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The Fundamentals cient and modern conceptions of the eternity of matter. God only is eternal. One can well believe the story of a Japanese thinker who took up a strange book, and with wonderment read the first sentence: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” I t struck him that there was more philosophy of a theological character, and satisfying to the mind and soul, in that one sentence than in all the sacred books of the orient. That single sentence separates the Scriptures from the rest of human productions. The wisest philosophy of the an- cients, Platonic-Aristotelian or Gnostic, never reached the point that the world was created by God in the sense of absolute creation. In no cosmogony outside of the Bible is there a record of the idea that God created the heaven and the earth, as an effort of His will, and the fiat of His eternal, self-ex- istent Personality. E x nihilo nihil fit. The highest point reached by their philosophical speculations was a kind of atomic theory ; of cosmic atoms and germs and eggs possessed of some inexplicable forces of development, out of which the present cosmos was through long ages evolved. Matter was almost universally believed to have existed from eternity. The Bible teaches that the universe was not càusa sui or a mere passive evolution of His nature, nor a mere transition from one form of being to another, from non-being to being, but that it was a direct creation of the personal, living, work- ing God, who created all things out of nothing, but the fiat of His will, and the instrumentality of the eternal Logos. In glorious contrast to agnostic science with its lamentable creed, “I believe that behind and above and around the phenomena of matter and force remains the unsolved mystery of the uni- verse,” the Christian holds forth his triumphant solution, “I believe that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (John 1; 1-3 ; Heb. 1:1 ; Col. 1:16.) The first verse of the Bible is a proof that the Book is of God.
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