3. This doctrine does violence to the instinctive religious convic- tions of all men. Even those the least enlightened live and act under the conviction of absolute dependence. Thej recognize God as everywhere present and everywhere active. If the}'^ do not love" and trust Him, they at least fear Him and instinctively deprecate his wrath. They cannot, without doing violence to the constitution of their nature, look upon God as a being who is a mere spectator of the creatures who owe their existence to his will.
Preservation not a Continued Creation. A second view of the nature of preservation goes to the oppo- site extreme of confounding creation and preservation. This opin- ion has been held in different forms, —
1. It is sometimes said that preservation and creation are to be referred to one and the same divine act. So far, therefore, as God is concerned, the two are identical. This ground is taken by many who admit the reality of the world and the efficiency of second causes. They intend by this mode of representation to deny any succession in the acts of God. He cannot be viewed as acting in time, or as doing in time what He has not done from etei'nity.
2. Others who represent preservation as a continued creation, only m.ean that the divine efficiency is as really active in the one case as in the other. They wish to deny that anything out of God has the cause of the continuance of its existence in itself; and that its properties or powers are in any such sense inherent as that they j preserve their efficiency without the continued agency of God. . This is the sense in which most of the Reformed theologians are to be understood when they speak of preservation as a continuous creation. Thus Heidegger ^ says, " Conservatio continuata creatio Dei activa est. Si enim creatio et conservatio duje actiones distinctae forent, creatio primo cessaret, ac turn conservatio vel eodem, quo creatio cessavit, vel sequent! momento inciperet." This only means that the world owes its continued existence to the uninter- rupted exercise of the divine power. He therefore elsewhere says, " Conservationi annihilatio opponitur. Cessante actione con- servante res in nihilum collabitur." In like manner Alsted^ says, " Conservatio est quaedam continuatio. Quemadmodum crea.tio est prima productio rei ex nihilo, ita est conservatio rei continuatio, ne in nihilum recidat. Deus rhundum sustinet." Ryssenius (whose work is principally from Turrettin),^ says " Providentia bene altera
; lli-i,te</<jii\ Corpus TheoloyicB, loc. vii. 22, Tiguri, 1732, p. 251.
•i Alsted, Theol. Didao',. Hanomce, 1627, p. 283. 8 Summa Theologice, i. 209 ; Ibid.
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678 PART L — THEOLOGY. [Ch. XI. — Providence.
creatio, dicitur. Nam eadem voluntate, qua Deus omnia creavit, omnia conservat, et creatio a conservatione in eo tantum differt, quod quando voluntatem Dei sequitur rerum existentia, dicitur creatio ; quando res eadem per eandem voluntatem durat, dicitur conservatio." This amounts only to saying that as God created all things by the word of his power, so also He upholds all things by the word of his power.
3. There is, however, a third form in which this doctrine is held. By continued creation is meant that all efficiency is in God ; that all effects are to be referred to his agency. As there was no co- operation in calling the world out of nothing, so there is no cooper- ation of second causes in its continuance and operations. God creates, as it were, de novo at each instant the universe, as at that moment it actually is.
Objections to the Doctrine of a Continuous Creation. All these modes of representation, however, are objectionable. Creation, preservation, and government are in fact different, and to identify them leads not only to confusion but to error. Creation and preservation differ, first, as the former is the calling into exist- ence what before did not exist ; and the latter is continuing, or causing to continue what already has a being ; and secondly, in creation there is and can be no cooperation, but in preservation there is a cmicursus of the first, with second causes. In the Bible, therefore, the two things are never confounded. God created all things, and by Him all things consist. As to the first mentioned of the three forms of the doctrine of a continued creation, it is enough to remark that it rests on the d priori idea of an absolute Being. It is not only a gratuitous, but an unscriptural assumption which denies all diffei-ence between will and efficiency, or between power and act in God. And as to the idea that God's acts are not successive ; that He never does in time what He does not do from eternity, it is obvious that such language has for us no meaning. We cannot comprehend the relation which the efficiency of God has to the effects produced successively. We know, however, that God acts ; that He does produce successive effects ; and that, so far as we are concerned, and so far as the representations of Scripture are concerned, our relation to God and the relation of the world to Him, are precisely what they would be if his acts were really successive. It is the height of presumption in man, on the mere ground of our speculative ideas, to depart from the plain representations of Scriptures, and so to conceive of the relation of