AXIOMS LYING AT THE FOUNDATION OF ALL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.

Out of nothing, nothing comes. Into nothing, nothing goes. These are foundation axioms underlying the entire system of Christian theology. The first looks backward, and the second looks forward. The first correllates with the saying, "So things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." The converse of this is the following: Things which are seen were made of unseen things; that is, the visible universe is the manifestation of the invisible. The real universe is the invisible. There is nothing that can not be thrown into the invisible. Even the diamond has been thrown into solution, and all solutions may be thrown into the invisible by heat. The question, What is matter? has puzzled the best minds of earth, and puzzled all, both infidels and Christians, as much as any other question. The visible, organic universe was created, but it was created out of the invisible. The invisible is eternal. There is an eternal world, and that is the invisible and real universe, without which the visible would not be, for of nothing, nothing comes. All matter is to be referred to antecedent substance—that which lies under and causes it to be. Substance, strictly speaking, lies in the invisible. Matter, properly speaking, is an effect, which is the visible manifestation of an unseen substance, and this is eternal.

God created the universe by means of eternal substance. He is the king eternal. The time never was when he was the king of nothing. It is said of Leibnitz that he thought inert matter insufficient to explain the phenomena of body, and had recourse to the entelechies of Aristotle, or the substantial forms of scholastic philosophy, conceiving of them as primitive forces, constituting the substance of matter, atoms of substance, but not of matter imperishable, but subject to transformation. This view of the atomic theory is two-fold: First, the atomic invisible, as the very term atom indicates, for it is from "ha temno," which means not cut—literally indivisible. You can't cut an atom chemically or otherwise, unless you are working upon that which is an atom in the loose and more modern sense of the term. You may reduce matter chemically to the invisible or underlying substance, but beyond this you can not cut? Can you run it into nothing? No. Into nothing nothing goes. Physicists are indebted to the oldest philosophers, who lived prior to Democrites, for the use of the term atom. Those oldest philosophers used the term to indicate something that was not matter, viz: immaterial substance. The term in its primary sense is applicable nowhere else.

The invisible world of substance is undoubtedly eternal. But those men who try to make this fact an argument against the existence of God are guilty of the most stupid nonsense and impudence, for, having allowed eternity not only to substance, but to material substance, they have no right in logic to deny eternity to life and mind; because it is as easy, and as rational, to conceive of the eternity of one thing known to exist as of another. But the idea that the visible world is eternal is in direct conflict with the facts of science, which establish beyond contradiction the mutable nature of all organized bodies. Aristotle, though a believer in the existence of God, did affirm the world's eternity, and therefore held that there never was any first male or female in the history of any animals whatsoever, but affirmed, on the contrary that one begat another infinitely, without any beginning. This thought was so repugnant to common sense that Aristotle himself seemed to be skeptical about it, admitting it to be a disputable thing. After affirming his notion he added, "If the world had a beginning, and if men were once earth-born, then must they have been, in all probability, either generated as worms, out of putrefaction, or else out of eggs." But the question comes up for an answer, From whence came the eggs?

Old Epicurus, after Aristotle, fancied that the first men and animals were formed in certain wombs or bags growing out of the earth, by a fortuitous concourse of dead atoms. Here we have the last home stretch of all physicists in their efforts to get rid of the Christian idea of creation; beyond it no modern infidel has traveled in his speculations, nor ever will.

But if men were formed from eggs growing out of the earth, or from bags, or from wombs created by a fortuitous concourse of dead atoms, by chance, why, the motion of atoms being as brisk and vigorous as ever, should we not expect the same thing to occur occasionally throughout all the ages?

Anaximander, however, concluded that men, because they require longer time than other animals to be hatched up, were at first generated in the bellies of fishes, and there nourished till they were able to defend and shift for themselves, and were then disgorged and cast upon dry land. So we are driven to the conclusion that there is nothing in the world too absurd for those men, both ancient and modern, to swallow down in their efforts to get rid of the notion of an intelligent creation by the hand of an intelligent creator.