Part 4 — Chapter IV. The Works Of God; Or The Execution Of The Decrees. (continued 2)

(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.

Martensen wrongly asserts that “Judaism represented the world exclusively as creatura, not natura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.” This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).

The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species. “When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words: ‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.” Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.

We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the word bara in Gen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored by Gen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”; 20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly [pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”; 2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”; 9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”; cf. Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.” Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen: “Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”

All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is “derived from the lower.” Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.

Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative “two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.” Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in “spiritual law in the natural world.” His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was “red in tooth and claw with ravine.” But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.

Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.” God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.

2. Its proper interpretation.

We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation [pg 394] was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.

(a) The allegorical, or mythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.

We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs: “The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.” W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.” To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.

Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him “the first sober one among many drunken.” Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.” Dr. E. G. Robinson: “The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.” For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of “prophetic vision,” see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.

(b) The hyperliteral interpretation would withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses of Gen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word “day” is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun; 8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”; 2:2—God “rested on the seventh day”; cf. Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it; Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days; cf. Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”; Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”; 2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as [pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word “day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.

(c) The hyperscientific interpretation would find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be

(d) The pictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which was next to nothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.” We proceed now to the scheme:

1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described in Genesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term “waters.”

2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement in verse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows: “there was evening and there was morning, one day.” Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.

3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of “the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”in verse 7. Here the word “waters” is used to designate the “primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term “waters” is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass. Ps. 148 seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the “waters that are above the heavens” (verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the “deeps” below (verse 7), and the “vapor” above (verse 8).

4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described in verse 9 as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.

5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described in verse 11 as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, the algæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it [pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.

6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described in verses 16 and 17 as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. Compare Gen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.” As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.

7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented in verses 20 and 21 as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.

8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated in verses 24 and 25 by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.

9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (see verses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that “in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.” See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen: “Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz: “Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”

Prof. John M. Taylor: “Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.” W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days “chapters in the history of creation.” He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks: “Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”

On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week; [pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.

V. God's End in Creation.

Infinite wisdom must, in creating, propose to itself the most comprehensive and the most valuable of ends,—the end most worthy of God, and the end most fruitful in good. Only in the light of the end proposed can we properly judge of God's work, or of God's character as revealed therein.

It would seem that Scripture should give us an answer to the question: Why did God create? The great Architect can best tell his own design. Ambrose: “To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?” George A. Gordon, New Epoch for Faith, 15—“God is necessarily a being of ends. Teleology is the warp and woof of humanity; it must be in the warp and woof of Deity. Evolutionary science has but strengthened this view. Natural science is but a mean disguise for ignorance if it does not imply cosmical purpose. The movement of life from lower to higher is a movement upon ends. Will is the last account of the universe, and will is the faculty for ends. The moment one concludes that God is, it appears certain that he is a being of ends. The universe is alive with desire and movement. Fundamentally it is throughout an expression of will. And it follows, that the ultimate end of God in human history must be worthy of himself.”

In determining this end, we turn first to:

1. The testimony of Scripture.

This may be summed up in four statements. God finds his end (a) in himself; (b) in his own will and pleasure; (c) in his own glory; (d) in the making known of his power, his wisdom, his holy name. All these statements may be combined in the following, namely, that God's supreme end in creation is nothing outside of himself, but is his own glory—in the revelation, in and through creatures, of the infinite perfection of his own being.

(a) Rom. 11:36—“unto him are all things”; Col. 1:16—“all things have been created ... unto him”(Christ); compare Is. 48:11—“for mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it ... and my glory will I not give to another”; and 1 Cor. 15:28—“subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all.” Proverbs 16:4—not “The Lord hath made all things for himself” (A. V.) but “Jehovah hath made everything for its own end” (Rev. Vers.).

(b) Eph. 1:5, 6, 9—“having foreordained us ... according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace ... mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him”; Rev. 4:11—“thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”

(c) Is. 43:7—“whom I have created for my glory”; 60:21 and 61:3—the righteousness and blessedness of the redeemed are secured, that “he may be glorified”; Luke 2:14—the angels' song at the birth of Christ expressed the design of the work of salvation: “Glory to God in the highest,” and only through, and for its sake, “on earth peace among men in whom he is well pleased.”

(d) Ps. 143:11—“In thy righteousness bring my soul out of trouble”; Ez. 36:21, 22—“I do not this for your sake ... but for mine holy name”; 39:7—“my holy name will I make known”; Rom. 9:17—to Pharaoh: “For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth”; 22, 23—“riches of his glory” made known in vessels of wrath, and in vessels of mercy; Eph. 3:9, 10—“created all things; to the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God.” See Godet, on Ultimate Design of Man; “God in man and man in God,” in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1880; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:436, 535, 565, 568. Per contra, see Miller, Fetich in Theology, 19, 39-45, 88-98, 143-146.

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Since holiness is the fundamental attribute in God, to make himself, his own pleasure, his own glory, his own manifestation, to be his end in creation, is to find his chief end in his own holiness, its maintenance, expression, and communication. To make this his chief end, however, is not to exclude certain subordinate ends, such as the revelation of his wisdom, power, and love, and the consequent happiness of innumerable creatures to whom this revelation is made.

God's glory is that which makes him glorious. It is not something without, like the praise and esteem of men, but something within, like the dignity and value of his own attributes. To a noble man, praise is very distasteful unless he is conscious of something in himself that justifies it. We must be like God to be self-respecting. Pythagoras said well: “Man's end is to be like God.” And so God must look within, and find his honor and his end in himself. Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “This is the glory, that in all conceived Or felt or known, I recognize a Mind, Not mine but like mine,—for the double joy Making all things for me, and me for Him.”Schurman, Belief in God, 214-216—“God glorifies himself in communicating himself.”The object of his love is the exercise of his holiness. Self-affirmation conditions self-communication.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 94, 196—“Law and gospel are only two sides of the one object, the highest glory of God in the highest good of man.... Nor is it unworthy of God to make himself his own end: (a) It is both unworthy and criminal for a finite being to make himself his own end, because it is an end that can be reached only by degrading self and wronging others; but (b) For an infinite Creator not to make himself his own end would be to dishonor himself and wrong his creatures; since, thereby, (c) he must either act without an end, which is irrational, or from an end which is impossible without wronging his creatures; because (d) the highest welfare of his creatures, and consequently their happiness, is impossible except through the subordination and conformity of their wills to that of their infinitely perfect Ruler; and (e) without this highest welfare and happiness of his creatures God's own end itself becomes impossible, for he is glorified only as his character is reflected in, and recognized by, his intelligent creatures.” Creation can add nothing to the essential wealth or worthiness of God. If the end were outside himself, it would make him dependent and a servant. The old theologians therefore spoke of God's “declarative glory,”rather than God's “essential glory,” as resulting from man's obedience and salvation.

2. The testimony of reason.

That his own glory, in the sense just mentioned, is God's supreme end in creation, is evident from the following considerations:

(a) God's own glory is the only end actually and perfectly attained in the universe. Wisdom and omnipotence cannot choose an end which is destined to be forever unattained; for “what his soul desireth, even that he doeth” (Job 23:13). God's supreme end cannot be the happiness of creatures, since many are miserable here and will be miserable forever. God's supreme end cannot be the holiness of creatures, for many are unholy here and will be unholy forever. But while neither the holiness nor the happiness of creatures is actually and perfectly attained, God's glory is made known and will be made known in both the saved and the lost. This then must be God's supreme end in creation.

This doctrine teaches us that none can frustrate God's plan. God will get glory out of every human life. Man may glorify God voluntarily by love and obedience, but if he will not do this he will be compelled to glorify God by his rejection and punishment. Better be the molten iron that runs freely into the mold prepared by the great Designer, than be the hard and cold iron that must be hammered into shape. Cleanthes, quoted by Seneca: “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.” W. C. Wilkinson, Epic of Saul, 271—“But some are tools, and others ministers, Of God, who works his holy will with all.” Christ baptizes “in the Holy Spirit and in fire” (Mat. 3:11). Alexander [pg 399]McLaren: “There are two fires, to one or other of which we must be delivered. Either we shall gladly accept the purifying fire of the Spirit which burns sin out of us, or we shall have to meet the punitive fire which burns up us and our sins together. To be cleansed by the one or to be consumed by the other is the choice before each one of us.” Hare, Mission of the Comforter, on John 16:8, shows that the Holy Spirit either convinces those who yield to his influence, or convicts those who resist—the word ἐλέγχω having this double significance.

(b) God's glory is the end intrinsically most valuable. The good of creatures is of insignificant importance compared with this. Wisdom dictates that the greater interest should have precedence of the less. Because God can choose no greater end, he must choose for his end himself. But this is to choose his holiness, and his glory in the manifestation of that holiness.

Is. 40:15, 16—“Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance”—like the drop that falls unobserved from the bucket, like the fine dust of the scales which the tradesman takes no notice of in weighing, so are all the combined millions of earth and heaven before God. He created, and he can in an instant destroy. The universe is but a drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment. It is more important that God should be glorified than that the universe should be happy. As we read in Heb. 6:13—“since he could swear by none greater, he sware by himself”—so here we may say: Because he could choose no greater end in creating, he chose himself. But to swear by himself is to swear by his holiness (Ps. 89:35). We infer that to find his end in himself is to find that end in his holiness. See Martineau on Malebranche, in Types, 177.

The stick or the stone does not exist for itself, but for some consciousness. The soul of man exists in part for itself. But it is conscious that in a more important sense it exists for God. “Modern thought,” it is said, “worships and serves the creature more than the Creator; indeed, the chief end of the Creator seems to be to glorify man and to enjoy him forever.” So the small boy said his Catechism: “Man's chief end is to glorify God and to annoy him forever.” Prof. Clifford: “The kingdom of God is obsolete; the kingdom of man has now come.” All this is the insanity of sin. Per contra, see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 329, 330—“Two things are plain in Edwards's doctrine: first, that God cannot love anything other than himself: he is so great, so preponderating an amount of being, that what is left is hardly worth considering; secondly, so far as God has any love for the creature, it is because he is himself diffused therein: the fulness of his own essence has overflowed into an outer world, and that which he loves in created beings is his essence imparted to them.” But we would add that Edwards does not say they are themselves of the essence of God; see his Works, 2:210, 211.

(c) His own glory is the only end which consists with God's independence and sovereignty. Every being is dependent upon whomsoever or whatsoever he makes his ultimate end. If anything in the creature is the last end of God, God is dependent upon the creature. But since God is dependent only on himself, he must find in himself his end.

To create is not to increase his blessedness, but only to reveal it. There is no need or deficiency which creation supplies. The creatures who derive all from him can add nothing to him. All our worship is only the rendering back to him of that which is his own. He notices us only for his own sake and not because our little rivulets of praise add anything to the ocean-like fulness of his joy. For his own sake, and not because of our misery or our prayers, he redeems and exalts us. To make our pleasure and welfare his ultimate end would be to abdicate his throne. He creates, therefore, only for his own sake and for the sake of his glory. To this reasoning the London Spectator replies: “The glory of God is the splendor of a manifestation, not the intrinsic splendor manifested. The splendor of a manifestation, however, consists in the effect of the manifestation on those to whom it is given. Precisely because the manifestation of God's goodness can be useful to us and cannot be useful to him, must its manifestation be intended for our sake and not for his sake. We gain everything by it—he nothing, except so far as it is his own will that we should gain what he desires to bestow upon [pg 400]us.” In this last clause we find the acknowledgment of weakness in the theory that God's supreme end is the good of his creatures. God does gain the fulfilment of his plan, the doing of his will, the manifestation of himself. The great painter loves his picture less than he loves his ideal. He paints in order to express himself. God loves each soul which he creates, but he loves yet more the expression of his own perfections in it. And this self-expression is his end. Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 54—“God is the perfect Poet, Who in creation acts his own conceptions.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:357, 358; Shairp, Province of Poetry, 11, 12.

God's love makes him a self-expressing being. Self-expression is an inborn impulse in his creatures. All genius partakes of this characteristic of God. Sin substitutes concealment for outflow, and stops this self-communication which would make the good of each the good of all. Yet even sin cannot completely prevent it. The wicked man is impelled to confess. By natural law the secrets of all hearts will be made manifest at the judgment. Regeneration restores the freedom and joy of self-manifestation. Christianity and confession of Christ are inseparable. The preacher is simply a Christian further advanced in this divine privilege. We need utterance. Prayer is the most complete self-expression, and God's presence is the only land of perfectly free speech.

The great poet comes nearest, in the realm of secular things, to realizing this privilege of the Christian. No great poet ever wrote his best work for money, or for fame, or even for the sake of doing good. Hawthorne was half-humorous and only partially sincere, when he said he would never have written a page except for pay. The hope of pay may have set his pen a-going, but only love for his work could have made that work what it is. Motley more truly declared that it was all up with a writer when he began to consider the money he was to receive. But Hawthorne needed the money to live on, while Motley had a rich father and uncle to back him. The great writer certainly absorbs himself in his work. With him necessity and freedom combine. He sings as the bird sings, without dogmatic intent. Yet he is great in proportion as he is moral and religious at heart. “Arma virumque cano” is the only first person singular in the Æneid in which the author himself speaks, yet the whole Æneid is a revelation of Virgil. So we know little of Shakespeare's life, but much of Shakespeare's genius.

Nothing is added to the tree when it blossoms and bears fruit; it only reveals its own inner nature. But we must distinguish in man his true nature from his false nature. Not his private peculiarities, but that in him which is permanent and universal, is the real treasure upon which the great poet draws. Longfellow: “He is the greatest artist then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who follows nature. Never man, as artist or as artizan, Pursuing his own fantasies, Can touch the human heart or please, Or satisfy our nobler needs.” Tennyson, after observing the subaqueous life of a brook, exclaimed: “What an imagination God has!” Caird, Philos. Religion, 245—“The world of finite intelligences, though distinct from God, is still in its ideal nature one with him. That which God creates, and by which he reveals the hidden treasures of his wisdom and love, is still not foreign to his own infinite life, but one with it. In the knowledge of the minds that know him, in the self-surrender of the hearts that love him, it is no paradox to affirm that he knows and loves himself.”

(d) His own glory is an end which comprehends and secures, as a subordinate end, every interest of the universe. The interests of the universe are bound up in the interests of God. There is no holiness or happiness for creatures except as God is absolute sovereign, and is recognized as such. It is therefore not selfishness, but benevolence, for God to make his own glory the supreme object of creation. Glory is not vain-glory, and in expressing his ideal, that is, in expressing himself, in his creation, he communicates to his creatures the utmost possible good.

This self-expression is not selfishness but benevolence. As the true poet forgets himself in his work, so God does not manifest himself for the sake of what he can make by it. Self-manifestation is an end in itself. But God's self-manifestation comprises all good to his creatures. We are bound to love ourselves and our own interests just in proportion to the value of those interests. The monarch of a realm or the general of an army must be careful of his life, because the sacrifice of it may involve the loss of thousands of lives of soldiers or subjects. So God is the heart of the great system. Only by being tributary to the heart can the members be supplied with streams of [pg 401]holiness and happiness. And so for only one Being in the universe is it safe to live for himself. Man should not live for himself, because there is a higher end. But there is no higher end for God. “Only one being in the universe is excepted from the duty of subordination. Man must be subject to the ‘higher powers’ (Rom. 13:1). But there are no higher powers to God.” See Park, Discourses, 181-209.

Bismarck's motto: “Ohne Kaiser, kein Reich”—“Without an emperor, there can be no empire”—applies to God, as Von Moltke's motto: “Erst wägen, dann wagen”—“First weigh, then dare”—applies to man. Edwards, Works, 2:215—“Selfishness is no otherwise vicious or unbecoming than as one is less than a multitude. The public weal is of greater value than his particular interest. It is fit and suitable that God should value himself infinitely more than his creatures.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:3—“The single and peculiar life is bound With all the strength and armor of the mind To keep itself from noyance; but much more That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests The lives of many. The cease of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel Fixed on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis'd and adjoined; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone did the king sigh, But with a general groan.”

(e) God's glory is the end which in a right moral system is proposed to creatures. This must therefore be the end which he in whose image they are made proposes to himself. He who constitutes the centre and end of all his creatures must find his centre and end in himself. This principle of moral philosophy, and the conclusion drawn from it, are both explicitly and implicitly taught in Scripture.

The beginning of all religion is the choosing of God's end as our end—the giving up of our preference of happiness, and the entrance upon a life devoted to God. That happiness is not the ground of moral obligation, is plain from the fact that there is no happiness in seeking happiness. That the holiness of God is the ground of moral obligation, is plain from the fact that the search after holiness is not only successful in itself, but brings happiness also in its train. Archbishop Leighton, Works, 695—“It is a wonderful instance of wisdom and goodness that God has so connected his own glory with our happiness, that we cannot properly intend the one, but that the other must follow as a matter of course, and our own felicity is at last resolved into his eternal glory.” That God will certainly secure the end for which he created, his own glory, and that his end is our end, is the true source of comfort in affliction, of strength in labor, of encouragement in prayer. See Psalm 25:11—“For thy name's sake.... Pardon mine iniquity, for it is great”; 115:1—“Not unto us, O Jehovah, not unto us, But unto thy name give glory”; Mat. 6:33—“Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you”; 1 Cor. 10:31—“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God”; 1 Pet. 2:9—“ye are an elect race ... that ye may show forth the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light”; 4:11—speaking, ministering, “that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, whose is the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen.” On the whole subject, see Edwards, Works, 2:193-257; Janet, Final Causes, 443-455; Princeton Theol. Essays, 2:15-32; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 358-362.

It is a duty to make the most of ourselves, but only for God's sake. Jer. 45:5—“seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not!” But it is nowhere forbidden us to seek great things for God. Rather we are to “desire earnestly the greater gifts” (1 Cor. 12:31). Self-realization as well as self-expression is native to humanity. Kant: “Man, and with him every rational creature, is an end in himself.” But this seeking of his own good is to be subordinated to the higher motive of God's glory. The difference between the regenerate and the unregenerate may consist wholly in motive. The latter lives for self, the former for God. Illustrate by the young man in Yale College who began to learn his lessons for God instead of for self, leaving his salvation in Christ's hands. God requires self-renunciation, taking up the cross, and following Christ, because the first need of the sinner is to change his centre. To be self-centered is to be a savage. The struggle for the life of others is better. But there is something higher still. Life has dignity according to the worth of the object we install in place of self. Follow Christ, make God the center of your life,—so shall you achieve the best; see Colestock, Changing Viewpoint, 113-123.

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George A. Gordon, The New Epoch for Faith, 11-13—“The ultimate view of the universe is the religious view. Its worth is ultimately worth for the supreme Being. Here is the note of permanent value in Edwards's great essay on The End of Creation. The final value of creation is its value for God.... Men are men in and through society—here is the truth which Aristotle teaches—but Aristotle fails to see that society attains its end only in and through God.” Hovey, Studies, 65—“To manifest the glory or perfection of God is therefore the chief end of our existence. To live in such a manner that his life is reflected in ours; that his character shall reappear, at least faintly, in ours; that his holiness and love shall be recognized and declared by us, is to do that for which we are made. And so, in requiring us to glorify himself, God simply requires us to do what is absolutely right, and what is at the same time indispensable to our highest welfare. Any lower aim could not have been placed before us, without making us content with a character unlike that of the First Good and the First Fair.” See statement and criticism of Edwards's view in Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 227-238.

VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.

1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.

Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:

(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.

(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.

The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured. Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation [the irrational creation] groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”; 23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning. 2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.” Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.” John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.

It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole, “happiness decidedly prevails.” Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.” Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203 sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.” Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.” Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between [pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn: “Suffering is God's protest against sin.”

Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson: “Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.” William James: “Our dogs are in our human life, but not of it. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.” The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.

This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of “anticipative consequences,” and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.” Perowne refers Ps. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation; cf. Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”; Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”

Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana: “It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!” Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that of Rom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”

Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?” Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.” And Sir Henry Taylor's words: “Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal: “Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.” The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.

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2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.

No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.

As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.

But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin's Quia voluit is not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”

Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—see Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”; 1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”

For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.” But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say in Is. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”

The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten). “All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.” But we might retort: “Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.” See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God: Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.” Homer: “There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.” Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron: “Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.” But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.

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G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.” Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought, ‘The inmost life of all things is one,’ with the Hindoo insight, ‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’ To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”

Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress “represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.” Strauss: “If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book: “Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”

On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.” Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.

3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.

Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christ for us on the Cross and Christ in us by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.

Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress. Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”; 8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?” Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”; Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.” See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.

G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.” Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth, [pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible “Let the day perish wherein I was born” (3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit. Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.” Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.

Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all things aregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things are working together for good. Reverie in Asolando: ‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’ Balaustion's Adventure: ‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’ Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos: ‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’ Pippa Passes: ‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’ But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul: ‘All's love, but all's law.’ Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.” Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him: “Do you believe in a devil now?” But Emerson replied: “I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.” On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.

Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered: “I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.” The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as “a depraved little insect.” She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying: “There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!” He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.” On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265 sq.

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.” On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows: “The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.” He should [pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.

Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?” Live spells Evil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”

Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?” Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution: “When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.” F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.” A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil: “(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”

4. To Providence and Redemption.

Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.

But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.

The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheistic dicta of Fichte: “The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel: “God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss: “Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”

Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing an other which is not an other. The creation is his, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and love another. But in loving this other, God is only loving himself.” We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.

[pg 408]

Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents the confounding of God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents the separation of God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.” See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.

5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.

We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.

(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.

Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.” Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation: Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time [lit. “at the end of days”] it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”; Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark; Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”; cf. Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”; Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf. verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed: Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”

The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce: “Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.” But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words: “A day of rest.” The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called “the day of rest for the heart,” but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.

S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week: “Subattu in Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.” Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.” We [pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.

(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.

Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need. Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made [by God] for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day. Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.

Origen, in Homily 23 on Numbers (Migne, II:358): “Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.” Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether “the Lord's day” was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley: “In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”

According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said: “Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.” But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is “the core of our civilization.” Charles Sumner: “If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.” Oliver Wendell Holmes: “He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.” In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.

(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.

No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day [pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to “a Sabbath rest” that “remaineth,” and to “another day” taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles: “On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”

The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon “the first day of the week” (Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became “the Lord's day” (Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. on Ps. 92 (Migne, V:1191, C): “Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”

Justin Martyr, First Apology: “On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.” This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was “received up” only after “he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen” (Acts 1:2).

The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. on Gen. 2: “If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.” (Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”; Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath. Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?

Section II.—Preservation.

I. Definition of Preservation.

Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is [pg 411] our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.

In explanation we remark:

(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.

(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.

(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.

Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... The rest of God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.” Nor is God “the soul of the universe.” This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.

It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”

Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”

II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.

1. From Scripture.

In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its [pg 412] powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.

Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”; Job 7:20—“O thou watcher [marg. “preserver”] of men!”; Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”; 104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.” See Perowne on Ps. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.” Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.” Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”; Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”; Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.” John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compare Gen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” God is the upholder of physical life; see Ps. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.” God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see 1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive” (ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course. Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. In Ps. 104:26—“There go the ships,” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism: “There is leviathan” would indicate, and that by “ships” are meant “floaters” like the nautilus, which is a “little ship.” The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.