Christian progress? It would take a Christ to invent a Christ. Verily there is no other name under heaven given among men, in which we can be saved. His is the name above every name, the God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself; and every tongue must confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

PART II

GOD THE CREATOR

CHAPTER XII

THE CREATION

I. THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION. The doctrine is that God is the cause of the being or existence of the universe, and not merely of its arrangement or evolution. The doctrine of God's preservation of the universe is that, while God has given to the universe being distinct from himself, it has reality only as continuously and progressively realizing God's thought, as always dependent on his power, and revealing his presence. The two doctrines are inseparable; God cannot create a being that can exist independent of himself. The two doctrines will therefore be treated together. The significance of the two is that God is always the causative antecedent of the universe, and that the universe is always dependent on him, and is always revealing him. The universe is all that is conditioned. The Creator is the Unconditioned and the All-conditioning.

The doctrine distinguishes theism from dualism, whether in the form of the eternity of God and of matter, or in the form of the eternity of two personal beings, the Good and the Evil. It also distinguishes theism from monism, pantheistic or materialistic. And, by its doctrine of preservation and God's immanence in the universe, it distinguishes theism from Epicureanism and deism, which recognize God only as the First Cause, who created and completed the universe at a stroke, and thereafter is not active in it.

God's action in creating and preserving the universe, is the free action of his will. Thus theism is distinguished from Gnostic theories of necessary emanation through successive æons. Creating and preserving by the action of free will is everywhere the scriptural representation: "He spake and it was done, he commanded and it stood fast." And it was shown in the discussion of God's attributes that, from the very essence of his being as absolute Spirit, all his action in creating and evolving the universe must be free, as the expression in the finite of his own free choice or self-determination eternally in harmony with the truths and laws, and progressively realizing the archetypal ideals and ends eternal in himself, the absolute Reason. And this enlarges and enriches our idea of the creative action of God. It is no longer an exertion of naked almightiness, creating something out of nothing. It is God, the absolute, personal Reason, eternally self-determined to energize in harmony with the eternal principles and laws of absolute Reason, expressing, in the forms of space and time and finite personality, the archetypal thought of his reason, and realizing the archetypal ideals and ends of perfection and good. It is God realizing in the finite the thought of perfect wisdom in the action of perfect love. Novalis said that force is the infinite vowel, and matter the consonant in the book of nature in which God expresses his thought. It is true that even in the physical world of matter and force God is expressing his thought, and its deepest reality is in the thought which it expresses, not in the symbols or letters through which it is expressed. But it is in personal beings, in the moral and spiritual system, that we read most plainly the thought of God, and understand the significance of the universe and the ends for which it has been created, sustained, and developed.

Creation is the act of God alone. No increase of finite power could bring it any nearer to creative power. It is a power differing not in degree only but in kind from all power of finite beings. The nearest analogy is the power of creating an ideal in thought and then realizing it on the canvas, or in a building or a machine, or in any concrete reality. Or a man may be said to create his own character by the free action of his will. But these are not creative acts, for they originate no being. Hence any attempt of the human imagination to picture the creative act of God must always be inadequate. The creative action of God may be known

as a fact, but it can never be fully comprehended by the finite mind.

Creation is compatible with any subsequent process of arrangement or evolution. Professor Haeckel and others have claimed, with an air of triumph, that evolution disproves creation. But it is not so. Evolution gives no explanation of the origin of the homogeneous stuff itself, nor of the beginning of motion in it. It leaves the necessity of a creation as imperative as it was before. And without God immanent in it the evolution cannot account for its own continuance and for the higher orders of being which at successive epochs appear in the universe. Evolution is incompatible only with the doctrine that God completed the universe at a stroke in one creative fiat of his will, and then left it to go of itself. On the contrary, the theistic conception of God, as realizing and expressing his thought in the universe in the forms of the finite, demands an evolution of some sort always going on. It is only when God expresses his thought in the finite that eternity discloses itself as time measured by events. And God fills all measured time with action in the finite. This continual action of God in the universe is the only supposition on which the fundamental maxim of physical science is possible, that the sum of all force potential and energizing must be always the same. This cannot be true of a finite force, but only of power that is absolute and infinite. When God creates he does not add to his power, ne only reveals it by realizing his thought in a finite form. And should he annihilate a finite being, he would not annul the power which had been revealed in it; he would only recall it into himself. It is only the absolute that cannot be made greater by addition nor less by substraction.

That God is the creator of the universe is clearly recognized everywhere in the Bible. It is needless to cite particular texts. So far as the universe, in the constitution and course of nature and the constitution, experience, and history of man, reveals the existence of God, it equally reveals him as distinct from the universe and as its creator. The existence of God, the absolute Reason, expressing his thought in the universe which he creates, and which is always dependent on him, is further made certain by the fact that this alone removes the difficulties and contradictions otherwise insuperable in both empirical and philosophical

science.

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II. THE COSMOGONY IN GENESIS. — The forms in which truth is presented in the opening chapters of Genesis are similar to those in which the Semitic peoples, from among whom the Hebrews had originally emigrated to Canaan, had expressed their traditional conceptions of God and of his relations to the world and to man. This is one of the points established by recent researches into the traditions of these peoples and the deciphering of inscriptions found among the ruins of their ancient cities. The conceptions of God and of the supernatural expressed in these traditional forms were pagan and polytheistic. But in the opening of Genesis, while these familiar forms are retained, they are divested of the false conceptions of God, and are used as the medium for conveying the revelation of the one only living and true God, of his creation of the universe, and of his real relations to it, and to man from the beginning of human history.1

If it is asked why these forms were used, the answer is obvious. Always, if truth is to be understood by any person, it must be communicated in language and forms of thought with which he is familiar. If truth respecting God is to be communicated to a child or to a savage, it can be done only in the words of their meagre language and in conceptions and forms of thought familiar to their undeveloped minds. For the same reason truths

1 Religion is a common characteristic of mankind. It is the response of the human spirit to the presence of God revealed to all in the constitution and course of nature and in the constitution and history of man, as well as in the experience of individuals. Thus all men attain more or less true ideas of God, of the spirit of man, and of the supernatural. But in interpreting these revelations to their own minds, men form conceptions of God and of his relations to men, which, notwithstanding whatever truth there may be in them, are defective, fanciful, and erroneous. These perpetuated by tradition, come to be expressed in various legends, myths, and superstitions. Hence arose the accounts of the creation and of the early condition and history of man, the forms of which are used in Genesis to declare the doctrine of monotheism. Some of these ethnic legends and myths are doubtless reminiscences, more or less faded, embellished by fancy and etherealized into myths, of momentous events or of remarkable heroes, "the mighty men which were of old, men of renown" (Gen. vi. 4). The tradition of the flood, for example, has been found among almost all races and tribes of men. It is doubtless the reminiscence of a great catastrophe of that kind in the regions inhabited by the primitive men. This, indeed, the modern theories of geology show to be not only possible but probable. Such traditions, as well as the incontrovertible historical evidence of events discovered among the inscriptions and other remains of these peoples, confirm the historical trustworthiness of the biblical narratives.