07 Dec




















In the wake of these great men the universal Church steadily followed. The Fourth Lateran Council declared that God created everything out of nothing; and at the present hour the vast majority of the faithful--whether Catholic or Protestant--are taught the same doctrine; on this point the syllabus of Pius IX and the Westminster Catechism fully agree.(3) (3) For Tertullian, see Tertullian against Hermogenes, chaps. xx and xxii; for St. Augustine regarding "creation from nothing," see the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, lib, i, cap. vi; for St. Ambrose, see the Hexameron, lib, i, cap iv; for the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, and the view received in the Church to-day, see the article Creation in Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary. Having thus disposed of the manner and matter of creation, the next subject taken up by theologians was the TIME required for the great work. Here came a difficulty. The first of the two accounts given in Genesis extended the creative operation through six days, each of an evening and a morning, with much explicit detail regarding the progress made in each. But the second account spoke of "THE DAY" in which "the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." The explicitness of the first account and its naturalness to the minds of the great mass of early theologians gave it at first a decided advantage; but Jewish thinkers, like Philo, and Christian thinkers, like Origen, forming higher conceptions of the Creator and his work, were not content with this, and by them was launched upon the troubled sea of Christian theology the idea that the creation was instantaneous, this idea being strengthened not only by the second of the Genesis legends, but by the great text, "He spake, and

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