^ How the Jews have understood the first verse of Genesis is sufficiently notorious. "Those," says Maimonides, "who believe in the laws of our master Moses, hold that the whole world, which comprehends everything except the Creator, after being in a state of non-existence, received its existence from God, being called into existence out of nothing. ... It is a fundamental principle of our law that God created the world from nothing." The mother of the Maccabean martyrs, when endeavouring to strengthen her youngest son for his last agony, bids him look upon the
1 H. P. Liddon. * John Pulsford, The Supremacy of Man, 127.
GENESIS I. I II
heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them out of things that were not. If the Alexandrian author of the Book of Wisdom speaks of God's making the cosmos out of shapeless matter, it does not follow that, like Philo after- wards, he had so yielded to Platonic ideas as to suppose that matter was eternal ; he is speaking of God's later creative action, which gave form to matter that had been made before. Justin Martyr uses the phrase in the same sense; and St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of matter having no relation to time, not meaning that matter is eternal, but that it had been created at a period when there were no " times or seasons or days or years." Tertullian holds that the Carthaginian artist, Hermogenes, who probably had never unlearnt his heathen creed, really teaches the existence of a second God when he asserts the eternity of matter : "Duos Deos infert," says Tertullian, "materiam parem Deo infert." And the common sense of Christian antiquity is expressed in the devout reasoning of St. Augustine : " Thou, O Lord, hast made heaven and earth ; yet not out of Thine own Substance, for then heaven and earth would be equal to Thine Only Begotten, and, besides Thyself, there was nought else out of which Thou couldst make it : therefore hast Thou made heaven and earth out of nothing."
iv. Continuous Creation.
In the sense of giving form and order to pre-existent matter, God has continued to create ever since the Creation. It is quite possible, as was distantly suggested by Peter Lombard in the heart of the Middle Ages, and as is maintained by the evolu- tionary theory in our time, that He has continuously developed ever new species of creatures by a natural selection out of lower species previously existing. In this, and other kindred ways, it may be that He " worketh hitherto." And to us the development of one species out of another may appear even more wonderful and a greater miracle than the independent creation of every species.
^ The forest oak is a majestic object, as it sits rooted upon its rocks, looking forth toward all the winds, and watching the seasons come and go. The apparatus of an intricate life is playing in a million of veins and arteries, adding each year its ring of robust strength to the concentric circles on which you may mark off the centuries, girding about it anew its coats of shaggy bark, and painting its leaves with the tender green of spring and the ruddy hue of autumn. It is the grand production of His word who bade
12 THE CREATION AND THE CREATOR
the earth bring forth her grass, her herb, her tree. But you bring to me, half hidden in its rustic cup, an acorn, and tell me that in the white kernel within that brown shell are imprisoned all the possibilities of the future oak — not some chance tree, it may chance of beech or elm or of some other tree, but the oak itself with all its lordly traits, its giant boll, its stretch and grasp of root, its tough fibre, its shaggy bark, its deep-cut leaves of shining green — ^that all these, to the last detail, are provided for in that little nodule of starch, and I say this is a greater wonder still ! 1
^ Men startle us with their beginnings ; at once they show their hand, and after the pomp of initiation we are disappointed with the finish. This is all exactly contrary to the method of the greatest Worker of all. He is usually modest, meagre, unpromising in His beginnings ; but His finishing strokes make the sublime. It was thus with the creation of the world. Starting with slime and darkness. He went forward in firmaments, suns, moons, stars, and the humanity that is more than all galaxies. This is God's order in the world still. Beginning with coral insects and earth- worms. He ends with rich landscapes ; beginning with specks of jelly, He works up to splendid organisms ; beginning with sober seeds, He crowns His creation with the golden lilies and burning roses.^
11.
The Ckeator.
The sentence, " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," stands like an archway at the beginning of the Universe. In the beginning of heaven, God; in the beginning of the earth, God ; in the beginning of time, God ; in the beginning of man, God; in the beginning of the Bible, God; in the beginning of salvation, God. Looking back at the universe to the time when the chaotic mists hung across the morning of creation, we see streaking their silvery summits that infinite word, "God." Looking above us at the stars of the heavens, and contemplating their number and magnitude, and the power that created and sustains them, we think of " God." Looking forward into the infinite future, toward which all are travelling, we meet with "God." The idea of God is the centre of the spiritual universe. It is the focal point of human thouglit. It