40 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



us to lean only on the arm of Omnipotence. Beyond is 

 only God. No man can predicate an anterior condition 

 of cosmical matter. This condition is necessarily primor- 

 dial. As matter could not have remained in such a condi- 

 tion — as it did not remain in such a condition — the career 

 of matter must have had a commencement. Its evolutions 

 are not from eternity. As its earliest existence involves 

 an evanescent condition, the existence of matter had a com- 

 mencement. It began to exist only when it began to 

 change. Matter, viewed in the light of physical laws 

 alone, can not be jn*onounced eternal. Matter is the ef- 

 fect of an efficient cause whose existence is antecedent to 

 matter. As philosophy utters this verdict, how harmoni- 

 ously rise the voices of the soul, declaring in the face of 

 Atheism that nothing exists except as an effect — demand- 

 ing that matter itself be remanded to the causation of a 

 creator. And as matter proclaims a First Cause, having 

 existence in itself, as the first link of the long chain of 

 events, so the soul of man reveals an intuition of that First 

 Cause, and rests satisfied in attributing self-existence to a 

 Supreme Intelligence, while impelled to deny it to every 

 thing else. 



The beginning of this history does not stretch, therefore, 

 into the inscrutable eternities. We discover the firm Rock 

 of support from which the chain of existence hangs. It is 

 the " Rock of Ages." We feel comforted and strengthened 

 in knowing that " in the beginning God created" 



We assert, then, that evidence exists that the solar sys- 

 tem came from the hand of the Creator in the state of ig- 

 neous vapor. Nor does the assertion predicate a condition 

 of cosmical matter that is not, even to this day, exemplified 

 in the universe. Is not the sun a globe of fire-cloud, with 

 a nucleus of molten minerals ? And does not the spectro- 

 scope declare the composition of the sun to be identical 



