I. True greatness consists, not in weight and extension, but in intellectual power and moral worth. When the Psalmist looked up to the heavens, he was at first overwhelmed with a sense of his own littleness; but, on second thoughts, David bethought himself that this was an entire misconception of the matter, and that man could not be inferior to the heavens, for God had, in point of fact, made him only a little lower than the angels "than the Elohim," is the word in the Hebrew. This term, in the Elohistic portion of the Pentateuch, is applied to the Almighty instead of the term "Jehovah." God had made man, we may therefore read, a little lower than Himself, had crowned him with glory and honour, had given him dominion over the works of His hands, and had put all things under his feet. So far from being insignificant in comparison with the heavens, man is of infinitely more value than they.
II. The progress of science has had a tendency to make us underrate our manhood. The language of very many thinkers nowadays is the first hasty utterance of the Psalmist "What is man?" And the answer they give to the question is this: Man is but a mote in the sunbeam, a grain of sand in the desert, a ripple upon an infinite ocean, an atom in immensity. They forget that he is an atom which feels, and knows, and thinks, an atom that believes itself endowed with "the power of an endless life."
III. The doctrine of man's paltriness is no less pernicious than erroneous. So morbid a belief must react injuriously upon character. If we believe that we are more insignificant than the dead and mindless world around us, we shall never give ourselves much trouble about character. On the other hand, if we remember that our spiritual nature is akin to God's, made only a little lower than His, then we are stimulated to cultivate the manhood with which we have been endowed, to agonise,if need be, till we become perfect, even as He is perfect.
A. W. Momerie, Defects of Modern Christianity, and Other Sermons,p. 266.