Welsh Journals

The Doctrine of Creation. By Dr. Cynddylan Jones. I CONFINE myself to-day to one doctrine, the Doctrine of Creation. The question has been asked in all ages and climes, Who made all things? Let us inquire what answer the Bible gives to this all-important question, and then what answers are furnished by heathen religions and heathen philosophies. What answer does Moses return to the ques- tion ? His answer we find in Gen. i: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." What a wonderful beginning-no pre- face, no apology. He takes for granted the truth of the Divine Existence, considering it so evident as to require no proof, it being a truth at the beginning of an argument, and not at the end. In the beginning, God. He hangs this truth as a key to the Temple of Truth, to open up the mysteries and solve the problems which follow. Theism (God) explains every- thing, Atheism (no God) explains nothing. Moses, in this chapter, uses three words, made," formed," created." Of these the strongest is created," but concerning its exact meaning scholars somewhat disagree. What is there that scholars do not disagree about? The great majority, however, admit that in Holy Writ it signifies the pro- duction of the universe without pre-existing materials, or, in ordinary speech, creation out of nothing. This statement is not considered suffi- ciently philosophic. Perhaps. But common sense usually over-rides philosophy. God did not grant His revelation to scholars in British and continental universities that they might expound it and make it intelligible to the rest of man- kind. No; God entrusted His revelation to men and women of common sense, and common sense will outlive all the philosophies of the world. In the beginning God created heaven and earth." How succinct, lucid, and even poetic the statement. The infinite Sun all ablaze pours down his light from above. The Bible thus begins at the sublimest heights maintains that altitude to the very end. From Genesis to Revelation the radiance loses none of its lustre. No wonder that writers on rhetoric quote the first verses in the Bible as specimens of the sublime. In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And God said, Let there be light, and light was." A more rhetorical state- ment was never made, and yet devoid of all literary adornment. Truth, bare and naked, always is sublime. A man's garniture, however expensive and fashionable, is not half so beautiful as the human form divine upon which the clothing is suspended. It is the bare body that Phidias made immortal. Out of nothing, without any pre-existing materials, God summoned the universe into being. He spake and it was; He commanded and it stood fast," Psalm xxxiii, 9. We cannot make a mental picture of the creative act, but human ability is not the measure of the Divine possibility. "In the beginning God created heaven and earth." Then Mind was before Matter, a truth, mark, foreign to all the religions and philosophies of antiquity. Read the celebrated Babylonian poem, and you will find that matter was existent in turbulent disorder before the gods began to manipulate it. Matter antedated mind, a view on which modern materialistic philosophy is founded, and which was adopted wholesale by Herbert Spencer and his school. Ancient reli- gions and modern evolution advocate the same- matter before mind. But Moses, the author of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, and the Apostle John, the author of the Apocalypse, the last book in the Bible, teach without the slightest hesitation that mind was before matter. In the beginning God (Mind) created heaven and earth (matter). In the beginning was the Word," and a Word is nothing unless there be a mind behind it. By Him all things were made, and without Him was not anything made that was made." Mind before matter, says Biblical theology; matter before mind, exclaims Spencerian philosophy. Which do you prefer, Moses or Spencer? For my part I follow Moses. Yes, I rather believe with Moses and John in the past eternity of mind than believe with Spencer and Huxley in the past eternity of matter. How to account for the superiority of the teaching of the two ancient authors over that of the two modern scientists? Does not this fact, for fact it is in the judgment of the vast majority of Christian readers, engender within us the suspicion, yea, the conviction, that some extraordinary influence from above had an invisible hand in its production? DUALISM. Who made all things? Let us now turn for a moment from Moses, and address the question to Plato, the illustrious representative of Greek philosophy in its meridian splendour. What is his answer to the above inquiry? That God is the maker of the Kosmos, but not the maker of the Chaos, described in the second verse in Genesis, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." According to him, God is the author of the order of the universe, but not the author of the stuff or material of which the worlds are made. The idea of creation out of nothing never occurred to this brilliant thinker, it is the exclusive property of Holy Writ. God did not produce the chaos-the chaos was eternally there, matter in an unformed and incoherent state, not produced by God, not dependent on God, and, if I may say so, rebellious against God. God and Matter were thus the two con- curring but antagonistic causes of the universe. From the nature of matter as co-eternal with the Divine Intelligence, and from its intractable-