two points already indicated, the first cause and the final cause of the creation, as clearly demonstrating the homage which is due from Science to Revelation, and pointing out the dividing line between the domains of the two.

It will be necessary, in the first place, to determine the sense of that faith, for which we claim so much. We use it, in precisely the same sense the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews used it, in the familiar passage, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." This is not to be taken as a definition of justifying faith, or of faith as justifying, but is a description of the efficacy and operation of this faith in them who are justified. It refers to the disposition, wrought in Christian believers, by which they live and walk, looking not on the things which are seen, but the things which are not seen. It is not faith as opposed to works by which they are justified; but faith as opposed to sight, by which they can patiently wait, in the face of all difficulties, for the fulfilment of the most ancient promise. It is the substance, or as the margin, with greater precision, renders UPOSTASIS, the ground or confidence, i. e., the well-grounded confidence of things hoped for; it is the evidence, i.e., demonstration, ELEGCHOS, or manifestness (as the rendering is in the Syriac Testament*) of things not seen. It is a confidence in the reality of things hoped for, as if they were in actual possession; a realisation of things invisible, as if they were in sight. As the confidence of things hoped for, it relates exclusively to the future; as the demonstration of things not seen, it may relate to the past as well as the future.

It

Now, it is through the operation of faith, as thus described, that all who have it in exercise, as the apostle to the Hebrews proceeds immediately to declare, understand, or perceive, NOUMEN, as if the knowledge were obtained through the medium of the senses, that the worlds were framed by the word of God. is not, we say again, in, or by means of faith, as men come to the knowledge of Christ as a Saviour; but it is an understanding, which, by virtue of their faith, has been begotten within them; or, it is faith viewed as an act, which gives the knowledge and proof of the reality of things hoped for and unseen; and which, therefore, gives them, on the authority of God's revealed truth, the demonstration that the worlds were formed by the word of God. Faith is to be viewed not as a mere dogma demanding definition; it is an appropriation by the mind and heart, of all the great truths God has revealed as necessarily connected, and of all the great things he has promised, as if their possession had already been entered upon. The creation of the worlds, as understood by

* See Murdock's Translation.

faith, of course must have exclusive reference to the second part of the general description of it, to wit, that it is the evidence or demonstration of things not seen. It was an event of which there were, and could have been, no human witnesses, when the things which are now visible were made, not out of apparent materials, or matter already in existence, but out of nothing. We have human testimony as to the reality of the miracles of Christ; but we have no such testimony as to the framing of the worlds by the word of God. Man could not have been a witness of that creation of which he was a component part. That portion of the inspired record, therefore, which gives an account of the origin of all things, is pure revelation, as much so as a prophecy of the future. It is an unfolding of the past, by him who knoweth all things, just as prophecy is an unfolding of the future. It is the testimony of man only as Moses testifies that he spake by the express authority of God. God himself (with reverence be it spoken) was the earliest historian of the world. We know absolutely nothing-we mean to include the greatest scholars among men of the origin of things, except what he has told us. Every true philosopher must come back to what the Bible has told him, that God is the author of all things, or he will surely prove himself to be but a fool. It is here that the simple-hearted peasant is on a footing with the profoundest student, and may often have an advantage over him, because he is simple-hearted. He believes, and is not tempted by a false science to rush in where science is of no more account than the sheerest ignorance. It is through faith, and through faith alone, that men, whether learned or unlearned, can understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. It accepts God's own testimony, that he is the Creator of all things; and so accepts it as to know or perceive things, not perceptible by the senses. It opens up in the man a higher region of perception and knowledge than that which exists in the senses. It is well remarked by the great Dr. Owen, that as when it is said, we are justified by faith, faith includes its object, Christ and his righteousness, so in this case, faith includes its object, the divine revelation, made in the word of God, "By the word of the Lord, were the heavens made: and all the hosts of them, by the breath of his mouth. He gathered the waters of the sea together as a heap: he laid up the depths in storehouses." He spake and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." Ps. xxxiii. 6, 7, 9.

There was first a calling of the matter of which the worlds are composed, by a sovereign word, into existence, and then a framing of this matter into distinct worlds, and a fashioning of all created things into that beautiful order which we behold. All this was accomplished by the simple fiat of the Almighty. He said, BE; and IT WAS. There were no intermediate agencies, instruments,

or powers, coming in between his will, or his word, and the result. The vastness of the work is intimated by the expression, "the worlds," i.e., the universe, in all its vastness and variety, beginning from the lowest and ascending to the highest, or, beginning from the highest and descending to the lowest. There was first, as we have said, the creative act, by which they were called out of nothingness into existence, "so that things which are seen were not made" out of pre-existing materials. The omnipotent power of God was employed in this work. Nothing else was adequate to the performance of it. Every thing out of himself, or distinct from his own being, was made by him. "Without him (the Creator) was not any thing made that was made." John i. 3. That "from nothing, nothing can come," is true only in respect to the power of created, dependent beings. It would be a contradiction in terms, that an omnipotent Being could not cause that to exist which did not exist before. Ancient philosophers, governed by the maxim that "from nothing, nothing comes," held to the doctrine of the eternity of matter. Some of them, to the eternity of the world, as it now exists; others of them to the eternity of the atoms, or elements, which were at length fortuitously brought together in the form of worlds. The very highest point which the most cultivated of them ever attained was, that the world must have been formed by an intelligent Power, but out of pre-existing materials. But modern philosophy is ready to concede that a first cause, essentially different from all dependent causes, is an intellectual necessity. The mind can find no satisfaction, no repose, except in an all-creating, self-existing mind. It cries out for God; and the senseless clod and shapeless stone, no less than the solar system,' unite in proclaiming his existence, wisdom, and power. "In his self-existence," says the acute author of the Fundamental Principles of Mathematics, "as it was, is, and is to come,' is to be found THE one, the absolutely necessary truth: all others are contingent, just so far as He has made them so. Herein is to be found, moreover, the great, the final hypothesis, upon which rests the structure of the universe; and which, too, undergirds and sustains the universe in all its relations." The wisest of the ancients needed such a revelation of God as we have in the sacred oracles, to enable them to rise to the height of this great truth, that he created the world. They needed just that discovery which is contained in the opening sentence of the Bible: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." They needed the enlightening power of faith.

God, having called the world into existence, by his word, did then, by divine skill, "frame," or fashion it. He said, Let there be light; and the darkness fled away. Let there be a firmament; and it was arched over the world. Let the waters be

gathered in one place; and the waves rolled back, and were shut up as in storehouses. Let the dry land appear; and valleys and plains were stretched out; mountains lifted their crowns towards heaven. Let there be lights to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years. He speaks again, and the beautiful, and yet tenantless world, is replenished with another and higher form of life; fishes swarm the sea, birds fill the air, cattle and beasts roam and graze in the fresh and ample pastures; and, at last, "the master-work," man, stands forth, and gazes on the scene, and listens to the morning stars singing together, and the sons of God shouting for joy, over this finished work, "very good," even in the eyes of the holy Being who made it. There was a design in his every work, and an adaptation of every work to its proper end, fitted to excite the adoration of every intelligent creature. He established that beautiful order which reigns among the heavenly bodies, and those laws which control winds, rains, seas, seasons, and fruits of the earth, and make it a fit dwelling-place for man. All objects have their appropriate purposes; all faculties have their corresponding objects. Everywhere we are met with the evidences of divine wisdom.

Such, in brief, was the work, concerning which we are made to know something, through faith, which we can learn in no other way. Admit it to be true, if you please, that science now shuts the door as effectually against the self-existence, or eternity of the material universe, as the Bible does, still it does not follow that science alone could make us acquainted with that great truth, which we learn, through faith, to wit, that the worlds were framed by the word of God. Have we the least reason for concluding that modern philosophy, without the revelation we have of God in the Scriptures, would have contended any more successfully against the tendencies of a depraved nature, to darken and mislead the mind? Is not the revelation of the eternal power and Godhead of the Ruler of the world, as we have it in the Bible, absolutely essential to such beings as we are, notwithstanding all the light of nature, or all that science can teach, when we come to deal with the origin of things? Reason may decide against the eternity of the material universe, but can reason, in such depraved creatures as we are, find out the true God, or find out any better divinities than were adored, when it reigned proudly, as of old? Would it not still talk of appetency, necessity, adaptive energy, or of development, and attribute to such blind phantoms as these the work of God? And if it cannot find out a God omnipotent, and infinitely wise, can it ascertain that great truth, which is at the beginning of all our knowledge, that all things were made by him? No; it must sit down humbly at the feet of revelation, for the sublime teaching, that in the beginning God created the

heaven and the earth. It may investigate the composition, changes, and mutual actions of material substances; but it cannot give an account of the origin of these substances. It may treat of the structure, formation, and position of the mineral masses of the globe, and the causes of their physical features; but its explorations are sure to reach primitive beds, which it finds it impossible to trace to any antecedent matter. It may take the wings of the morning, and traverse the nebulous paths of the heavens, and expatiate amidst the so-called original fire-mist of the astral regions, as if, with its keen eye, it actually saw it rotating and aggregating into suns and planets; but who made this star-dust? who sowed the vast fields of space with it, as a husbandman would scatter wheat from his hand over his ploughed acres? "Declare, if thou has understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?" Job xxxviii. 4, 5. The profoundest philosopher is just as much dependent for this knowledge, on the first verses of Genesis and of John, as the most unlettered Christian.

But even if science, after reaching the conclusion that the material universe must have had a beginning, could then have inferred that it owed its origin to an omnipotent power, still it could not have found out that it was brought into existence by the simple word of a personal Jehovah; that he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast. Here, then, unmistakably, is a clear dividing line between Revelation and Science, where the former says to the latter, in tones of authoritative majesty,"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." That great fact of the divine authorship of worlds, of which ancient philosophy was ignorant, and which modern science fails of itself to discover, we understand through faith, by the revelation God has made of it in his word. The eminent astronomer, La Place, because he could find, as he said, in the solar system no indications of an end, was unable to find in it any trace of a beginning. The Bible, in its very first flash of light on our darkness, finds that beginning. It "establishes," to use the words of the lamented Hugh Miller, "the divine authorship of the universe, and shows that all its various forces are not self-existent, but owe their origin to a great First Cause."-Test. of the Rocks, p. 384.

That faith, in behalf of which we set up the claim that it is a source of positive knowledge, is just our faith in the Bible, or the revelation it contains. It has evidences without and evidences within, which convince us that God addresses us in its pages. He must have revealed directly to Moses the account it contains of the creation of all things. Hence the grounds of our faith in the Divine authorship of the universe are just the grounds of our faith in the Divine origin of the Scriptures. Strike away the one, and