matter into a quivering motion, just as now, beginning with the fourth day, it is brought into motion by the celestial luminaries, which have received this power from God.” (p. 423.)
It is necessary to repeat word for word and quickly to admit that God brings the light-bearing matter into motion by his immediate power, as though his problem did not consist in creating the world, but that the manner of the creation should agree with the Bible, rather than admit any departure from the words of Moses, which might harmonize his account with our concepts and knowledge of zoology, physics, and astronomy. The whole history of the creation in six days has to be understood word for word; thus the church commands. This is a dogma.
75. The moral application of the dogma. This application consists in the necessity of attending mass on Sunday and sanctifying the seventh day.
“76. The Lord our God, at the end of the creation, produced man, who belongs equally to the spiritual world, by his soul, and to the material world, by his body, and so he is, as it were, an abbreviation of the two worlds and has since antiquity justly been called the little world.” (p. 427.)
“God in the Holy Trinity said: Let us make man in our image, and after our likeness (Gen. i. 26). And God made the body of the first man, Adam, from the earth; breathed into his face the breath of life; brought Adam into Paradise; gave him for food, besides the other fruits of Paradise, the fruits of the tree of life; finally he took a rib from Adam during his sleep, and from it created the first woman, Eve—” (p. 427.)
77. The essence and meaning of Moses’ account of the origin of the first men, Adam and Eve. This account of Moses is to be taken in the sense of history, and not in the sense of an invention or myth, because Moses and the holy fathers understood it in a historical sense. On
