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The Fundamentals if they allow them to go out of their specific provinces without protest. Their assumptions ought to be watched with the ut- most vigilance and jealousy. (See Gladstone, “The Impreg- nable Rock of Holy Scripture,” pp. 62-83.) But to resume. The Book of Genesis is the foundation on which the superstructure of the Scriptures rests. The foundation of the foundation is the first three chapters, which form in themselves a complete monograph of revelation. And of this final substructure the first three verses of the first chapter are the foundation. In the first verse of Genesis in words of supernatural gran- deur, we have a revelation of God as the first cause, the Crea- tor of the universe, the world and man. The glorious Being of God comes forth without explanation, and without apology. I t is a revelation of the one, personal, living, God. There is in the ancient philosophic cosmogony no trace of the idea of such a Being, still less of such a Creator, for all other systems began and ended with pantheistic, materialistic, or hylozoistic conceptions. The Divine Word stands unique in declaring the absolute idea of the living God, without attempt at demonstration. The spirituality, infinity, omnipotence, sanc- tity of the Divine Being, all in germ lie. here. Nay more. The later and more fully revealed doctrine of the unity of God in the Trinity may be said to lie here in germ also, and the last and deepest revelation to be involved in first and foremost. The fact of God in the first of Genesis is not given as a deduction o f reason or a philosophic generalization. It is a revelation. It is a revelation of that primary truth which is received by the universal human mind as a truth that needs no proof, and is incapable of it, but which being received, is verified to the intelligent mind by an irresistible force not only with ontological and cosmological, but with teleological and moral arguments. Here we have in this first verse of Genesis, not only a postulate apart from Revelation, but three great truths which have constituted the glory of our religion.
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