it were aware of it or not, philosophical thought set itself to explore, not creation in the scriptural sense, but the primordial act, as if this was the mystery of mysteries, and key to all wisdom. As man has no creative power, the attempt to pierce into that high, inscrutable, eternal mystery of God, the mystery of creation, must fail. But the Church having conceived of Creation as a simple, instantaneous fiat of Deity, the philosophie mind, misled by its guide the ecclesiastical mind, presumed the mystery of creation lay in the simple, instantaneous creation of force; it supposed it could grasp the idea, which seemed somewhat cognizable by the human mind, recognizing, whether consciously or not, something so like its own acts; and so it set itself to trace all actual results out of that which seemed to it to contain everything. The boldness with which the philosophers who attempted this problem enunciated their ideas in the face of a world not devoid of common sense, might be admired, had it not been accompanied with a spirit of gnosticism, that rioted in blasphemy, and a pride which bordered on the exaltation of lunacy. Yet their errors may excite commiseration; for, wild as they were, they came directly from a single error of the Church, on a single point, and their aberrations but show, as the most valuable lesson of their laboriously learned philosophizing, the potency of ecclesiastical thought over the mind, even when it seems to itself free from its power. These philosophical attempts resulted in the famous postulate, that nothing is everything, and everything nothing. And it can now be seen how this was arrived at. This strange conclusion of these philosophers is very nearly coincident with the fact as seen from their point of view, and in the exclusion of scriptural light from the subject. For they sought to find everything in an act which reached a result only infinitesimally above nothing, which is not the world-germ, which has not the least tendency toward a world, which is not in the least prophetic of the world; so it is not so strange as at first it seems, that these blind Titans of intellectual chaos, groping in outer

darkness, should have named it nothing, and, knowing of nothing else, should have come to conceive of it as everything.

In view of these aberrations of the philosophical intellect, it may seem wise that the Record assumes the truth which has led to such error; and the reason may have been that in whatever terms set forth, man would confound it with a higher reality. The idea itself is one which requires not the confirmation of Revelation. For the idea of force as originated by spirit, and becoming an existing entity, lies near to man. It is not a solitary act of his spirit. It rather seems to be an unintermitted effect. The motive power in man, in its ultimate analysis, is the spirit. This is the wheel within the wheel, the mainspring, the prime motor, and seems never to cease from the effluence of force. This seems to be the status, or law, or condition of spirit, and inseparable from it, so far as its status comes under human observation.

Of force in its simplest or lowest form, as an entity separate from the originating spirit, so as to be an existing entity, the mind has no difficulty of conceiving; it believes in it as readily and as firmly as in anything, though of course it is to be said of this, as of everything, there is that in it which it does not comprehend.

But it does not believe in this as something which comes out of nothing. As an accepted expression for the idea that the world is not eternal, this phrase, though liable to great perversion, and closely related to false ideas of the creation of the world, may be used; and indeed it cannot well be avoided, in the present state of language, without needless prolixity, or the coinage of some new term or phrase; but strictly construed, it is absurd, for that out of nothing nothing comes, is the dictate of reason; and hence the absence of this phrase from the sacred Record, need provoke no wonder and no regret.

Neither should the absence of the idea of the origination of the first force, or primordial matter, be thought to detract from the glory of the Record of Creation. Not only is there not in it those mysterious potentialities or possibilities which have mis

led some into thinking that with this idea the farther power of God in the great and manifold mystery of Creation, his highest work in the natural world might be dispensed with; but it is by no means to be thought of as having the least indirect, or even slightest possible tendency toward a world. To call this creation, is to take a stand in the outer darkness. It is not creation, nor any part of creation; and this is the reason why it forms no part of the Divine Record of Creation.

Contrasting it with this idea of Creation, read in the Scripture what Creation is. Study it, meditate upon it, till it opens on the soul in its complexity, its duration, its manifold order, in all its wonder as a great work of God, and you may then appreciate the wisdom of the Scriptures in making so naught of the one, and everything of the other. And you will see that the impression of the soul was wise and just when it felt that the Being who could do this, could do anything; that He who did this, did everything. Think of the work of the Spirit; of the going forth of the Eternal Word, not once, but many times; the mighty agencies; the interminable ages; all this was the creation of the World. And as thus created, the World, in all its manifold beauty and glory, is a great epistle of God to man. "The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his Eternal Power and Godhead."

Of these things the Scriptures speak. In this Creation the Eternal Wisdom exults. "From eternity was I anointed, away before the beginning, the beginning of the oldest parts of the earth. When there was no chaos was I born, before there were any deeps swelling with waters; before the mountains, before the hills was I born. When he had not made the earth, or the parts beyond, or the beginnings of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens I was there; when he established the skies above, when he made strong the foundations of the deep, when he made a law for the sea, even when he ordained the supports of the earth. I was ever with Him, as the world-builder. Day on day was I his delight, rejoicing

ever before him. Glad was I in the orb of his earth. My great joy was with the sons of Adam.” 1

The whole scriptural idea of Creation is different from the conception of it as the result of an instantaneous fiat of the Almighty, and far removed, and infinitely above all those speculations concerning creation, confounding it with the primordial act, to which the Western mind has come, departing from the interpretation of the East, and the thought of the primeval world.

1 Proverbs viii. 22-31.

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CHAPTER XI.

BEFORE Commencing in the third chapter to treat of coincidences between the Record and Science, it was made to appear that the two leading objections of Science to the Record, namely, that its teachings were opposed to the scientific ideas of vast times, and also of the Natural in Creation, were disposed of by the interpretation propounded in "The Six Days of Creation." But opposed to this there is one consideration, which must have been suggested to every mind that followed that discussion, and which, if unanswerable, prevails against that interpretation with decisive force.

It seems to be new truth, truth never found in the Record before. If so, its seeming discovery there but deludes. New truth may shine out of the Record, but still it must ever be born from the old truth must be the widening and deepening of itself; it must be the increasing, the brightening more and more of the same light. But this, it is alleged, is contradictory to the old interpretation, to all old interpretation; and, if it be so, this is fatal to its truth. Let the thought be conceived of in all its power, let the mind be fully opened to its force. It is a decisive thought. However satisfactory in every other point of view, however glorious in its results, though it could save the World, the discovery is a miserable cheat, a delusion, a mockery, if this can be alleged against it, that it is an absolutely new interpretation, is Truth unheard of in the Church, is Truth never discovered in the sacred oracles before. The rule which leads to this conclusion, as a general rule, is most stringent, and this is not a case where shelter from its consequences can be had in the exceptions to it.

The conception of creation is something of too much impor