Claudius Galenus, the illustrious physician of ancient Pergamos, who was wont to speak of his vocation and work as "a religious hymn in honor of the Creator." Let Him Who spake, and it was-Who commanded, and it stood fast (Psalm xxxii. 9)—be the Object of your supreme and ceaseless allegiance, homage, and trust. For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all Gods. In His hand are the deep places of the earth; the strength of the hills is His also. The sea is His, and He made it: and His hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand (Psalm xcv. 3–7). For from Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things (Rom. xi. 36).

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

LECTURE III.

GENESIS OF ORDER.

"And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."-GENESIS 1. 2.

I. Explanation

of the Passage.

FIRST of all, let us attend to the Explanation of the Passage.

And, first, the Primeval Chaos:

1.—The Primeval "Now the earth was waste and empty, and darkness was over the face of the

Chaos.

a.-Origin of Chaos.

abyss."

At the very outset, an interesting question arises. Was this Chaos the

original condition of matter as it came direct from the Creator's hand, or was it the wreck of an earlier world? It must be confessed that certain things seem to indicate— at least, at first sight-that the latter was the fact. First: God is not the author of confusion, but of peace (1 Cor. xiv. 33); whatever He creates is perfect. Again: the words tohu and bohu, rendered "without form and void," literally mean wasteness and desolation. The expression is often applied to ruined cities and territories. Two passages are remarkably in point. Isaiah, speaking of the coming judgment on Idumea, says: "The cormorant and

the bittern shall possess it, the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it, and He will stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness" (Is. xxxiv. 11); the words rendered "confusion and emptiness" are precisely the same as those rendered in our passage "without form and void." According to the prophet, Idumea was to be devoted to devastation and destruction. So also Jeremiah, foretelling the ruin that would come upon Judea, exclaims: "I looked upon the land, and, lo, it was without form and void; I looked to the heavens, and they gave their light no more; I looked to the mountains, and, lo, they trembled; I looked, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the air had fled; I looked, and, lo, the fruitful land had been turned into the desert, and all its cities were broken down before the fury of Jehovah's anger" (Jer: iv. 23-26). It seemed to the prophet a real return to the ancient realm of Chaos. Again: this opinion was held by some of the ancient Fathers, e. g., the Gregorys, Basil, Augustine, etc. Again: it seems to be confirmed by alleged scientific facts, particularly the geologic doctrine of Catastrophes, many of which are supposed by some scientists to have occurred in the immense interval between Creation and Chaos, and during Chaos itself. Once more: it seems to be confirmed by present terrestrial changes, e. g., recomposition out of decomposition, as the harvest out of the dying seed. Such are some of the reasons which have inclined some scientists, e. g., Buckland, Sedgwick, Hitchcock, etc., and many theologians, e. g., Chalmers, McCaul, Wordsworth, etc., to the opinion that Chaos was the wreck of an earlier world.

Nevertheless, although this opinion seems plausible, and although it is maintained by scholars entitled to our respect, it lies open to grave objections. First: it does not

seem to be in harmony with the scope of the Sacred Narrator; he is giving us the history of the Creation of the heavens and the earth, not of their reconstruction. Again: it introduces an unwarrantable or at least apparently arbitrary break between the first and second verses—that is to say-between Creation and Chaos. Again: instead of being sustained by the geologic records, it seems to be in direct conflict with them. Once more: it is opposed to God's usual method of working; that method is inchoative, that is to say, a method of progress, from small to vast, from embryo to fruition, from homogeneousness to heterogeneousness, or rather from homogeneousness to diversity, and through diversity to unity in diversity. For these reasons I am compelled to believe that the Chaos of the original elements not less than the Creation of them was the direct issue of the Creative Will; that is to say, God created the atoms of the Universe, starting with them in a chaotic state. It was an instance of the truth to which I shall advert later on: All progress begins in Chaos.

And now glance for a moment at b.-Picture of Chaos. this primeval Chaos.

All the elements which now exist were doubtless there; but all were out of relation. Far as the eye could pierce, not a thing of life or beauty or definite form redeemed a single point in the monstrous waste. And over this wild, structureless, desolate abyss rested the pall of blackness. In short, earth was that heterogeneous mass of inextricable confusion which the ancients called Chaos.

. . . . A dark

Illimitable ocean, without bound,

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time, and place, are lost; where Eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand;

For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce,
Strive here for mastery, and to battle bring

Their embryon atoms."-("PARADISE LOST," ii. 891–900.)

Strikingly similar is the description by the heathen poet Ovid:

"Ere sea, or land, or sky, that covers all,

Existed, over all of Nature's round

One face there was, which men have Chaos named-
A rude, unfathomed mass, with naught save weight:
And here were heaped the jarring elements

Of ill-connected things. No sun as yet
His rays afforded to the world; the moon
Filled not afresh her horns by monthly growth;
Nor hung the globe in circumambient air,
Poised by its balanced weight: nor had the sea
Reached forth its arms along the distant shore:
No land to stand upon, no wave to swim,
And rayless air. Nothing preserved its form:
Each thing opposed the rest; since in one frame
The cold with hot things fought, the moist with dry,
The soft with hard, the light with heavy things."
—(“METAMORPHOSES,” i. 5.)

True, there is a large accretion here to the primeval Creation Archive as transmitted to us by Moses. Nevertheless, recalling what was said in our Introductory Lecture respecting the wide-spread, venerable traditions touching the primeval condition of the globe, who does not feel that Ovid obtained his clew from that hoary Creation Archive?

c.-Confirmation of

Science.

And what Moses says touching the original condition of the globe, Modern Science tends in a remarkable way to