and all have human hands, a fact that so strikes the prophet that he repeats it three times.[2] These four Cherubim, then, seem to me clearly to indicate the archetypes of Creation, the great design-forms of created life, showing themselves the progressive scale from the Animal to the Man and the Angel.  And these four great types exactly answer to the resulting groups of created life.  We have the development of Reptilia into Birds as one final type; consequently one face of each cherub has the Bird type—­the Eagle head[3].  Two other faces on each give us the Animal type, one representing again the great order Carnivora (the Lion), the other the Herbivorous Ungulates (the Ox or Calf); while the fourth face indicates the last development, Man.

[Footnote 1:  Ezek. viii. 10.]

[Footnote 2:  See chapters i. 8, x. 8, and x. 21.  Remark, in passing, that the human hand has always been the subject of wonder as an evidence of Divine skill in Creation.  Sir Charles Bell’s Bridgewater treatise, on the human hand as illustrating the proof of Divine wisdom and contrivance in Creation, is just as good an argument for Design now as ever it was.  I cannot here resist the temptation to notice one of those small points in which the accuracy of the Bible is so constantly brought to light.  The popular notion of angels gives them wings as well as hands—­a form quite impossible from the natural history point of view; all animals of the vertebrate orders never have more than two pairs of limbs.  And in winged animals the fore-limbs become wings.  The popular notion about angels is, however, artistic, not Biblical.  Just the contrary in fact.  Here is a vision of a mysterious form with wings and hands, but how?—­the figures are fourfold; and being winged, each division might have been winged like the eagle, so each cherub would have had eight wings.  But as one of the divisions had a human face and human hands, the prophet only saw six wings to each, leaving one division where, nature’s Divine type being obeyed, there were hands, and consequently no wings.]

[Footnote 3:  Reptiles are unrepresented, perhaps as not being a final type.]

I would say here, as regards the animal creation being represented by a double form, that it is most curious to notice that this double division of animals is found throughout Scripture, and seems to have its counterpart in the actual facts of creation on earth.

Accompanying these created beings in this remarkable vision were “wheels” which appeared to be spheres within spheres, revolving with ceaseless activity and never turning, but always going forward.  The wheels were full of eyes.  It appears to me probable that these symbolize—­and if so the symbol is at once full of meaning and grandeur—­the inevitable, ever wakeful energies and forces of nature, the marvellous agency of electricity, chemical affinity,