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(Rom. i. 20.) Thus, the apostle expressly teaches that all things were created by God, OUT OF HIMSELF, and not out of nothing; "For," says the apostle, "OUT OF HIM, (eg avrov,) and through Him, and for Him are all things." (Rom. xi. 36.) And again—" But to us there is one God, the Father, OUT OF WHOM, (eg ov) are all things, and we for Him.” (1 Cor. viii. 6.) In our common version the exactness and force of the original is lost by rendering "out of Him," and "out of whom," by "of Him," and "of whom," thus losing the correctness and power of the preposition eέ. Now, if God created all things, as the apostle says, OUT OF HIMSELF, it is very obvious that they were not created out of nothing, and that to think so is irrational, absurd, and contrary to Scripture.

And this great truth, like other truths revealed in Scripture, may be seen by the rational mind to be a truth worthy of all acceptation. For if God, as our Cambridge correspondent will no doubt admit, is the only Fountain of Life to all things, it must follow, that He is the one only substance from which all things derive their substantial forms receptive of life from the Creator. Thus the apostle calls God a substance, when he says that Jesus is the express image of his Person, (Heb. i. 3.) or, more properly, substance (VTOσтασews,) which very term is that employed by the Athanasian Creed to denote God as a substance.* But when we speak of God as a substance, we do not mean a material substance, but a divine and infinite substance, totally exempt from all the laws of finite matter; thus, when we think of God as a Person, we do not think of Him as of a finite person like man, but as of an infinite Person, all good, all wise, all powerful, and everywhere present; of whom, nevertheless, man, as a finite person, is (if regenerate) an "image and likeness." In like manner, when we speak of God as a substance; for that there are other substances and forms besides those obvious to our external senses, must be evident to every intelligent mind, enlightened by the truths of Revelation. In general, there are natural substances and spiritual substances, and, above all, divine substances, which, in degree and quality, are totally distinct and discrete from each other. Divine substances are, therefore, the parent of all other substances, even the very lowest, which are the inert matters of the earthly globe on which we live. All these substances, as well as all spiritual substances, of which the minds of men, and the spiritual bodies of angels and spirits, and all things in the spiritual world, are constituted, are the offspring, by derivation, from the one only Divine Substance in God, by whom they are constantly preserved. Thus Tatian, one of the ancient * See the Greek, which is the original text of the Athanasian Creed.

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fathers, says: "The Creator of all things derived from Himself the substance out of which He made all things.' And Philo, a writer in the first century, by way of illustration, says:-"As the fire [of the sun] sends forth its warmth without losing any of its own warmth, and as the light continually sends forth its rays without losing any of its brilliance, so the ORIGINAL SOURCE of all things communicates His essence without losing any thing thereof." But heat and light suppose substances into which they flow, and by which they are conveyed to the earth. These substances are the ethers and the atmospheres. Now to think of God as a mere abstraction, without substance and without form, is to think, if possible, of a nonentity. It is to reduce the idea of God to a mere abstraction, which, in itself, is rank atheism. The fact is, that God, far from being an abstraction, that is, devoid of substance and form, is the only self-existing REALITY in the universe; He being the one only SUBSTANCE and FORM, Self-essent and Self-subsisting, from Whom all other beings and things continually derive their essence (or life), their substance, and their forms. Nor is this great Truth, namely, that all substances and forms, even the most finite and inert, are, as the apostle says, as quoted above, "out of God," above the sphere of the rational mind. For every one knows that from the bodies of men, of animals, of plants, and of minerals, there constantly emanates a sphere consisting of substances derived from the activities of their forms of life. These substances not only constantly emanate, but they are likewise constantly animated by the activity of the forms from which they proceed; and this animation is in proportion to the distance of the object from which the sphere of substances emanates. If near the object, as in the case of a flower, the sphere of fragrance is more active and powerful; but if remote, less so, according to the distance, until at length the sphere becomes, as it were, inert and dead. Now, the substances which proceed from an object are distinct from the object itself, and in themselves possess no life or activity but what they receive from the object, which, from its own activity, actuates the sphere of substances proceeding from itself. This is easily tested and proved, and although a simple fact, obvious to our senses, yet it serves to illustrate the great truth declared by the apostle, that all things have come forth "out of God;" the great difference being that God is infinite, and the objects which illustrate the mode of His activity and creative power-are finite; but as the finite, especially man, is the "image" of the Infinite, therefore we may, by a proper knowledge of the finite image, think correctly, as far as our finite ideas can extend, of the Infinite, and its Divine operations. Thus, the first and purest emanation of substances from the Divine Being, is the

Sun of the spiritual world, called the "Sun of Righteousness." This Sun is the first Finite, and has consequently not life in itself, but is constantly actuated by Him who dwells in its centre, "who is over all, God blessed for ever," even our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Tim. vi. 16.) This Sun is consequently the first manifestation from His " GLORIOUS BODY" of the Divine Love and Wisdom, which are the Divine Life; and through this Sun all the natural suns in the universe have been created, and through them again, as instrumental mediums in the Divine hand, all the planets which revolve around them.*

We may now inquire how it has come to pass, that so absurd an assertion as that "all things are created out of nothing," should have been so long an established proposition in Christian theology, and which, at the same time, has no ground either in Scripture or in reason to stand upon? This assertion, we think, was originated at an early period, in order to counteract the philosophy of Aristotle, so many ages prevalent in the world. For Aristotle asserted that "the world, and consequently matter, is eternal, even in its form, and not the work of a creative Providence." This assertion is evidently opposed to the Scriptures, which plainly assert that the world had a beginning, and that it was created by God. It would appear that from the fifth century, when the works of Aristotle began to be studied by the educated members of the church, they found this assertion of the celebrated philosopher to be opposed to Revelation, and being asked,-If matter was not eternal, from what was it created and formed? they saw no other mode of answering the question than that of asserting, that "all things were created out of nothing." And when Augustin gave his sanction to this absurd assertion, it received an impress of so high an authority, as scarcely to be called into question. Thus, like other many traditions of men," sanctioned by synods and by the authority of great names, this assertion, adopted in the creeds of a fallen Christianity, has been a great obstacle to the progress of genuine intelligence, and has rendered both the Word of God and the voice of reason of none effect, in their united efforts to instruct and elevate the human mind §

66

EDITOR.

* But on this subject the reader is especially referred to Swedenborg's Works. D. L. W. 291-294. A. E. 1120-1130.

See Aristotle's Analyt. Prior. I. 30.-See also Tenneman's Handbuch der Geschicte der Philosophie, cap. Aristotle.

See Augustin's Confessions, xii. 7.

§ See this same assertion still proclaimed and confirmed in the new editions of Matthew Henry's Commentary.-Vide Comments on Heb. xi. 3.

295

THE DEPENDENCE OF LANGUAGE UPON CORRES

PONDENCES.

[Continued from page 271.]

45. We shall conclude the subject of onomatopoeias or root-words by giving a few illustrations of the highly-beautiful and numerous class which man has formed by condensing the inarticulate sounds native to his own being. The modulations of the human voice possess so exceedingly wide a range, and the natural, undesigned accordance of its several tones with particular states of feeling is so wonderfully exact, unvarying, and delicate, that to express the latter as mere feelings, articulate words are not required. Hence it is that a tender and watchful mother can tell exactly what are the wants or emotions of her little tongueless babe, simply by the tones in which it appeals to her. The slenderest filament of sound which draws her to the cradle-side is as meaningful as the most measured sentence. Hence, too, in after life, the sensations and passions continually manifest themselves, without the possibility of their being mistaken, in such sounds as those which we designate laughing' and 'sighing. When expressed in words, the same passions derive almost all their emphasis from the intonations with which the speaker clothes his utterance. We say, for instance, that a person speaks angrily, ironically, or imploringly; or in a sprightly, cheerful, soothing, persuasive, or discontented manner, as the case may be; and it is very often far more to these intonations, than to the words themselves, that the speaker's success or influence on those who hear him, is owing.

46. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that man should have found in his own voice abundance of useful elements of words. Very many of the ordinary terms in which it is our own daily custom to express the feelings (most of which words we have inherited from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers), were strictly onomatopoetic in their origin, though the fact of their relation to the parent sounds may seldom strike us. For it must be remembered that one language does not arise from another, as English did from the Anglo-Saxon, without extensive changes taking place in its constituent words; and hence, while the terms in question are substantially onomatopoetic, their superficial appearance often seems to yield but meagre proof of it; just as an immense proportion of our other current English is substantially Anglo-Saxon, though

in aspect it is widely different from that language. The class of words we refer to comprises all such as to laugh, to grumble, to groan, to shriek (skrike' among the lower orders), to scream, to blubber, to sigh, to sob. The earlier forms of these words in Anglo-Saxon and the allied tongues, were lhafan, grommelen, granian, skriger, &c., and with the ancient Teutonic people they probably existed in forms still purer. In primæval times, there can be no doubt that words of this kind existed in equal abundance, and that they served, like most other onomatopoeias, as roots or bases for large families of terms denoting things related to them by correspondence. The proof lies in the fact of our being able to trace home very many ancient words to this precise origin.

47. The primitive words themselves, by being slightly altered, often served indeed to express whole classes of feelings, in addition to furnishing terms for objects related correspondentially. Take, for example, the extremely ancient onomatopoeia representative of shouting for joy, on the one hand, and of wailing, or cries of sorrow, on the other. It is the same term of which one of the forms was referred to in section 36 as having anciently been used to designate what is indeed still called the howling of wild beasts, all three classes of sounds being of the same general character, viz., inarticulate, high-pitched, long-drawn-out, and more or less monotonous. In the Hebrew language we find this interesting root in the shape of (uleel), modified on the one hand into the first part of the jubilant shout of praise (Hallelujah)

or praise ye Jah! and serving, in the second place, to denote a cry of anguish, as in the (haleelouh) of Isaiah xiii. 6, which the authorized version well translates Howl ye!' The pure Hallelujah form is very properly left unaltered in the Septuagint and Vulgate translations of the Scriptures, being uniformly copied as ảììŋλovïa and Alleluja; but in the authorized English version it is generally treated like any other word, and translated 'Praise the Lord.' It is from the associations connected with this sacred and solemn use of the word, that we have our English expressions holy and to hallow. Not that these words are derived from Hallelujah, but from the ancient root of which Hallelujah was itself one of the earliest offspring, and which ramified through all the European families of languages, reaching England through many different channels. Hence these two words come proximately, not from the Hebrew, but through the Anglo-Saxon channel of halig and halgian.

48. Passing to the Greek language, we find the root in question reappearing, as before, under two principal forms, the type-words of which are respectively ἀλαλάζω and ὀλολύζω. The former was usually applied

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