virtue, must be chosen, must be an object of the will. What does not belong to the will, does not belong to the man; nor can the man be free to choose where there is no choice. In being born into the merely natural or animal state, there is no choice; but in passing out of it, there is; and the narrative of the first chapter of Genesis is only a description of the process by which, in the exercise of freedom, man was brought out of disorder into order, out of Chaos into Paradise.
"Volumes have been written on the connection of Geology with the Mosaic account of the Creation." True: but even if there were a material Chaos as well as a spiritual,[1] a Chaos of matter as well as of mind, which of the two is the proper subject of Theology? which the most worthy of the Word of God? Is it more important for the Church to know how the Almighty gave law and order to the material Creation, than how He gave and still gives them to the spiritual? how out of the sensuous mind He creates the intellectual; out of the intellectual He creates the voluntary; out of the animal He creates the image and likeness of God? If this be the subject matter of the first chapter of Genesis, then has the whole chapter, from beginning to end, relation to man—to the human animal in his infantine state, progressing gradually, according to Divine law and order, to his state of consummation as man, or an image and likeness of God.
This order of God, in proceeding from the lower
- ↑ See our Appendix.
