self-existent material atoms, but by an
act--an act of will on the part of a Being designated by that name
which among all the Semitic peoples represented the ultimate, eternal,
inscrutable source of power and object of awe and veneration. With the
simplicity and child-like faith of an archaic age, the writer makes no
attempt to combat any objections or difficulties with which this great
fundamental truth may be assailed. He feels its axiomatic force as the
basis of all true religion and sound philosophy, and the ultimate fact
which must ever bar our further progress in the investigation of the
origin of things--the production from non-existence of the material
universe by the eternal self-existent God.

It did not concern him to know what might be the nature of that
unconditioned self-existence; for though, like our ideas of space and
time, incomprehensible, it must be assumed. It did not concern him to
know how matter and force subsist, or what may be the difference
between a material universe cognizable by our senses and the absolute
want of all the phenomena of such a universe or of whatever may be
their basis and essence. Such questions can never be answered, yet the
succession of these phenomena must have had a commencement somewhere
in time. How simple and how grand is his statement! How plain and yet
how profound its teachings!

It is evident that the writer grasps firmly the essence of the
question as to the beginning of things, and covers the whole ground
which advanced scientific or philosophical speculation can yet
traverse. That the universe must have had a beginning no one now needs
to be told. If any philosophical speculator ever truly held that there
has been an endless succession of phenomena, science has now
completely negatived the idea by showing us the beginning of all
things that we know in the present universe, and by establishing the
strongest probabilities that even its ultimate atoms could not have
been eternal. But the question remains--If there was a beginning, what
existed in that beginning? To this question many partial and imperfect
answers have been given, but our ancient record includes them all.

If any one should say, "In the beginning was nothing." Yes, says
Genesis, there was, it is true, nothing of the present matter and
arrangements of nature. Yet all was present potentially in the will of
the Creator.

"In the beginning were atoms," says another. Yes, says Genesis, but
they