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all we will say here is that man is not said to possess a soul, but that he
is one.
There are two Psalms in which David asks and answers the question,
'What is man?'
'Lord, what is man, that Thou takest knowledge of him! or the son of
man, that Thou makest account of him! Man is like to vanity, his days
are as a shadow that passeth away' (Psa. 144:3,4).
But instead of this conclusion leading David to consider that man has
no place in the scheme of things, and that his little world and span are but
a drop in the ocean, it causes him immediately to call upon the Lord: 'Bow
Thy heavens, O Lord, and come down, touch the mountains and they shall smoke'
(verse 5). And all this with the object of delivering one who at first sight
was of so little account.
When we turn to the other Psalm of David where this question occurs, we
find even less reason for unscripturally belittling man:
'When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the
stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man, that Thou art mindful of
him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?' (Psa. 8:3,4).
Unless we give good heed to the actual teaching of this Psalm, we are
liable to become the victims of a false comparison. When man looks away from
himself to the vastness of the heavens, the myriads of stars, the immensity
of it all is overwhelming, yet is the pessimism of the poet justified when he
wrote:
'Stately purpose, valour in battle, splendid annals of army and fleet,
Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, shouts of
triumph, sighs for defeat.
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Raving politics, never at rest while this poor earth's pale history
runs:
What is it all but the murmur of gnats in the gleam of a million
million suns?'
Ecclesiastes expresses a similar thought. Because it ends in death,
all such activity is 'vanity'. This is a true conclusion, but the poet has
been misled by the mere comparison of size and bulk, which is a false basis
to work upon.
An astronomer, similarly overwhelmed by this 'irrelevant logic of
size', as Fitchett aptly calls it in his Unrealized Logic of Religion,
observed that if God despatched one of His angels to discover this tiny
planet, earth, amongst all the glittering hosts of the stars, it would be
like sending a child out upon some vast prairie to find a speck of sand at
the root of a blade of grass. This would be very terrible if true, but in
its implication it is false. Scripture does not speak of the earth as one of
these millions of suns and planets. Its constant language is 'the heaven and
the earth', with no thought concerning their disproportion so far as size is
concerned. When dealing with moral worth, do we think in terms of inches and