68 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



or animal, which by successive variations and 

 adaptations becomes anew species, is His creation. 1 

 It follows that terms like " interference " have no 

 meaning. God cannot interfere with Himself. 



2. The second principle is that which the equally 

 one-sided system of Deism has seized, and which 

 is the safeguard of Theism against Pantheism, 

 however disguised. God is not nature, and nature 

 is not God. Any system therefore which logically 

 carries with it the identity of God and Nature, or 

 obscures the line which separates them, contradicts 

 this principle and is destructive of true Theism. 



Now, Creation in its theological sense implies the 

 recognition of both these principles conditioning 

 one another, and hence it has been said, " Belief in 

 creation is a necessary outwork of any true theism 

 whatever ; deny creation, and you deny God." 2 

 But if Creation includes God's omnipresence in the 

 world of nature, and His separation from Nature, 

 it has more meanings than one, and these have to 

 be defined. Now, the theological distinction is 

 between primary and secondary, or original and 

 derivative creation, or immediate and mediate, or 

 supernatural and natural. God creates in the first 



1 Cf. W. S. Lilly, Cont. Rev., 1883, p. 119. "The budding 

 of a rose and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ are equally the effect 

 of the One Motive Force which is the cause of all phenomena." 



2 Liddon, Some Elements of Religion, pp. 59, 60. Cf. Mivart, 

 Genesis of Species, p. 244. " No one can at. the same time accept 

 the Christian religion, and deny the dogma of creation." 



