A Theory of Creation - 1845 Author:Francis Bowen 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: remote, though necessary, inferences and conclusions. To this end, it is requisite to separate, as far as possible, the doctrines themselves from the evidence ad... more »duced in support of them ; and to consider the former as a whole, before proceeding to discuss the cogency of the latter. The following may be taken as the most concise abstract that we can form of the history of the creation, according to this author. In the beginning — we use this word in a kind of preter- perfect sense — in the very beginning of things, immense portions of infinite space were filled with finely diffused nebulous matter, heated to an intensity that is altogether incon-. ceivable. The particles of this " fire mist," as it is appropriately called, were the true primordia rerwm, — the elements of the universe, — the principles of all the forms of inorganic matter and all organic things. At the outset, the Creator endowed these particles with certain qualities and capacities, and then stood aside from his work, as there was nothing farther for him to do. The subsequent progress of creation is only the successive development, upon mechanical and necessary principles, and as fast as proper occasions were offered, of these qualities thus made inherent in the primitive constitution of matter. The atoms thus marvellously endowed have gone on, without any further aid from Almighty power, to form suns, and astral systems, and planets with their satellites, and worlds tenanted by successive generations and races of vegetable and animal things. And this work of creation, or rather of development, is still in progress all around us, and in all its various stages, though in the portion most directly exposed to the observation of man it is far advanced towards perfection. Upon this earth, the unaided action of these ...« less