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Divine Providence; Or, the Three Cycles of Revelation
Divine Providence Or the Three Cycles of Revelation Author:George Croly Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. CREATION. THE FIRST DAY.—In The Beginning God CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH. The work of the first day was the summoning of the whole ma... more »terial universe into existence by the Divine will1. It has been idly surmised that this declaration applies only to our globe and itsatmosphere. But this sense is totally irrecon- cileable with the use of the word heaven in Scripture,—with the " thrones and dominations of heaven;" with the gathering together in Christ of " all things both in heaven and earth ;'' with the wisdom of God made known to " the principalities and powers in heaven;" with the " heaven and the heaven of heavens," declared to be incapable of bounding the grandeur of God. 1 This was the uniform doctrine of the earlier Greek philosophy. That " the earth had a beginning, and was capable of decay; that the stars were of the nature of fire, and that the soul was immortal," are among the chief tenets which Diogenes Laertius (Procemid) ascribes to the Egyptians, the teachers of the early sages of Greece. Pythagoras spent twenty-two years in Egypt. Cicero (De Natwa Deorum, 1. i. c. 25.) states the tenet of Thales to be, " Aquam esse initium rerum; Deum autem earn mentem, quce ex aqua cuncla jingeret." Thus the two great leaders of the Ionic and Italic schools coincide, and we have the testimony of Aristotle himself, that all the philosophers before him asserted the creation; ytvofitvav per ovv airavreg tivai ijiaaiv. (De Coelo, 1. i. c. 10.) The word N"13 is cited by Fagius from R. Nachman, as the only word in the Hebrew to express such a production out of nothing. The solar system has been as idly surmised to be the limit of the declaration. But the natural meaning of the word " heavens" is the whole region of the starry worlds. The text gives us no c...« less