CHAPTER III. CREATION. "My heart is awed within me, when I think For ever." "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." - GEN. i. 1. THE Bible begins its marvellous record with Genesis, or the account of the creation of all, and it closes with Revelation, or the regenesis, that is, the announcement of the regeneration of all things. It begins with God, and it ends with God. All came from him, and to him is given in the Bible the glory of all. The first verse of Genesis assumes the existence of God. This is a fact which the sacred penmen rarely attempt to prove. They assume it as almost a self-evident truth, an original and inherent part of the furniture of the human mindan intuition more than an inference. A voice ever rises from within, and mingles with ten thousand without, declaring there is a God. His existence and rule are assumed as the basis of all—the great secret and solution of all. Exclude Deity from the universe in our reasonings, and calculations, and thoughts, and hopes, and trusts, and fears, and joys, and nature falls back to chaos, the human heart into despair, and all things become confusion worse confounded. · Nature reverberates in all her chambers, in her heights and depths, in all she was, in all she is, and still more from what she will be - GOD. We may rise from nature to the apprehension of nature's God; but, however pleasing, this is only a discovery. The Bible tells us that God is, and this is a revelation. A discovery, we have seen, is something that man makes, and for which he is prone to take a tithe of glory and honor to himself, and which is therefore ever dangerous. But a revelation is something that God gives, in which man knows that he has no share, and from which he can extort no glory: Creation is full of Deity, and revelation resonant with his accents. The natural philosopher rises from what he finds in creation, until he reaches the staple fixed to the throne of God, from which the whole chain of being hangs. A Christian starts with God, who is announced to him in his Bible, and comes down to see what creation is, from what he has found God to be. Hence, the mere natural philosopher argues what God is, from the jarring and broken state in which he finds creation; but a Christian argues what creation is, was, and will be, from what he has first discovered God in his word to be. In this lies the superiority of the Christian's deductions, that he forms his conceptions of creation from a previous knowledge of God, and can explain it all; whereas the natural man forms his conceptions of God from a very much marred, a broken, and a disjointed world, and therefore often errs. Hence, the mere theist's apprehension of God is not a perfect one, because his evidence is not so; the Christian's idea of the world is the only true one, because his idea of God is an inspired one. What a blessed thought now, if we could all at all times realize it, that we, and all about us, are the creatures of God! When we have no sense of our adoption by grace, we may fall back upon the fact of our creation by power. 66 If I cannot say, owing to the faltering of my faith, “O Lord, I am thy adopted son,” I may yet say, because it is impossible to avoid it, “O Lord, I am thy creature." There is a collect in the English Prayer Book, “O Lord, who hatest nothing that thou has made." I think that is very beautiful: God hates nothing that he has made; and whatever God hates is, come whence it may, an interpolation, an intrusion, which vitiates all it touches, and will be destroyed, but which he did not make. If God made us all, this brings before us the dead level on which all humanity is laid. We all occupy one common level, as the workmanship of one hand-the offspring of one Parent. Our birth and our decay, our origin and our - end, our immortality and our tears, our sorrows and our joys, should all lead us to sympathize with each other, but never to hate and persecute each other. When we read the first chapter of Genesis, and think of the vastness of created things therein recorded, we may form, and God warrants us to do so, not as a substitute for our creed, but as an illustration of it, some idea of the greatness of Him who made all. When God created the world is of very little consequence; that he created the world is the precious and practical fact for us. When I think of the mountain ranges so vast in height, of primæval forests so extensive; of the ocean lifting up its unsleeping eye; of the sun and moon and stars ever looking down, and recollect that there are stars so distant, that, though light travels from the sun to the earth in four minutes, yet the light of these stars, travelling with almost inconceivable rapidity, has not yet reached our orb; when I think that stars the most distant are really centres of systems, and those systems each with its central sun only groups around another central sun, and that central sun with these groups, which are clusters of worlds, only small groups around a yet inner central sun; and that all these, and more than these that the telescope brings before us, are but a few of the outposts of that starry host which keeps watch on the infinite plains, and ministers about God's throne perpetually; in short, that all that the best telescope is able to bring within the horizon are but some of the scattered sentinels of those magnificent battalions that cover the fields of immensity; we may try to conceive, but adequately conceive we cannot, the magnificence and the greatness of Him who made all, and sits enthroned upon the riches of all, from whom all came, and to whom all give glory and honor and praise. But I have spoken of catching a glimpse of what God is by the great things that the telescope brings within the horizon from the stupendous heights of nature; but I dare venture to state, that we have even a grander idea of what God is by the little things that the microscope brings within our view from the depths of the earth we live on. The more that one discovers of the universe about us, the more one is perplexed to determine whether God is seen to be most great in creating fixed stars, in controlling high angels, or in creating those minute and microscopic. organisms which the human eye cannot see, but every one of which millions upon millions, invisible and intangible by us, has a perfect organization of nerves and veins and arteries. Man's mind is overwhelmed by the magnificent things which the telescope brings down to him; it is no less struck by the minute things which the microscope brings up to him; one feels what difficulty there must be in being an atheist, what credulity there must be in that man who can muster moral depravity to expose his intellectual blindness, and to cry, "There is no God." I think there is nothing so plain, so palpable, so unmistakable on earth, apart from the Bible, as that there is a God. I have spoken of the outer creation as a mirror of Deity, but when we come to what is more familiar to us, ourselves, what evidence is there in all our structure of God! I have heard that not a few physicians and medical men are sceptically inclined. I wonder at it. Of course the human body cannot teach us that Christ died for sinners, for this precious truth we must go to God's revealed word; but the human body does teach every man that it is not an accidental thing struck off from some other, but an original creation of Deity, instinct with beautiful design, and eloquent with instructive lessons. So delicate is this body of ours, that one feels at times it is better not to know it too well, for the more we know it, the more we shall wonder that it holds together for ten minutes; and yet it is so powerful, that what it can endure, and what it will do, and what it will dare, defies almost the historian to record. Yet, noble as this body is, after all it is not the man; it is but the movable tent which he carries about with him. It is a combination of levers, and pulleys, and hooks, and pumps, and wheels, and windows, and speaking-trumpets, and acoustic tubes, to enable the man within, who is its owner, to communicate with this outer world. But if this body be so exquisitely made, so wondrously arranged, it must be a very grand inhabitant for which such machinery, so complicated, so beautiful, so delicate, and yet so strong, was prepared. If the body give traces and evidence of wisdom, design, omnipotence, how much more that soul which dwells in its innermost chambers, for which that body was made and consecrated of old! How precious the jewel for which so exquisite a casket was got ready! how great the inner king for whom so royal a palace was built! and how truly do both show alike the wisdom and the power of Him who made them, and knit them inseparably together. I know nothing greater than man's soul, but God; and I know no creature in heaven, upon earth, that man would not |