the majesty and magnitude

of it over whelmed him. In wonder at the great contrast between all of this and himself he cried out in

amazement to God, "What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that you visit

him?" If David had cause to wonder what made him an object of God's concern, how much more do

we in our age of astronomy? Fred Hoyle of St. John's College says that our earth is only a speck of

dust, for in our galaxy alone there are ten billion stars as big or bigger than our Sun, and there are

more than one hundred million more galaxies.

Sir James Jeans in his book The Mysterious Universe says that the majority of stars could be

packed with hundreds of thousands of our earth, and some giants are so large that even millions of

millions of our planet could not fill them.

We are so materially insignificant that the universe would suffer no more loss by our destruction than

a vast forest would suffer by the burning of one leaf. Who can fail to be humbled by such facts?

Someone might say that man has gone a long way by getting to the moon. But this does not change

the picture in any measurable way. It is like the boy who, when he heard that the Sun was 93 million

miles up, asked if that was from the ground or the top of the house? When you are dealing with the

figures involved with astronomy, anything that man does in space is relatively insignificant. We can

only stand in awe at the magnitude of it, and ask with David, "What is man that you are mindful of

him?"

In our search for an answer to this question we find that men fall into two categories in their

conclusions. One group is pessimistic as to what man is, and the other group is optimistic. This is an

over simplification, and it does not mean there are not all shade of differences. You can never divide

men into two camps on anything, for they have the capacity for a great variety of opinions. Someone

said that there are only two kinds of people in the world-those who think there are two kinds of

people in the world, and those who know better. We know better, but we are dividing them into two

camps on this question. First of all we will look at-

I. A BIOLOGICAL VIEW OF MAN.

By biological I mean those who, because of ignorance or false intelligence, cannot see that man

is anymore than an animal. They see him strictly as a product of fate and evolution, and not of

creation. In other words, it is a view of man that leaves out God. The result is pessimism, for

although they recognize that man is the animal of supreme intelligence, they also recognize he has a

pathetically poor record of applying it. He can develop all kinds of schemes to protect himself, and

then go to war and destroy everything he developed, and himself as well.

Bernard Shaw said that the folly of man convinced him that earth was a cosmic insane asylum