Again, that he may be fully understood (for we would not, knowingly, misrepresent), we quote from the following page :
"
It is enough for us to learn, without doing any violence to the
language of the account, that the production of the vegetable and
animal races are set forth as having been originally a ψίσις, or
growth — a growth out of the earth, and by and through the earth; in
other words, a nature with its laws, stages, successions, and
developments.
"
There was a previous nature in the earth, whether it had been in
operation for twenty-four hours, or twenty-four thousand years. We may
compare this to a stream flowing on and having its regular current of
law or regulated succession of cause and effect. Into this stream, we
may say, there was dropped a new power, supernatural, yet not
contra-natural, or unnatural, varying the old flow and raising it to a
higher law and a higher energy, yet still in harmony with it. New
causations, or new modifications of causation, arise; and, after the
successions and steps required, be they longer or shorter, a world of
vegetation is the result of this chain of causation in the one period,
and through an analogous if not similar process, an animal creation
arose in another. Our mode of argument may be denounced as
metaphysical, and yet it is but the analysis of a common thought which
every man, who examines his own mind, will find that he has in
connection with the words nature, growth, etc.; or the terms
that, in all languages, grow out of roots corresponding to those that
are here employed in this plain narrative of the Bible."
In
the following chapter, he arrives at the profounder conclusion, which
we did not discuss in our former review, that spiritual entities
preceded material forms. The reader will find the views, at large, in
the work; we cite only two or three passages.
Speaking of the principle sustained, he says : —
"
It is neither more nor less than the essential act of faith, as Paul
sets it forth, Heb. 11: 3, in which we believe that "the worlds (τους αιώνας, the icons or ages) were brought out, in order, by the word of God ; so that the things that are seen were made [or generated] from things that do not appear" (ί/c μη φαινομένων). That is, the outward or phenomenal entities were generated born or (yeyovhai) from the invisible, immaterial, vital powers, principles, laws, σπερματικοί λόγοι, spermatic
words or ideas, call them what we will, which are, themselves, the
first and immediate creations of the Divine "Word going forth, before
any new agency of nature, whether the universal or any particular
nature " * (p. 224).
1 We leave it to others to criticize the liberty taken with the Greek version in transposing e« and μη in the phrase " ck μη φαινομένων."
