12 



ON IMATTEU, AND 



of Wisdoii), a book written in Greek instead of in Hebrew, and hereby 

 proving his own cEra as well as the school in which he had studied, ex- 

 pressly asserts that " The almighty hand of the Lord created the world 

 out oi^unfashioned (amorphous) matter £^6if>top(ptibXi}g while Athenago- 

 ras, Tatian, Theophikisof 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 vera. : For that the word of 

 God," says he ^'•formed the world out of unfashioned matter^ Moses dis- 

 tinctly 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 without 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 passage we seem to have a statement of three dis- 

 tinct 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 

 efibrt to reduce it from this shapeless and void or waste condition into a 

 state of order and productiveness — " the Spirit of God moved upon the 

 face of the waters." And hence, to maintain from the Mosaic narration 

 that the heaven or the earth existed in a waste and amorphous mass ante- 

 cedently to the first act of creation, is to derange the series of such narra- 

 tion, and to put that process first which Moses has put second. 



I enter not here into the correctness of the general rendering, nor into 

 the exact import of the word Nia, " created ;" for whatever be the ren- 

 dering, the same consecutive order of events must be adhered to, and the 

 same conclusion must follow. I am perfectly ready, however, to admit 

 that does by no means at all times import an absolute creation out of 

 nothing, but, like create in our own language, that it occasionally denotes 

 the formation of one thing out of another ; yet when we are told that, if 

 Moses had really intended to express an absolute creation of the earth out 

 of nothing, he would have used some other word, which should have limit- 

 ed us to this idea, I confidently put it to any critic, what word he could 

 have employed specially appropriated to such a purpose, and hmited to 

 such a sense, at the time he wrote ; or even what word, thus restrained, 

 he could select in our own day, from any spoken language throughout the 

 world ? Words are not invented for an exclusive expression of solitary facts, 

 but for general use. The creation of the world, or of any thing whatever, 

 out of nothing, is a fact of this kind ; and no language ever had or ever 

 will have a term precisely struck out for the purpose of representing such 

 an idea, and exclusively appropriated to it ; and assuredly there could be 

 no such word at the time Moses first spoke of the fact, and communicated 

 the doctrine ; as, antecedently to this, it could not have been called for. 



* Cap. xi, 17. 



