Creaze

“ With the introduction of man into the scene of existence, creation, I repeat, seems to have ceased. What is it that now takes its place, and performs its work? During the previous dynasties, all elevation in the scale was an effect simply of creation. Nature lay dead in a waste theatre of rock, vapor, and sea, in which the insensate laws, chemical; mechanical, and electric, carried on their blind, unintelligent processes: the creative fiat went forth; and, amid waters that straightway teemed with life in its lower forms, vegetable and animal, the dynasty of the fish was introduced. ”

“ Here, I, indeed, behold nature fresh from the bosom of creation, unchanged by man, and stamped with the same impress she originally bore! Here I behold God's design when He formed this tropical land, and left its culture and improvement to the agency of man! The Creator's gift as yet neglected by the creature; and yet the time may be confidently looked for when the axe shall level the forest, and the plough turn the ground. ”

“ I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. ”

“ Creation, at every step we tread, seems ever varied and new; the grass which springs up under our feet, flowers mingling their infinite diversity of tints, the dewdrops which refresh them and sparkle amongst them like diamonds, the reviving perfumes we breathe, the millions on millions of trees, shrubs, and flowers,—and none of these, not even a blade of grass, or herb, or leaf, atoms as they appear, could be useful, or please, unless created by Infinite Wisdom, from whom they receive form, verdure, and life."
Rosilia paused ”

“ Looking only at nature, or looking at it only with the lights of experience and reason, I see not how it is possible to avoid one of these two theories, the development of all organic existence out of gaseous elements, or the eternity of matter in its present forms.
Creation, however, solves the dilemma. I have, in my postulates, begged the fact of creation, and I shall not, therefore, attempt to prove it. Creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty Power, gives us the commencing point, which we in vain seek in nature. But what is creation? ”

“ The Creator, a grand and terrific figure, ancient and winged, like some monument of an Oriental imagination, clothed about the body with flowing drapery, his hair streaming behind, with all the agony of creation upon his face, is forming Adam, who lies prostrate below him, out of the four elements. ”

“ Creation's precious jewel, heart and eye
Of all that is—disrealmed and headlong cast,
And, prone in whirling fate and unplumbed night,
Fall with a world unhinged? because His will,
Who works in awful secrecy of change,
Conceives, creates, but knows not to preserve? ”

“ We, my dear, are in ourselves evidence of a design in creation. For we are the last word of creation. It has taken all the efforts, all the birthpangs of all the ages to evolve—you and me. [18] And, being evolved, we are intellectually so perfectly and so divinely fashioned to dovetail together. And, physically too, are we not divinely meant the one for the other? ”

“ The Creation is, as it were, a Poem in the Sublime: Every Species of created Beings is a Stanza, and every individual Creature, a Verse in it, as a certain learned Divine expresses it. Creation here is not stiled εργον, which is a Work of manual Labor, but ποιημα [333] , a Work of Skill; not so much the Operation of the Hand, as of the Head and Heart: No Creature so small and mean, but glitters with a Beam of divine Skill. ”

“ Thus does regeneration become a work of orderly progress and successive growth. Guided by the Lord, it is brought forward under his never ceasing energies. It is begun in chaos and ends in the glorious likeness of Divinity. This, and manifold more, the parable of the Creation sets forth, in its beautiful symbols, concerning the beginnings of the soul, its progress through the stages of its advancing career, the nature of each successive state, and the quality of its celestial outcomes. ”

“ We have learned that the narrative is an allegory of the regeneration of the human mind. The heaven and the earth were found to be symbols of the two minds of man, or if you prefer the expression, the two regions of his mind, its heavenly and its earthly, or in other words, its spiritual and its natural. Creation symbolizes the regeneration, that is the rebirth, or new creation of the spiritual nature. ”

“ The old view of creation, which represented it as single and instantaneous, made each creature or each organ seem like a mere piece of molded mechanism, with no history, no puzzle, and no recognizable relation to its like elsewhere. But the new view, which represents creation as continuous, progressive, and regular, teaches lis to see in every species or every structure a result of previous causes, an adaptation to preexisting needs. ”

“ Look over the whole Creation, and you shall see that the Band or Cement that holds together all the Parts of this great and glorious Fabric is Gratitude, or something like it: you may observe it in all the Elements, for does not the Air feed the Flame? and does not the Flame at the same time warm and enlighten the Air? Is not the Sea always sending forth, as well as taking in? And does not the Earth quit scores with all the Elements, in the noble Fruits and Productions that issue from it? ”

“ In the midst of these marks of a creative energy recently active, while the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, I look back for the era of this creation not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough—a morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. ”

“ The creation is as the bursting bubble, or foam and froth of the mantling ocean of omnipotence; it appears as a wood and wilderness in the clouded face of the firmament, but disappears in the clear vacuous atmosphere of the Divine Mind; and there is no speck nor spot of creation in the infinite ocean of the Supreme Intellect. ”

“ This old creation, with its temporary mediatorial constitution, then, is but a grand system of means, elementary of a still grander and inconceivably more magnificent creation, which will be of an unchangeable and eternal constitution. The old Mosaic physical heavens and earth are to the new creation as the accumulated materials of a building are to the edifice about to be built: and hold the same relation to the new heavens, as the natural system does to the spiritual. ”

“ The commencement, as a fact, I must learn from testimony; I have no means whatever of inferring it from phenomena.
Permit me, therefore, to repeat, as having been proved, these two propositions:—
All organic nature moves in a circle.
Creation is a violent irruption into the circle of nature. ”

“ For all the members of creation form, as it were, the links of one great chain, and were but one removed, though it might perchance be only some poor weed or lowly moss, yet might it cause the whole to be annihilated ”

“ Thus we see that the terms "creation," and "to create," have, in Scripture phraseology, a spiritual meaning. This renewal of the heart, this cleansing of the spirit, this becoming a new man, was termed by our Lord, the rebirth or what is the same, regeneration. We have been created or born naturally; we are to be created or born spiritually. Until this second or spiritual birth takes place no man has fulfilled his destiny. We have been created natural beings to live on the earth, we are to be created spiritual beings to live there unto the Lord. ”

“ And here we have (as I think will be seen one day) the whole rationale of Creation—we have the conception which brings into line the phenomena of the visible and material world and their genesis, with the genesis of thoughts in our own minds, and their passage into visibility and expression; we have the conception which unites the mental and material, and which makes the whole Creation luminous with meaning. ”

“ And what is the spiritual world, but an outbirth or derivation from the Divine Mind? Creation is, properly speaking, production,—a sending forth, as it were, by the Infinite God, of indefinitely various forms and existences from Himself. ”

“ What the difference between the part in creation of the Father and the part of the Son may be, who can understand?—but perhaps we may one day come to see into it a little; for I dare hope that, through our willed sonship, we shall come far nearer ourselves to creating. The word creation applied to the loftiest success of human genius, seems to me a mockery of humanity, itself in process of creation. ”

“ They stand as the models of art and intellect—each unapproached—solitary and beautiful,—the human eye contemplates them with the chaste wonder of Creation's daughter—Eve, when from the banks of Eden's limpid waters, she first gazed upon the mirrored image of herself! ”

“ An architect who can make his own bricks and other building material, can surely build what he desires out of these materials. Common sense tells us that, if the Creator really created life in the beginning, He did not stop with a few specks of protoplasm here and there over the earth. ”

“ Creation precedes Providence, not merely in the order of sequence, but what is usually called intellectual and physical grandeur. So in genius and taste, Poetry transcends prose. In the work of Creation the Almighty broke the awful stillness of Eternity, by His first creative fiat, and angels were the first-born of God. They took their thrones in the galleries of the universe, and in silent contemplation sat. ”

“ Regeneration then, being progressive, not a thing of sudden attainment, but, like a tree, of slow growth, the six days of creation represent the six general states of life through which each one has to pass before he becomes perfect in the sight of God. The exact distinction between these different stages of spiritual progress we will understand better as we advance in the consideration of the six days of creation. ”

“ Lastly, he made man. Turning the clay of the Nile upon his wheel, he fashioned the last and greatest of created things, and having “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” made man the cornerstone of the fabric of creation. ”

“ The Lord never despises beginnings. But He puts them at their true worth, and values them only as beginnings.
Therefore, in this account of creation as a parable of regeneration, what the mind brings forth is still expressed under the similitude of what the earth brings forth. This third stage of regeneration is described by the springing forth of vegetation, first, in its lower forms of grass, then in the higher forms of the herb yielding seed, and at last in the highest form of the fruit tree yielding fruit. ”

“ Creation in simultaneous order is represented by conceiving each plane in the diagrams carried completely around the Creator as a center, and all forming not an ascent, but one plane. This conception helps in conceiving how creation is sustained by interiors and intermediates being in ultimates, and acting as one with them. Activity passes from the Creator through the successive planes of the spiritual world to the sun, and thence, through the successive degrees in nature to the rock, which is the ultimate plane of reaction. ”

“ Natural selection being supplemented by Divine selection, the cloud over the tabernacle lifts and we can see to proceed on our journey. The mystery of creation is largely dispelled, for then it is realized how nature has selected so wisely, why she has never made a mistake, and why she never can err. ”

“ The elements of which this terra firma is composed, are every moment either composing or decomposing. They commence to organize or to compose, and continue to grow until they arrive at their zenith of perfection, and then they begin to decompose. ”

“ How admirably, from age to age, do the organic as well as the inorganic structures of the geological narrative illustrate the truth of these remarks, where the manifestations of design are as numerous as the objects of creation, and as legible as if God had written their import by his own finger? ”

“ How much, again, in all this last and highest evolution of creative might, is the conclusion confirmed, and arrived at from so many converging lines, that the sacred record was intended to embody an actual account of the creation of our globe, in its various primordial arrangements as well as in all its consecutive events, until its majestic close in the human epoch? ”

“ All these wonderful under-currents and cross-currents, rises and falls, appearances and disappearances, nevertheless all work together till the whole earth is peopled with the forms, designed in the beginning by the Heavenly Creator.
No account of Creation can be other than wonderful and mysterious; nor can the mystery of the Divine act be explained in language other than that of analogy.
We can speak without mystery of a human architect conceiving a design in his mind ”

“ Offer to it the lightest suggestion, and there springs forth from that abyss a figure corresponding, or a dozen figures, or a whole procession! The mere delight of creation calls them forth. Could anything be more wonderful? What a strange glimpse it gives us of the possibilities of Creation. ”