Calvinism logically requires the separation of Church and State: though Calvin did not see this, the Calvinist Roger Williams did. Calvinism logically requires a republican form of government: Calvin introduced laymen into the government of the church, and the same principle requires civil liberty as its correlate. Calvinism holds to individualism and the direct responsibility of the individual to God. In the Netherlands, in Scotland, in England, in America, Calvinism has powerfully influenced the development of civil liberty. Ranke: "John Calvin was virtually the founder of America." Motley: "To the Calvinists more than to any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England and America are due." John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England: "Perhaps not one of the mediaval popes was more despotic than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the promulgation of his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind have taken towards personal freedom. . . . It was a religion fit to inspire men who were to be called to fight for freedom, whether in the marshes of the Netherlands or on the moors of Scotland."

Esop, when asked what was the occupation of Zeus, replied: "To humble the exalted and to exalt the humble." "I accept the universe," said Margaret Fuller. Some one reported this remark to Thomas Carlyle. “Gad! she'd better!" he replied. Dr. John Watson (Ian McLaren): "The greatest reinforcement religion could have in our time would be a return to the ancient belief in the sovereignty of God." Whittier : "All is of God that is and is to be, And God is good. Let this suffice us still Resting in childlike trust upon his will Who moves to his great ends unthwarted by the ill." Every true minister preaches Arminianism and prays Calvinism. This means simply that there is more, in God's love and in God's purposes, than man can state or comprehend. Beecher called Spurgeon a camel with one hump - Calvinism. Spurgeon called Beecher a camel without any hump: "He does not know what he believes, and you never know where to find him."

Arminians sing: "Other refuge have I none; Hangs my helpless soul on thee "; yet John Wesley wrote to the Calvinist Toplady, the author of the hymn: "Your God is my devil." Calvinists replied that it was better to have the throne of the universe vacant than to have it filled by such a pitiful nonentity as the Arminians worshiped. It was said of Lord Byron that all his life he believed in Calvinism, and hated it. Oliver Wendell Holmes similarly, in all his novels except Elsie Venner, makes the orthodox thinblooded and weakkneed, while his heretics are all strong in body. Dale, Ephesians, 52-"Of the two extremes, the suppression of man which was the offence of Calvinism, and the suppression of God which was the offence against which Calvinism so fiercely protested, the fault and error of Calvinism was the nobler and grander. . . . The most heroic forms of human courage, strength and righteousness have been found in men who in their theology seemed to deny the possibility of human virtue and made the will of God the only real force in the universe."

2. True method of preaching the doctrine.

(a) We should most carefully avoid exaggeration or unnecessarily obnoxious statement. (b) We should emphasize the fact that the decrees are not grounded in arbitrary will, but in infinite wisdom. (e) We should make it plain that whatever God does or will do, he must from eternity have purposed to do. (d) We should illustrate the doctrine so far as possible by instances of completeness and far-sightedness in human plans of great enterprises. (c) We may then make extended application of the truth to the encouragement of the Christian and the admonition of the unbeliever. For illustrations of foresight, instance Louis Napoleon's planning the Suez Canal, and declaring his policy as Emperor, long before he ascended the throne of France. For instances of practical treatment of the theme în preaching, see Bushnell, Sermon on Every Man's Life a Plan of God, in Sermons for the New Life; Nehemiah Adams, Evenings with the Doctrines, 243; Spurgeon's Sermon on Ps. 44: 3-"Because thou hadst a favor unto them." Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra: "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hand Who saith 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: See all nor be afraid!''' Shakespeare, King Lear, 1:2-"This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by

heavenly compulsion, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on; an admirable evasion of man to lay his disposition to the charge of a star!" All's Well: "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull." Julius Cæsar, 1:2-"Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY.

VOLUME II.

CHAPTER IV.

THE WORKS OF GOD; OR THE EXECUTION OF THE DECREES.

SECTION 1.-CREATION.

I. DEFINITION OF CREATION.

By creation we mean that free act of the triune God by which in the beginning for his own glory he made, without the use of preëxisting materials, the whole visible and invisible universe.

Creation is designed origination, by a transcendent and personal God, of that which itself is not God. The universe is related to God as our own volitions are related to ourselves. They are not ourselves, and we are greater than they. Creation is not simply the idea of God, or even the plan of God, but it is the idea externalized, the plan executed; in other words, it implies an exercise, not only of intellect, but also of will, and this will is not an instinctive and unconscious will, but a will that is personal and free. Such exercise of will seems to involve, not self-development, but self-limitation, on the part of God; the transformation of energy into force, and so a beginning of time, with its finite successions. But, whatever the relation of creation to time, creation makes the universe wholly dependent upon God, as its originator.

F. H. Johnson, in Andover Rev., March, 1891:280, and What is Reality, 285-" Creation is designed origination. . . . Men never could have thought of God as the Creator of the world, were it not that they had first known themselves as creators." We agree with the doctrine of Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause. Man creates ideas and volitions, without use of preëxisting material. He also indirectly, through these ideas and volitions, creates brain-modifications. This creation, as Johnson has shown, is without hands, yet elaborate, selective, progressive. Schopenhauer: "Matter is nothing more than causation; its true being is its action."

Prof. C. L. Herrick, Denison Quarterly, 1896:248, and Psychological Review, March, 1899, advocates what he calls dynamism, which he regards as the only alternative to a materialistic dualism which posits matter, and a God above and distinct from matter. He claims that the predicate of reality can apply only to energy. To speak of energy as residing in something is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guest ad infinitum. "Force," he says, "is energy under resistance, or self-limited energy, for all parts of the universe are derived from the energy. Energy manifesting itself under self-conditioning or differential forms is force. The change of pure energy into force is creation -the introduction of resistance. The progressive complication of this interference is evolution - a form of orderly resolution of energy. Substance is pure spontaneous energy. God's substance is his energy the infinite and inexhaustible store of spontaneity which makes up his being. The form which self-limitation

impresses upon substance, in revealing it in force, is not God, because it no longer possesses the attributes of spontaneity and universality, though it emanates from him. When we speak of energy as self-limited, we simply imply that spontaneity is intelligent. The sum of God's acts is his being. There is no causa posterior or extranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak of absolute, but not of infinite or immutable, substance. The Universe is but the partial expression of an infinite God."

Our view of creation is so nearly that of Lotze, that we here condense Ten Broeke's statement of his philosophy: "Things are concreted laws of action. If the idea of being must include permanence as well as activity, we must say that only the personal truly is. All else is flow and process. We can interpret ontology only from the side of personality. Possibility of interaction requires the dependence of the mutually related many of the system upon an all-embracing, coördinating One. The finite is a mode or phenomenon of the One Being. Mere things are only modes of energizing of the One. Self-conscious personalities are created, posited, and depend on the One in a different way. Interaction of things is immanent action of the One, which the perceiving mind interprets as causal. Real interaction is possible only between the Infinite and the created finite, i. e., self-conscious persons. The finite is not a part of the Infinite, nor does it partly exhaust the stuff of the Infinite. The One, by an act of freedom, posits the many, and the many have their ground and unity in the Will and Thought of the One. Both the finite and the Infinite are free and intelligent.

"Space is not an extra-mental reality, sui generis, nor an order of relations among realities, but a form of dynamic appearance, the ground of which is the fixed orderly changes in reality. So time is the form of change, the subjective interpretation of timeless yet successive changes in reality. So far as God is the ground of the worldprocess, he is in time. So far as he transcends the world-process in his self-conscious personality, he is not in time. Motion too is the subjective interpretation of changes in things, which changes are determined by the demands of the world-system and the purpose being realized in it. Not atomism, but dynamism, is the truth. Physical phenomena are referable to the activity of the Infinite, which activity is given a substantive character because we think under the form of substance and attribute. Mechanism is compatible with teleology. Mechanism is universal and is necessary to all system. But it is limited by purpose, and by the possible appearance of any new law, force, or act of freedom.

"The soul is not a function of material activities, but is a true reality. The system is such that it can admit new factors, and the soul is one of these possible new factors. The soul is created as substantial reality, in contrast with other elements of the system, which are only phenomenal manifestations of the One Reality. The relation between soul and body is that of interaction between the soul and the universe, the body being that part of the universe which stands in closest relation with the soul (versus Bradley, who holds that 'body and soul alike are phenomenal arrangements, neither one of which has any title to fact which is not owned by the other'). Thought is a knowledge of reality. We must assume an adjustment between subject and object. This assumption is founded on the postulate of a morally perfect God." To Lotze, then, the only real creation is that of finite personalities, matter being only a mode of the divine activity. See Lotze, Microcosmos, and Philosophy of Religion. Bowne, in his Metaphysics and his Philosophy of Theism, is the best expositor of Lotze's system.

In further explanation of our definition we remark that

(a) Creation is not "production out of nothing," as if "nothing" were a substance out of which "something" could be formed.

We do not regard the doctrine of Creation as bound to the use of the phrase "creation out of nothing," and as standing or falling with it. The phrase is a philosophical one, for which we have no Scriptural warrant, and it is objectionable as intimating that "nothing" can itself be an object of thought and a source of being. The germ of truth intended to be conveyed in it can better be expressed in the phrase "without use of preexisting materials."

(b) Creation is not a fashioning of preëxisting materials, nor an emanation from the substance of Deity, but is a making of that to exist which once did not exist, either in form or substance.

There is nothing divine in creation but the origination of substance. Fashioning is competent to the creature also. Gassendi said to Descartes that God's creation, if he is the author of forms but not of substances, is only that of the tailor who clothes a man with his apparel. But substance is not necessarily material. We are to conceive of it rather after the analogy of our own ideas and volitions, and as a manifestation of spirit. Creation is not simply the thought of God, nor even the plan of God, but rather the externalization of that thought and the execution of that plan. Nature is "a great sheet let down from God out of heaven," and containing "nothing that is common or unclean;" but nature is not God nor a part of God, any more than our ideas and volitions are ourselves or a part of ourselves. Nature is a partial manifestation of God, but it does not exhaust God.

(c) Creation is not an instinctive or necessary process of the divine nature, but is the free act of a rational will, put forth for a definite and sufficient end.

Creation is different in kind from that eternal process of the divine nature in virtue of which we speak of generation and procession. The Son is begotten of the Father, and is of the same essence; the world is created without preëxisting material, is different from God, and is made by God. Begetting is a necessary act; creation is the act of God's free grace. Begetting is eternal, out of time; creation is in time, or with time. Studia Biblica, 4:148-" Creation is the voluntary limitation which God has imposed on himself.... It can only be regarded as a creation of free spirits. . . . It is a form of almighty power to submit to limitation. Creation is not a development of God, but a circumscription of God. . . . The world is not the expression of God, or an emanation from God, but rather his self-limitation."

(d) Creation is the act of the triune God, in the sense that all the persons of the Trinity, themselves uncreated, have a part in it- the Father as the originating, the Son as the mediating, the Spirit as the realizing cause.

That all of God's creative activity is exercised through Christ has been sufficiently proved in our treatment of the Trinity and of Christ's deity as an element of that doctrine (see pages 310, 311). We may here refer to the texts which have been previously considered, namely, John 1: 3, 4-"All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made. That which hath been made was life in him "; 1 Cor. 8:6-"one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things"; Col. 1:16-"all things have been created through him, and unto him "; Heb. 1:10-"Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands."

The work of the Holy Spirit seems to be that of completing, bringing to perfection. We can understand this only by remembering that our Christian knowledge and love are brought to their consummation by the Holy Spirit, and that he is also the principle of our natural self-consciousness, uniting subject and object in a subject-object. If matter is conceived of as a manifestation of spirit, after the idealistic philosophy, then the Holy Spirit may be regarded as the perfecting and realizing agent in the externalization of the divine ideas. While it was the Word though whom all things were made, the Holy Spirit was the author of life, order, and adornment. Creation is not a mere manufacturing,-it is a spiritual act.

John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:120-"The creation of the world cannot be by a Being who is external. Power presupposes an object on which it is exerted. 129 There is in the very nature of God a reason why he should reveal himself in, and communicate himself to, a world of finite existences, or fulfil and realize himself in the being and life of nature and man. His nature would not be what it is if such a world did not exist; something would be lacking to the completeness of the divine being without it. 144-Even with respect to human thought or intelligence, it is mind or spirit which creates the world. It is not a ready-made world on which we look; in perceiving our world we make it. 152-154-We make progress as we cease to think our own thoughts and become media of the universal Intelligence." While we accept Caird's idealistic interpretation of creation, we dissent from his intimation that creation is a necessity to God. The trinitarian being of God renders him sufficient to himself, even without creation. Yet those very trinitarian relations throw light upon the method of creation, since they disclose to us the order of all the divine activity. On the definition of Creation, see Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:11.