geology, and criticism. With respect to the latter two, both sciences are in such a state of crudity that their decisions become impugned every fifty years; but astronomy has more fixity. We have, under the head of Astronomical Objections to Revelation, the old story, that the account of Moses favours the ancient system, which believed earth the centre of the system, and that the sun and planets were created as subsidiary to the earth. Now, there appears nothing in astronomy to negative the Mosaic theory, that earth was created before the sun; on the contrary, the notion of Newton, who was really as competent as our author to discuss these matters, was very close in affinity to the Mosaic. In his letter to Bentley, he allows that matter might form itself into masses by the mere force of attraction.

"And thus," says he, "might the sun and fixed stars be formed, supposing the matter were of a lucid nature. But how the matter should divide itself into two sorts, and that part of it should fall down into one mass and make a sun; and the rest, which is fit to compose an opake body, should coalesce, not into one great body like the shining matter, but into many little ones; or if the sun at first were an opake body like the planets, or the planets lucid bodies like the sun, how he alone should be changed into a shining body whilst all they continue opake; or all they be changed into opake ones while he continues unchanged, I do not think explicable by mere natural causes, but am forced to ascribe it to the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent."

What in the history of creation, what in astronomy negatives the position of earth being created out of the common matter of the universe the first of the system; or what prevents the creation of the sun as a luminous body being simply all that Moses means? Moses, also, did not write the history of the system, he wrote only of one planet; and he has simply to show, not the universal system, but such particulars out of it as concerned his subject, and he accordingly describes the offices rendered to earth by her chronometers, as our author calls them, the sun and moon. The tendency of his nation to sidereal worship showed the impress from distant worlds improper at the instant he wrote, that they were not disposed to attach too little but too much importance to the æthereal spheres around the earth. As to any argument being deducible from the fact that Moses describes the progress of creation and cultivation of the earth as occupying five days, and the sun, moons, and stars as created in one, nothing can be more ridiculous than any attempt to found an argument on that point. What hinders our affirming that God then only made them luminous, which is all that Moses says? What sense does Dr. Strauss attach to the first verse of Genesis? "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." What hinders

from expressing stellar matter? What does it mean, if this be not its meaning? The next point urged is, the inconsistency of the account of the creation with modern geology. It would, indeed, be difficult, nay, impossible to get any constant quantity to fix this variable. Look at Lyell, Buckland, Kirby, Cuvier, are they agreed on a single postulate? Is chemistry herself in a state to enunciate propositions, when she is hourly modifying her assertions? and, surely, her progress to fixity is in vastly superior advance of geology, which requires wonderful requisites and uncommon powers to arrive at dogmas where so many sciences are required to form a just conclusion. We consider, and always have done, that creation was performed in the six days; and we think our author's argument, that the days in the account are limited to twenty-four hours expressly by the terms day and night, good; showing clearly that those commentators of the Buckland school, who extend creation over a period of ages, are wrong. But the insidious and artful observation, that if six days of creation, in the first instance, appear too close for a Divine act, they are also too quick for a process of nature, we deny. The law of elements which are brought into operation, if left to itself, takes time for its accomplishment; and such a law is described as brought into operation by the Great Motor Agent; but it is not a process of nature that is described, it is the process of a vivifying life. When light burst forth, a day might disperse the waters under an ordinary agency, for the presence of light presumes heat. As to the origin of Testacea, and their separation from Mammiferæ in a day, that does not appear under the agency employed inconsistent, for separation was instant on creation. And it is idle to assert, though it may have the aspect in the eyes of infidels like Dr. Strauss of begging the question, that the supernatural character of the Demiurgus is not to be taken into question. We are simply bound to show, that the Demiurgus does not act inconsistent with reason; but no divine would assert, nor even philosopher worthy of the name, that he does not operate in a manner that defies the low reasoning powers of man to investigate. The only attempt to make criticism bear upon the question before us, after its vaunted powers, is, that the passages Gen. i. 1. ii. 4. and ii. 5. are inconsistent with each other, in which arguments we have already joined issue; and the baseless unproved assertion that the Book of Genesis is not all written by Moses, together with a dark attempt at Mythos, which the stubborn author of the Pentateuch does not supply, but is as strait forward as he is clear, form the whole attack. Where was the Mythos when Moses turned to his people with this appeal? "Ask now of the days that are past,

which were before thee, since the days that God created man upon the earth, and ask from one side of heaven unto the other, whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing is or hath been heard like it? Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire as thou hast and live? Or hath God assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation by temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a stretched out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Israel before your eyes?"-Deut. iv. 2. Did that look like one that could appeal to facts? Has his nation, his dark, sunk, mammnon-spirited, degraded nation, denied him, or ministered unvarying testimony to his truth? A Mythos, such as the Mosaic, were a miracle in itself. We pass to chap. 46-" Creation out of nothing."

Our author makes an attempt, but it is extremely feeble throughout this chapter, to incorporate matter with God. His reasoning amounts to nothing more than curious speculation on matters which lie infinitely beyond the powers of human reason to reach, to investigate, to separate into elements, or to exhibit with any clearness. After quoting 2 Macc. vii. 28, and Wisdom xi. 17, and contrasting them with Gen. i. 1, he comes to the conclusion that the latter writer does not affirm as to matter, whether the creating God found it ready, or created it also.

"To place matter, which he had only manufactured as Creator of the World, distinct from God, was not only most analogous to the common conception, which proceeds from the manner and custom in which men are wont to perform their works, but also in philosophy a similar Dualism became customary through Plato. The notion also had this advantage, that it served as a convenient outlet to unburthen God of the creation of evil in the world. Therefore the eldest Platonic fathers of the Church speak of a creation of the world out of formless matter, and Dualistic, Gnostic, and Manichæan teachers, as Hermogenes, placed with more certainty an eternal matter distinct from God. If in the latter relation there is involved the question of a God unable to vanquish the reaction of the bad matter, and therefore not absolute; if in the first, since the divine production is not a human one, the being bound to matter must be denied. A reproduction of all things out of his Being, appears also suitable to God. It is after this manner it has been supposed that the Son of God was produced; but in order to distinguish the world from him, and not to fall into the pantheistic emanatismus of the Alexandrian Gnostics and modern Platonists, it has been decided that the world was created neither out of a pre-existing matter, as men usually make their work, nor of the essence of God as the Son, but through the will of God out of nothing. This nothing ought not to indicate any matter, but on the contrary exclude such an idea. They distinguished, morever, a nihil negativum and priva

VOL. XXVII. NO. LIV.

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tivum, and, according to it, a creatio prima, and secunda. On the first day God produced of the mere nothing, or of the negatio omnis entitatis, the shapeless matter, out of which, as a primitive nothing, in the following days be made the world. The old philosophical objection against this theory, 'ex nihilo nihil fit,' was removed, it is true, by limiting it to the domain of the final causalitas. However, from all ages, the creation from nothing was a weightless definition for speculative thinkers. Scotus Erigena understood under the nothing out of which all things are produced the sublime depth of the Divine Being above all final something. J. Böhme considered the real nature of God as the matter out of which he has made all things, and afterwards the whole root of this supposition was destroyed by Spinozism; the new dogma, as far it could proceed, bas either sent away the terminus, or so explained it that the nothing ought only to indicate the side of the non-existence, which is always joined to the world in reproduction. In the Chaldee history of creation the positive to the nothing is not the divine essence, but the divine will; of which we shall treat in the following chapter."-vol. i. p. 46.

In the above reasoning we throw out of the question at once all Platonic notions, and shall simply take up the Mosaic and Christian. Now, first of all, Moses in his cosmogony is quite clear from Ovid's errors; he describes God positively as making the matter of the heavens and earth, as the immaterial generator of substance. Jehovah did not find things in confusion as Ovid describes God, he made matter. Ovid describes God and nature as co-equal and co-eternal. It is not so in the writings of Moses. Unbelievers may give this generation of matter the name of a weightless definition, but it is absurd to assert that any thing of perishable and fragile form can be God. We are aware that we shall be pressed with the Atomic Theory, with the individuality of every molecule, with its rigid character, with its indestructibility in space. We have nothing to do with this. A character impressed on a palpable thing must be exterior to the thing. If the character be coeval with the thing, then must whatever gave that character have preceded the impressed object. Now the indestructibility of matter is the result of exterior action, and therefore the inferiority of matter in duration to its Maker is evident. Now nothing can be more absurd than that reasoning that expects of the derived all the properties in the underived. Can God make gods? No. Does this proceed from the incapacity of God? No. Incapacity consists in not doing what is capable of being done. But whoever heard of an incapacity to effect an impossibility? Who, but the school of Hegel and his pupil Strauss ever dreamt of treating the Son as produced, when the divinity of the Son is co-eternal with the Father, only different in mode? Moses asserts amply that matter was not with God

from everlasting, but all matter, stellar, universal, earthly, generated by him. As for the stuff repeatedly uttered, "ex nihilo nihil fit," why should any sensible being trouble himself with that equivocation, for it is nothing more? A thing is not made of nothing when the product of an Almighty will. As for that absurd distinction of a nihil negativum and a nihil privativum, Hegel and Strauss are welcome to what they can make out of it. They are valueless terms. The negatio omnis entitatis we take as a fair statement of primordial condition, and fully concede that Moses speaks of such a state as a creatio prima, and of the generation of matter as a creatio secunda, which consists in forming from it individualities. But we have nothing in this view to do with matter as God or part of God. It must be held as aloof and wholly distinct from God, the positive matter, once the negative, and positive to sense only by the power of God. That this view stands any test, the vain battering of ages around the scheme of Berkeley, which has the basis of the Bible for it, leaving that scheme like a rock in ocean unmoved by the changing surge, will abundantly demonstrate. Infinite volition said, "Let there be light and there was light." The same volition has produced from an equally unpromising subject with darkness-the universe. We pass to chap. 47-"The Reason and Aim of the Creation."

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In this chapter an effort is made to negative all views usually entertained of this subject, without substituting any that can be available to solve the problems which the author raises. We are first told that Moses drew from the Platonist system a baseless assertion, but though it has been said, τι γαρ εστι Πλατων η Μωσης Αττικίζων; we never heard the reverse. We are next informed that the aim of an absolute Being must be absolute. dogma that cannot be true, unless we suppose all creatures equal to the author of them. A vegetable, on this principle, ought to be a man, but unluckily remains a vegetable; man, the creator, but still he remains the creature. We are next informed that God required the world to realize unto him his own essence; so that, on this principle, a man could not be convinced he was a living being unless he had children. The next point mooted is, that God was not self-content until he had made the world; and, therefore, according to the sense attempted to be fastened on creation by Spinoza, it was a work of chance. As if creation were not as much a faculty of God, as man's operation is of himself; as if accident could befal one, whose very absoluteness precludes it. Here Leibnitz is quoted, who vents the fol lowing unintelligible stuff: "When God will create something, a combat of infinitely many possibilities rises almost, as it were,