MAN, NATURE OF

We are all made of common clay and that is why we all have the same problems. As someone has well put it, “We’re all made in the same mold—only some are moldier than others.”820

Remember that man was made out of dust, and when dust gets stuck on itself it only turns into mud.821

As the old proverb puts it, you can bring a pig into the parlor, but that doesn’t change the pig—though it certainly changes the parlor!822

“Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite” (Thomas Carlyle).823

G. K. Chesterton said, “Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.”824

After many years of studying human behavior at one of the finest universities in the world, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles remarked, “Nothing I have discovered about the makeup of human beings contradicts in any way what I have learned from the Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, and from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and from Jesus and the lives of those he touched. Anything that I can say as a result of my research into human behavior is a mere footnote to those lives in the Old and New Testaments” (Robert Coles, Christianity Today, February 6, 1987, p. 20).825

“With the discovery of the atom, everything changed, except for man’s thinking. Because of this, we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe” (Albert Einstein).826

I still struggle with the old Adam, and so do we all. Young Philipp Melanchthon, colleague of Martin Luther, once wrote to Luther and said, “Old Adam is too strong for young Philipp.”827