sciousness, use and development of powers, enforcing obedience to law as the requirement and condition of a happy life. When men assert the existence of evil to be inconsistent with the personality or with the goodness of God, they really demand a universe absolutely perfect from the beginning. Would such a universe mirror forth Divine power, wisdom, goodness? Free responsible beings are the highest created existences: amongst these, evil, sometime or other, is sure to arise; and extend, by their agency, to physical things. Are free spirits never to spring into life, lest evil drag them away? Must life be denied to infinite numbers of happy beings, delighting themselves in Divine Goodness, because the mysterious gift of freedom may be abused? Would not this elevate evil into a power restraining even Godhead, and under the world a vast expanse of stagnation, without life, growth, progress? Are not onward movements essential to the happiness of finite beings? and can we form any idea of life, growth, progress, without conflict, i.e., without evil? The onward march of the universe through evil to perfection-a perfection never absolutely reached because infinite, is a higher conception of Divine working than the idea of a machine complete in all its parts, but incapable of development and progress. Those who think most profoundly on those deep things of God, believe that they fit into a vast design of wisdom and mercy, the full understanding of which must necessarily be deferred to a future further advance towards perfection. Scientific men will admit that millions of years are as nothing in the life of the universe; and if, in the brief period of human history, we can trace a gradual though slow abatement of moral and physical evils, all analogy leads us to extend that fact to the universe; and confirms the Revelation of the written Word that all things are in the hand of a mighty, wise, and loving Ruler-are moving through evil and by evil to more perfect good. STUDY VI. THE CREATIVE WORDS. Gen. i., ii. 3. "Speaking is the revelation of thought: Creation is the realization of Divine thought."-Keil and Delitzsch, Pentateuch. WE pass now from purely scientific arguments to the Record of Creation in Holy Scripture. This portion of our subject demands expository treatment, and will lead to some of those transcendental, yet most practical truths which the Gospel Revelation proclaims. Our main object is to harmonize the Scriptural Record with the true conclusions of science. Science confesses that the world is inexplicable without "the omnipresent existence (ignored by positivism), whereof the phenomenal world is the multiform manifestation." Our previous studies show that there have been breaks of continuity in the visible universe which must have been bridged from an external source-"all portions of our science, and especially that beautiful one, the Dissipation of Energy, point unanimously to a beginning, to a state of things incapable of being derived by present laws (of tangible matter and its energy) from any conceivable previous arrangement.' This fact science, whose province is the discoverable, has revealed; what saith Scripture? "In the beginning," na; "of old;" vápn, LXX; am Anfang, Luther; is to be taken as the head of all time, preceding every kind of existence-that commencement of Divine history when the ideal, fundamental, and eternal plan of God began to be realised in creation. Thus, the Bible in its first Hebrew word states a fact which it is now the glory of physical science to affirm. The earth and all things 1 "Cosmic Philosophy," Pref., p. x. : John Fiske. 2 "Recent Advances in Physical Science," p. 26: P. G. Tait, M. A. Creation Began Time. 109 therein, the heavens and all their host, "are phenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they must have had a beginning, and that they must have an end." There is no parallax by which to calculate the precise time, and there is no older event, for in the generation of the Son of God (Jno. i. 1-3) the same word is used to show that Christ is co-eternal with the Father. Not that Christ had a beginning, but in the beginning, being God and with God, He acted as the Creative Power. As Creation was in the beginning, and began time, there never was a time without Creation. In carrying up the mind to a conception of the age of our own earth and planetary system, it must be remembered that physical statements, like those in study on "the Rudiments of the World,” p. 76-80, are made, and rightly, on the ground of our belief as to the progressive order and continuance of things. It is not necessary as theologians, as physicists, or as geologists, so far as faith in God and Holy Scripture are concerned, to accept those calculations which assign great antiquity to our own world. Reckoned backwards-on scientific principles of progression from the past, and forwards-according to the doctrine of continuance,-they are affirmed by science not as absolute but highly probable facts. It was possible for God to have acted in any other way and by quicker process; and He may, as to the future, change all things in a moment; but, while chastened in mind by Scripture and preserved from secularism, we endeavour to use science as a light to the meaning of sacred physical statements that enlightened intellect and pious emotion may be alike content. Create, is the proper word to denote Divine production. Our faith pierces the phenomenal externality of the world to its supernatural and essential source, and has power to understand that the worlds were framed (Heb. xi. 3). Fuerst states, in his Concordance, that create has not essentially the meaning of making things out of nothing: “7, non habet producendi ex nihilo vim." The LXX version is Éπóinoev ò deós sòv oùpavòv xai sñv yýv." create, ny make, y form, interchange in use; for example, create and make 1 "Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge," Prof. Huxley. (Gen. i. 1; ii. 2) are make and create (Gen. i. 26, 27); form seems equivalent (in ii. 7) to make and create (in i. 26, 27); nevertheless, in Scripture the highest possible meaning is always the dominant, and passes by gradations into lower forms. We may safely say: "The Hebrew word is limited, in its primary meaning, to the working of God, and is never used in Scripture (where it is used in Kal thirty-five times) to describe the works of man, and presents an instance of the exactitude and precision with which the Holy Spirit writes."1 We are told the Bible account of Creation "is discredited by its barbarous origin, and by the absurd or impossible assumptions which it would require us to make :"2 "we may with equal propriety speak of the creation of cholera, of a conflagration, of a railway station, as of the creation of man." In order to get rid of Special Creation, we are asked to believe that God did not create anything, or, at most, only little things; say—nothing larger than an infusorial point; and that a few clever men trace their pedigree from cosmic dust to sea-slime, from sea-slime to protoplasm, and from protoplasm, by successive evolutions, to the philosopher who weaves the hypothesis with scientific imagination and mends all breaks in the web with threads of fancy. For our own part, we cannot believe that the world, an unconscious thing, unconsciously developed itself-bringing things that are out of things which were not: we hold that "Nature's great progression from the formless to the formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will," must be accounted as God's way of doing things. It is absolutely and for ever inconceivable that carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen atoms, should be otherwise than indifferent as to their position and motion-past, present, or future. Are we, "the cunningest of nature's clocks," to believe that there is no Intelligence at the heart of things? Are we to set our time as if it were more philosophical to regard unconscious, unintelligent energies as creators and guides than to have faith in God? 1 Wordsworth's "Commentary." "Cosmic Philosophy," vol. i., p. 464, John Fiske. 3 “Natural History of Creation," vol. i., p. 66, Dr Hæckel. Conception of Creation. III We are assured-"It is impossible to think of creation; and to prove it is the impossible task of establishing an equation between something and nothing." We reply-It is as easy to think of creation as of matter or space, of time or eternity; and the world is full of equations impossible to man and incomprehensible by human reason. The conception of matter acting upon matter is essentially incapable of being construed in our consciousness. Whether we regard the atom as divisible or indivisible, we cannot get rid of mastering difficulties, and the hypothesis of attractive and repulsive energies lands us in insoluble contradiction. The æther, the interstellar medium, in which the phenomena of light are displayed, surrounds and enters every solid liquid and gaseous substance; is imponderable, impalpable, cannot be isolated, nor compressed, nor attenuated, nor excluded from any space or substance; "its properties are those of a solid rather than gas, it resembles jelly rather than air."1 It seems hardly credible that men knowing of these mysteries should refuse the Divine Mystery. Aware that their own mind, correlated with a complex nervous system, possessing minute particulars of organization, modifies surrounding agencies; yet, they tell us that Supreme Wisdom does nothing of the kind—“there is no intrusion of creative power in any series of phenomena;" "it is beneath a philosopher to examine the evidence for miracles." We are to accept the government of La Madre Natura, let her again have altars and groves; we must live simply for the moment's sakeimmortality being a dream; free-will, virtue, responsibility— fond delusions. Why, Martin Luther would be very rude and say "I would rather be in hell with Jesus Christ than in heaven with men like you." “God created,” The Hebrew noun is plural: nomen majestatis. The mind of the Church discerns in this a threefold Divine self-consciousness in inseparable and co-eternal unity. Jehovah the personal God, covenanting with men; the Son of God, incarnate, is Christ, very God of very God, neither made nor created, but begotten; the Holy Ghost, proceeding, is the Spirit moving upon the waters. 1 "Fragments of Science," p. 4: Prof. Tyndall. |