I. The natural basis--the doctrine of creation.

I. The Bible affirms, and perhaps it is the only book that does so, that all things, visible and invisible, have originated from God by a free act of creation.2 The Bible doctrine of creation is something more than the Mosaic cosmogony. For my present purpose it is indifferent how we interpret the first chapter of Genesis--whether as the result of direct Revelation, or as the expression of certain great religious truths in such forms as the natural knowledge of the age admitted of. I believe myself that the narrative gives evidence of its Divine original in its total difference of character from all heathen cosmogonies, but this is a view I need not press.1 The main point is the absolute derivation of all things from God, and on this truth the Scripture as a whole gives no uncertain sound. Discussions have been raised as to the exact force of the Hebrew word (bara) used to express the idea of creation,2 but even this is of subordinate importance in view of the fact, which none will dispute, that the uniform teaching of Scripture is that the universe had its origin, not from the fashioning of pre-existent matter, but directly from the will and word of the Almighty.3 "He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast."4

Not only is this doctrine of creation fundamental in Scripture, but it is of great practical significance. It might be thought, of what practical importance is it to us to know how the world originated? Is not this a question of purely speculative interest? But a moment's reflection will convince us that it is not so. The vital thing in religion is the relation of dependence. To feel that we and our world, that our human life and all that we are and have, absolutely depend on God,--this is the primary attitude of religion. For if they do not thus depend,--if there is anything in the universe which exists out of and independently of God,--then what guarantee have we for the unfailing execution of His purposes, what ground have we for that assured trust in His Providence which Christ inculcates, what security have we that all things will work together for good? But to affirm that all things depend on God is just in another way to affirm the creation of all things by God. They would not depend on Him if He were not their Creator. They do depend on Him, because they are created by Him. The doctrine of Or, if it is not out of relation to His intelligence, by what middle term is this relation brought about? This, which applies to two absolutes, applies, of course, much more to a theory which starts from an infinity of independent atoms-- that is, from an infinite of absolutes. But these theories are weighted with difficulties of another kind. An absolutely quality less matter, or u52lh, such as Plato supposes,1 is unthinkable and impossible. Plato himself is compelled to describe it as a mh\ on, or nothing. It is a mere abstraction.2 Is Dr. Martineau's eternal matter, which has no properties of any kind till the Creator bestows them upon it, in any better case? When, again, Mr. Mill identifies this eternal element, not with naked matter, but with the matter and force which we know-- with constituted matter, clothed with all its existing properties and laws--are we not in the new predicament of having to account for this matter? How came it there? Whence this definite constitution? Whence these powers and properties and laws which, in their marvellous adjustments and inter- relations, show as much evidence of design as any other parts of the universe? To suppose that "the given properties of matter and force, working together and fitting into one another"3--which is Mr. Mill's own phrase--need no explanation, but only the uses subsequently made of them, is to manifest a strange blindness to the fundamental conditions of the problem.

2.If the Scripture view of creation is opposed to dualism in all its forms, it is not less opposed to every theory of a mere logical derivation of the universe--whether, with Spinoza, the universe is supposed to flow, with logical necessity, from an absolute substance;4 or with Hegel, to be the development of

(3) Finally, it is the view of many distinguished evolutionists, that the course of evolution itself compels us to recognise the existence of breaks in the chain of development, where, as they think, some new and creative cause must have come into operation. I may instance Mr. Wallace, a thoroughgoing evolutionist, who recognises three such "stages in the development of the organic world, when some new cause or power must necessarily have come into action," viz. (a) at the introduction of life, (b) at the introduction of sensation or consciousness, (c) at the introduction of man.1 With the view I hold of development as a process, determined from within, I do not feel the same need for emphasising these as "breaks." We have, indeed, at the points named, the appearance of something entirely new, but so have we, in a lesser degree, with every advance or improvement in the organism, e.g., with the first rudiment of an eye, or of a new organ of any kind. The action of the creative cause is spread along the whole line of the advance, revealing itself in higher and higher potencies as the development proceeds. It only breaks out more manifestly at the points named, where it founds a new order or kingdom of existence.2

While thus advocating, as part of the doctrine of creation, a beginning of the world in time, I am not insensible to the enormous difficulties involved in that conception. Prior to that beginning we have still, it may appear, to postulate a beginningless eternity, during which God existed alone. The Divine purpose to create was there, but it had not passed into act. Here arises the difficulty. How are we to fill up in thought these blank eternal ages in the Divine life? The doctrine of the Trinity, with its suggestion of an internal Divine life and love, comes in as an aid,1 but, abstracting from the thought of the world, of the universe afterwards to be created, we know of nothing to serve as a content of the Divine mind, unless it be the so-called "eternal truths." So that here we are in, presence of a great deep. A yet greater difficulty arises when we ask, Since God purposed to create, why was creation so long delayed? Why was a whole eternity allowed to elapse before the purpose was put into execution?2 If it was a satisfaction to love and wisdom to produce a universe, why was creation not as eternal as the purpose of it? Why an eternity's quiescence, and then this transient act? Or rather, since in eternity no one moment is indistinguishable from another, why this particular moment chosen for creation? The very mentioning of these difficulties suggests that somehow we are on a wrong track, and that the solution lies--since solution there must be, whether we can reach it or not--in the revisal of the notions we set out with as to the relations of eternity to time.

First, some have sought to cut this knot by the doctrine of an Eternal Creation. God, it is thought, did not wait through a solitary eternity before He called the world into existence-the act of creation is coeval with His Being, and the world, though a creature and dependent, is eternal as Himself. This was the doctrine of Origen in the early Church, of Erigena in the Middle Ages, and has been revived by Rothe, Darner, Lotze, and many others in modern times. It is carefully to be distinguished from the doctrine of a pre-existent eternal matter formerly referred to. But I do not think it solves the difficulty. It is either only the doctrine of an eternal series of worlds in another form,. and is exposed to all the difficulties of that assumption; or it seeks to evade these difficulties by the hypothesis of an undeveloping spiritual world, standing, as Dorner says, in the light of eternity, antecedent to the existing one--an hypothesis which leaves the origin of the temporal and developing world precisely where it was. Besides, how is the purpose of God ever to be summed up into a unity, if there is literally no beginning and no goal in creation?1 Secondly, another form of solution is that of the speculative philosophers, who would have us regard the distinction of time and eternity as due only to our finite standpoint, and who bid us raise ourselves to that higher point of view from which all things are beheld, in Spinoza's phrase,sub specie aeternitatis.2 The meaning of this is, that what exists f or our consciousness as a time-development exists for the Divine consciousness as an eternally complete whole. For God, temporal succession has no existence. The universe, with all its determinations, past, present, and future, stands before the Divine mind in simultaneous reality. Language of this kind is found in Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Green,3 and is to be met with sometimes in more orthodox theologians. It is, however, difficult to see what meaning can be attached to it which does not reduce all history to an illusion.4 For, after all, time-development is a reality. There is succession in our conscious life, and in the events of nature. The things that happened yesterday are not the things that are happening to-day. The things that are happening today are not the things that will happen to-morrow. The past is past; the future is not yet come. It is plain that if time is a reality, the future is not yet present to God, except ideally. The events that will happen to-morrow are not yet existent. Else life is a dream; all, as the Indian philosophers say, is Maya,--illusion, appearance, seeming. Even if life is a dream, there is succession in the thoughts of that dream, and time is still not got rid of. I cannot see, therefore, that without reducing the process of the world to unreality, this view of it as an eternally completed fact can be upheld. In an ideal sense the world may be, doubtless is, present to the Divine mind; but as regards the parts of it yet future, it cannot be so actually.1 What other solution, then, is possible? The solution must lie in getting a proper idea of the relation of eternity to time, and this, so far as I can see, has not yet been satisfactorily accomplished. The nearest analogy I can suggest is that of the spiritual thinking principle within ourselves, which remains a constant factor in all the flux of our thoughts and feelings. It is in the midst of them, yet it is out of the flux and above them. It is not involved in the succession of time, for it is the principle which itself relates things in the succession of time-for which, therefore, such succession exists. I would only venture to remark, further, that even if the universe were conceived of as originating in an eternal act, it would still, to a mind capable of tracing it back through the various stages of its development, present the aspect of a temporal beginning. Before this beginning, it would be possible for the mind to extend its vision indefinitely backwards through imaginary ages, which yet had no existence save as its own ideal construction. But God's eternity is not to be identified with this thought of an indefinitely extended time. Eternity we may rather take to be an expression for the timeless necessity of God's existence; and time, properly speaking, begins its course only with the world.2 A few words before leaving this part of the subject on the motive and end of creation. If we reject the idea of metaphysical necessity, and think of creation as originating in a free, intelligent act, it must, like every similar act, be conceived of as proceeding from a motive, which includes in it at the -same time a rational end. And if God is free, personal Spirit, who is at the same time ethical Will, what motive is possible but goodness or love, or what end can be thought of but an ethical one? In this way it may be held that, though the universe is not the product of a logical or metaphysical necessity, it arises from the nature of God by a moral necessity which is one with the highest freedom, and thus the conception of creation may be secured from arbitrariness. It is an old thought that the motive to the creation of the world was the goodness of the Creator. Plato expresses this idea in his Timaeus,1 and points to a yet more comprehensive view when, in the Republic, he names "the Good" as the highest principle both of knowledge and of existence.2 Since the time of Kant, philosophy has dealt m very earnest fashion with this idea of "the Good"--now conceived of as ethical good, but likewise as including in it the highest happiness and blessedness--as at once the moving cause and end of the world. Start from the postulate of Kant, that moral ends are alone of absolute worth, and the inference is irresistible that the world as a whole is constituted for moral ends, and that it has its cause in a Supreme Original Good, which produces the natural for the sake of the moral, and is guiding the universe to a moral goal.3 Hence, from his principles, Kant arrives at the notion of an ethical community or "Kingdom of God," having the laws of virtue as its basis and aim, as the end to which creation tends.4 Lotze takes up the same thought of a world ordered in conformity with the idea of "the Good," and having its source in a Highest-Good Personal, and from him chiefly it has entered into Ritschlian theology.5 But Christian theology from its own standpoint arrives at a similar result. We have but to ask, with Dorner, What is the relation of the ethical nature of God to the other distinctions we ascribe to Him? to see that "the non-ethical distinctions in and the nature of God are related to the ethical as means to an end; but the absolute end can only lie in morality, for it alone is of absolute worth."1 In the graduated system of ends of which the universe consists, the moral, in other words, must be presumed to be the highest. And this is precisely what Christianity declares when it teaches that Christ and the kingdom of God are the consummation of God's world-purpose; that the government of the world is carried on for moral ends; and that "all things work together for good to them that love God."2