region of the earth it will empty its treasury of genial and prolific rain. He who should affirm any one of these things would justly be termed a madman; and yet each is less repugnant to reason than that matter should create itself, it being a higher act of power and wisdom to create, than to dispose, regulate, or organize that which is already created. Our first notion of Deity therefore is INTELLIGENCE IN ACTION; and the action is that of CREATING; and as we have no experience of human Intelligence creating or causing "things which are seen" to be made of "things which do not appear," we infer, that creation must be the action of an Intelligence that is divine. If "the heavens and the earth were created in the beginning," then the Being who created them was GOD!

But this sacred Name of GOD implies a Mystery, though it is employed in the statement of a fact. It implies a plurality of Persons, Agents, or Divine Intelli

gences; while yet the word denoting action-the word "created"-expresses unity or singleness: the contrivance of One wisdom, the execution of One purpose, the exertion of One Power, the operation of One Mind, the creation of One GOD. This Mystery, however, though "hidden from ages and generations," hath been fully revealed to us in the word of Inspiration by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. "Go ye," He said to His apostles, "and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Here then are THREE Divine Persons or Intelligences, and yet but ONE Name. The God, therefore, that "in the beginning created the Heavens and the Earth," was the same God in whose Name we have been baptized into the Church; and thus we are taught, that if the Person who first creates must be necessarily God; and if the Person in whose Name we are baptized, as the sign

of a new creation, must be necessarily God; then in the beginning Heaven and Earth were created by GOD THE FATHER, and by GOD THE SON, and by GOD THE HOLY GHOST-and yet by ONE GOD. And this Mystery-of Three in One, which is called a Trinity in Unity; and of One in Three, which is called a Unity in Trinity;—is that of which the Church speaks in her prayer, blessing God, who hath “given unto His servants grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity;"* and beseeching Him to "keep them steadfast in this faith," as being "the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved."†

While, however, the Mystery of the first or natural creation is thus explained by the Mystery of Baptism, which is the

* Collect for Trinity Sunday.
+ Creed of St. Athanasius.

second or spiritual creation, so that we derive hence a full and clear understanding Who were the "God that created the heavens and the earth;"-the Gospel, uttering "things which had been kept secret from the foundation of the world," teaches the same momentous truth not only by necessary inference, but by express and explicit affirmation. One of the four Evangelists;-that one, who looked forward with the fulness of prophetic vision to the end-looked backward also, in Divine inspiration, to the beginning, the era, as we have seen, from which all human knowledge must date -and declared, that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. Him all things were made, and without Him was not anything made that was made." And though we cannot attempt to explain this term "WORD," which implies not so much Intelligence in the quality or abstract, as Intelligence in

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the operation and exercise, yet the personal application of it to the Son in whose name we are baptized is placed beyond all possibility of rational doubt. "The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we beheld His glory—the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father."* And again, "God, who in time past spake unto the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things by whom also he made the worlds." And, in another place concerning the Son, "He is before all things, and by Him all things consist;" while here, if further proof were needed, we might add the remarkable fact, that the Word being made flesh, and dwelling among us, exercised what was never known before nor since, even the power of creation; and that palpably and publicly, in the sight of man. He

*John i. 14.