ept of time with the motion of the
spheres. Thus time was created with the celestial world, and timelessness
remained an attribute of the uncreated God.(438) Such attempts at
harmonization prove the one point of importance to us,--which, indeed, was
frankly stated by Maimonides,--that we cannot accept literally the Biblical
account of the creation.

The modern world has been lifted bodily out of the Babylonian and
so-called Ptolemaic world, with its narrow horizon, through the labors of
such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lyall, and Darwin. We live in a
world immeasurable in terms of either space or time, a world where
evolution works through eons of time and an infinite number of stages.
Such a world gives rise to concepts of the working of God in nature
totally different from those of the seers and sages of former generations,
ideas of which those thinkers could not even dream. To the mind of the
modern scientist the entire cosmic life, extending over countless millions
of years, forming starry worlds without end, is moved by energy arising
within. It is a continuous flow of existence, a process of formation and
re-formation, which can have no beginning and no end. How is this
evolutionist view to be reconciled with the belief in a divine act of
creation? This is the problem which modern theology has set itself,
perhaps the greatest which it must solve.

Ultimately, however, the problem is no more difficult now than it was to
the first man who pondered over the beginnings of life in the childhood of
the world. The same answer fits both modes of thought, with only a
different process of reasoning. Whether we count the world's creation by
days or by millions of years, the truth of the first verse of Genesis
remains: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In our
theories the whole complicated world-process is but the working out of
simple laws. This leads back as swiftly and far more surely than did the
primitive cosmology to an omnipotent and omniscient creative Power,
defining at the very outset the aim of the stupendous whole, and carrying
its comprehensive plan into reality, step by step. We who are the products
of time cannot help applying the relation of time to the work of the
Creator; time is so interwoven with our being that a modern evolutionist,
Bergson, considers it the fundamental element of reality. Thus it is
natural that we should think of God as setting the first atoms and forces