A MATERIAL WORLD. 27 



spring from nothing 1 , or could ever return to nothing." Epicurus, in the few 

 fragments of his that have reached us, echoed the tenet in the following 

 terms : " Know first of all, that nothing can spring from nonentity." It was 

 thus given by Aristotle : " To suppose what has been created has been created 

 from nothing, is to divest it of all power; for it is a dogma of those who pre- 

 tend thus to think, that every thing must still possess its own nature." From 

 the Greeks it passed to the Romans, and appears as follows in Lucretius : 



ubi viderimus nihil posse creari 

 De nihilo, turn, quod sequimur, jam rectius inde 

 Perspiciemus.* 



Admit this truth, that naught from nothing springs, 

 And all is clear. 



And it was thus long afterward reiterated by Persius, as the common doc- 

 trine of his day : 



gigni 

 De nihilo nil, in nihilum nil posse reverti.t 



Naught springs from naught, and can to naught return. 



The Greeks themselves, however, seem to have received it from the East, 

 and to have become acquainted with it as a branch of gymnosophy ; for it 

 constitutes, even in the present day, a distinct doctrine of Brahminical reli- 

 gion, and is thus urged in univocal terms in the Yajur Veid, in the course 

 of an address to Brahm, or the Supreme Being : " The ignorant assert that 

 the universe, in the beginning, did not exist in its author, and that it was 

 created out of nothing. O ye, whose hearts are pure ! how could something 

 arise out of nothing ?"J 



This reasoning seems, indeed, to have spread almost universally, and per- 

 haps from the same quarter ; for we find many of the Jewish theologians, and 

 not a few of the Christian fathers, too much influenced by Platonic principles, 

 giving countenance to the same doctrine, though probably not to the full ex- 

 tent of the Platonic school. Thus, the author of the Book of Wisdom, a 

 "book written in Greek instead of in Hebrew, and hereby proving his own era 

 as well as the school in which he had studied, expressly asserts that " The 

 almighty hand of the Lord created the world out of unfashioned (amorphous) 

 matter" % a^ov dA;jj; while Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, 

 Athanasius, and Gregory Nazianzen, appear to have concurred in the same 

 opinion ; and Justin Martyr affirms it to have been the general creed of his 

 own era : " For that the word of God," says he, "formed the world out of un- 

 fashioned matter, Moses distinctly asserts, Plato and his adherents maintain . 

 and ourselves have been taught to believe." 



This is one specimen of the very common attempt in the writings of the 

 fathers to blend the narrative ; and doctrines of Moses with the principles of 

 Platonism, which, in truth, had been embraced by many of them before their 

 conversion. The text of Moses, when accurately examined, will be found, 

 if I mistake not, to lead us to a very different conclusion. This text consists 

 of the first and second verses of the book of Genesis, and is as follows : " In 

 the beginning God created the heaven and the earth ; and the earth was with- 

 out form and void, and darkness was upon, the face of the deep (or abyss) ; 

 and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Now in this pas- 

 sage we seem to have a statement of three distinct facts, each following the 

 other in a regular series : first, an absolute creation of the heaven and the 

 earth, which, we are expressly told, took place foremost, or in the beginning; 

 next, the condition of the earth when it was thus primarily created, being 

 amorphous and waste, or in the words before us, " without form and void ;" 

 and, thirdly, the earliest creative effort to reduce it from this shapeless and 



* De Rer. Nat. i. 157. f Sat. iii. 83. 



t The passage is quoted from M. Anquetil du Perron's Latin version. The reader may find various 

 similar extracts in Sir William Jones's -works, vol. vi. 4to. edit. Cap. xi. 17. 



