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| God Created the World Not from Any Certain Matter, But in His Own Word.
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Chapter V.—God Created the World
Not from Any Certain Matter, But in His Own Word.
7. But how didst Thou make the heaven and the
earth, and what was the instrument of Thy so mighty work? For it
was not as a human worker fashioning body from body, according to
the fancy of his mind, in somewise able to assign a form which it
perceives in itself by its inner eye.1027
| 1027 See x. sec 40, note 6, and sec. 53, above. | And whence should he be able to do
this, hadst not Thou made that mind? And he assigns to it already
existing, and as it were having a being, a form, as clay, or stone,
or wood, or gold, or such like. And whence should these things be,
hadst not Thou appointed them? Thou didst make for the workman his
body,—Thou the mind commanding the limbs,—Thou the matter
whereof he makes anything,1028
| 1028 That is, the artificer makes, God creates. The
creation of matter is distinctively a doctrine of revelation. The
ancient philosophers believed in the eternity of matter. As
Lucretius puts it (i. 51): “Nullam rem e nihilo gigni divinitus
unquam.” See Burton, Bampton Lectures, lect. iii. and
notes 18–21, and Mansel, Bampton Lectures, lect. iii. note
12. See also p. 76, note 8, above, for the Manichæan doctrine as
to the ὕλη; and The
Unseen Universe, arts. 85, 86, 151, and 160, for the modern
doctrine of “continuity.” See also Kalisch, Commentary
on Gen. i. 1. | —Thou the capacity whereby he may
apprehend his art, and see within what he may do without,—Thou
the sense of his body, by which, as by an interpreter, he may from
mind unto matter convey that which he doeth, and report to his mind
what may have been done, that it within may consult the truth,
presiding over itself, whether it be well done. All these things
praise Thee, the Creator of all. But how dost Thou make them? How,
O God, didst Thou make heaven and earth? Truly, neither in the
heaven nor in the earth didst Thou make heaven and earth; nor in
the air, nor in the waters, since these also belong to the heaven
and the earth; nor in the whole world didst Thou make the whole
world; because there was no place wherein it could be made before
it was made, that it might be; nor didst Thou hold anything in Thy
hand wherewith to make heaven and earth. For whence couldest Thou
have what Thou hadst not made, whereof to make anything? For what
is, save because Thou art? Therefore Thou didst speak and they were
made,1029
and in Thy
Word Thou madest these things.1030
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