subtle argument? Or shall I, with a despairing scepticism, either doubt their existence, or doubt that we can know aught of God? God forbid! God, in truth, can never be other than very partially, very dimly known to us. But in Him, indivisible, yet multitudinous, One, yet universal, in Him, I feel, that all things contradictory, all things discordant-save weakness, error, sin-meet and blend together with a harmony which saints and angels live to contemplate; and I content myself, therefore, with the belief of the wise apostle, "Through faith we understand, that the worlds were framed by the Word of God.” "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." "Created," not merely gave form to chaos, or another order to old materials, but bid chaos itself exist. So we understand the term; but did Moses so understand it? Not invariably certainly; for it is from water that the great whales ("and God created great whales ") are brought forth, and out of the earth that cattle and creeping things are made; and even though man (Gen. i. 27) is said to have been created in God's image, yet that creation is afterwards (Gen. ii. 7) limited to a mere arrangement or composition of existent materials,-" God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." In this first verse of Genesis then? If Moses have here used "created" in its strict and only proper sense, then as he has applied it to heaven and earth equally, he has applied it to them both in the same sense, and both consequently exist, though the latter, and the latter only (for two chaoses are an impossibility), exists as chaos (ver. 2). But if heaven' already exist, how is it that the creation of I find this argument in Beausobre Hist. des Manichéens, lib. v. c. iv. He refers to Isaiah xiv. 7, where the terms Bara, Jatsar, and Asah, are all used indiscriminately. vol. ii. p. 206. 7 I am aware that the heaven in the first verse has been supposed by commentators to allude to the supreme heaven, in which are the throne of God and the habitation of the angels; while that in the heaven is the work of the second day, and appears, like the after creation of the world, as a mere arrangement, a separation of the waters? How, besides, could the whole creation be called a six days' labour, when an indefinite period is allowed for the creation of that which was alone created-Chaos? Taking then the term "created" in the sense of produced, formed, arranged, I conclude that this first verse is but the summary and prefatory verse,-the "arma virumque cano "-of Moses' hymn of the creation; that the second shows us the matter on which God wrought; and that with the third only really commences the first act of creation: the spirit of God then moves on the face of the waters, and his voice is then first heard," Let there be light." I regard, then, the creation of Moses, with the exception, perhaps, of the creation of light, as a mere arrangement of pre-existent though confused materials." Verse 2: "And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep." "I do not eighth verse is the heaven in which are the planets, &c., belonging to our system. I, however, remember nothing in the books of Moses which implies, nor, I must own, can I conceive, this tier of heavens; I cannot understand how God is more in one place than another, and I cannot give a local habitation to pure spirits. To be blessed they surely need no white raiments, no jasper thrones, no gates of pearl, no walls of sapphire, or emerald, or chrysolite, and no cities of pure gold like unto glass;-not of such dross is their heaven: and if for our material natures heaven must be described materially, surely as the spirit of God rested not upon eastern kings or the throned Cæsars, but on the lowly carpenter's son, so some bleak and barren, and despised heath, made glorious by the presence of God, and the joy, and peace, and love of his saints, had better pictured heaven to us, than all this accumulation of the toomuch loved riches of earth. 8 I know nothing of Hebrew, and have turned the argument on the word "created." In Nimrod (iv. p. 110), by I believe the Hon. Algernon Herbert, however, I find that the words translated "the heavens" are "eth hasciamaim;" and that eth "is usually rendered essence," according to Hottinger; and that Fabre d'Olivet" renders it self-sameness an equivalent phrase." How far all this is correct I necessarily am unable to determine. I can only observe, that the context does not favour this translation; and that many great Hebrew scholars seem to have been unaware of the force of this little word. 9 The contrary opinion is advocated by Dr. Adam Clarke,—vid. Comment on Genesis, i. 1. remember," says the learned Burnet, "that any of the ancients that acknowledged the earth to have had an original, did deny that original to have been from a chaos. We are assured of both from the authority of Moses, who saith that in the beginning the earth was tohu-bohu, without form and void, a fluid, dark, confused mass, without distinction of parts, but without order or any determinate form." (Sacred Theory of the Earth, vol. i. c. 4, p. 61.) That the Jews, the Alexandrian Jews at least, held in this respect the opinions of their age, Philo-Judæus is evidence. In his tract (De Mundi Opif. p. 12) he speaks not merely of the one cause, efficient and intelligent, but also of a second, passive, inert, inanimate.1 He tells us that matter (ovoia) was, in its nature, without form, order, motion, was chaos in a word, and that the Deity gave it form, order, motion that hence the world is (yevroç) generated, and not (ayevnros) eternal. By the Brahmins it is believed that "this all once existed in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable, and undiscovered, as if wholly immersed in sleep." With the Egyptians, as also with the Greeks, chaos was a humid mass. Among the Chaldeans, according to Berossus, it was supposed "that a time had been in which the universe, the all, was darkness and water;" and if Sanchoniatho is a fair representative of the philosophical and religious opinions of his time and country, the Phoenicians conjectured that "the beginning of all things was a wind of black air, and a chaos dark : 1 "Το μεν ειναι δραστηριον αιτιον, το δε παθητον. καὶ ὅτι το μεν δραστηριον των ὅλων νους εστιν το δε παθητον, αψυχον και ακινητον εξ ἑαυτου. 2 From Stahl Lehrbegriff Philo in Eichhorn's Bibliothek der biblischen Literatur. 3 Instit. of Menu, c. i. by Sir W. Jones. 4 For the Egyptian chaos see pp. 320, 321, of Cory's Ancient Frag. from Damascius; for the Greek, Idem, p. 312; and Emeric David Recherches sur Jupiter, vol. i. p. 31. 5 Εν ᾧ το παν σποτος καὶ ὕδωρ ειναι. Berossus then goes on to state that this chaos was inhabited by mis-shapen monsters, paintings of which were to be seen in the temple of Belus. Vide Fabricius Bib. Græc. vol. xiv. p. 175, and Cory's Anc. Frag. p. 23. In the Egyptian hieroglyphics, according to Rosellini, chaos is similarly expressed by a confusion of the limbs and parts of various animals. as Erebus, and that they were boundless and for many ages without bound." And although the Chinese books nowhere, so far as I remember, directly speak of a chaos, yet, as they speak of the Heaven (Tien) and the Earth as the father and mother of all things,' they imply that God and matter are co-eternal, and, as Tien is also creator, a chaos. In reviewing these various speculations on the beginning of our world, we cannot but ask ourselves whether the existence of a chaos, that once "overwhelming necessity," is compatible with our idea of the Deity? Whether in some corner of infinite space-its thousands of miles some creeds have not hesitated to measure-darkness and confusion could ever for a moment have hid themselves from the all-seeing eye of God? World may have succeeded world, and inferior creations may have been replaced by creations more perfect, and the transitions may have been sudden, violent, terrible, in our eyes moments of disorder, all this I can very well understand; but I can never conceive, that any speck of matter has ever existed but by God's will and subject to God's law; nor that any, therefore, has ever existed but in its place, and that place the best, the only one, in the whole circle of the universe, fitted to the purposes for which that matter was destined and created. I cannot, therefore, conceive a chaos.1 All chaos, it will be objected to me. The idea of purpose, design, is surely not compatible with our notion of a chaos, and yet essentially enters into our conceptions of God's will. Besides, as the question is of a fact which transcends experience, which can be matter of speculation only, if we are to speculate-and were it not that others had ploughed the barren field, I assuredly had not put my dibble in earth-let us prefer speculations which are simple, and most in accord with the pure and loftier conceptions of God's cha racter. C things, every where, in all time, have, I believe, borne the mighty impress of God's plastic hand; and whatever may have been their courses, have but sustained a preestablished part in the ever-varying harmony of Nature. 2 "And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." This verse, while it more distinctly marks out the nature of chaos, its fluid mass, at the same time describes the "modus operandi," the manner in which the Deity performed His creative labours. His spirit moves upon the face of the waters, stirs them, makes them quick with life. The primal matter, and the mode in which, by the intervention of the first active principle, it was adapted to the purposes of the universe, are problems from which, however impossible they are of solution, the olden cosmogonists have never shrunk. Thus, the author of the Institutes of Menu, having first informed us that this universe existed only in darkness, adds that, "then the self-existing power, himself undiscerned but making the world discernible, with five elements and other principles, appeared with undiminished glory, dispelling the gloom, He, whom the mind can alone perceive....even He, the soul of all beings....shone forth in person. He having wished to produce various beings from His own substance, first with a thought created the waters, and placed in them a pro 2 The Hebrew word Ruah, which has been rendered "spirit of God," means "a breath," or "wind," and some translations, instead of making the spirit to move, make it to brood upon the waters, as a hen upon her eggs, thus calling to mind the mundane egg of so many cosmogonies (videJablonsky, Panth. Egyp. c. ii, § 8, p. 41). Milton so read the passage: Thou from the first, Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread, And mad'st it pregnant.' mentators, comprises the principles of things, and the elements; the existence of the chaotic mass, the production and the destruction of worlds."-Colebrooke on the Rel. Cerem. of the Hindoos, As. Res. vol. v, p. 351. I suspect, however, that water holds this high place only among the Vischnuists; among the Sevaists it is usurped by fire, among others by air; while a passage in the Yajur-Veda (Id. p. 432) attributes it to them all equally: "Fire is that original cause; the sun is that; so is the air; so is the moon; such too is that pure Brahme, and those waters, and that lord of creatures." |