The Worlds Great Sermons, Volume 1 | Page 4

harmony that the most distant, in spite of their distance,
appeared united in one universal sympathy. Let those men, therefore,
renounce their fabulous imaginations, who in spite of the weakness of
their argument, pretend to measure a power as incomprehensible to
man's reason as it is unutterable by man's voice.
God created the heavens and the earth, but not only one-half of each;
He created all the heavens and all the earth, creating the essence with
the form. For He is not an inventor of figures, but the Creator even of
the essence of beings. Further, let them tell us how the efficient power
of God could deal with the passive nature of matter, the latter
furnishing the matter without form, the former possessing the science
of the form without matter, both being in need of each other; the
Creator in order to display his art, matter in order to cease to be without
form and to receive a form. But let us stop here and return to our
subject.
"The earth was invisible and unfinished." In saying "In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth" the sacred writer passed over
many things in silence--water, air, fire, and the results from them,
which, all forming in reality the true complement of the world, were,
without doubt made at the same time as the universe. By this silence
history wishes to train the activity of our intelligence, giving it a weak
point for starting, to impel it to the discovery of the truth.
Thus, we are told of the creation of water; but, as we are told that the
earth was invisible, ask yourself what could have covered it and
prevented it from being seen? Fire could not conceal it. Fire brightens
all about it, and spreads light rather than darkness around. No more was

it air that enveloped the earth. Air by nature is of little density and
transparent. It receives all kinds of visible objects and transmits them to
the spectators. Only one supposition remains: that which floated on the
surface of the earth was water, the fluid essence which had not yet been
confined to its own place.
Thus the earth was not only invisible; it was still incomplete. Even
to-day excessive damp is a hindrance to the productiveness of the earth.
The same cause at the same time prevents it from being seen and from
being complete, for the proper and natural adornment of the earth is its
completion: corn waving in the valleys, meadows green with grass and
rich with many-colored flowers, fertile glades and hilltops shaded by
forests. Of all this nothing was yet produced; the earth was in travail
with it in virtue of the power that she had received from the Creator.
But she was waiting for the appointed time and the divine order to
bring forth.
"Darkness was upon the face of the deep." A new source for fables and
most impious imaginations may be found by distorting the sense of
these words at the will of one's fancies. By "darkness" these wicked
men do not understand what is meant in reality--air not illumined, the
shadow produced by the interposition of a body, or finally a place for
some reason deprived of light. For them "darkness" is an evil power, or
rather the personification of evil, having his origin in himself in
opposition to, and in perpetual struggle with, the goodness of God. If
God is light, they say, without any doubt the power which struggles
against Him must be darkness, "darkness" not owing its existence to a
foreign origin, but an evil existing by itself. "Darkness" is the enemy of
souls, the primary cause of death, the adversary of virtue. The words of
the prophet, they say in their error, show that it exists and that it does
not proceed from God. From this what perverse and impious dogmas
have been imagined! What grievous wolves, tearing the flock of the
Lord, have sprung from these words to cast themselves upon souls! Is it
not from hence that have come forth Marcions and Valentinuses and
the detestable heresy of the Manicheans which you may, without going
far wrong, call the putrid humor of the churches?
O man, why wander thus from the truth and imagine for thyself that
which will cause thy perdition? The word is simple and within the
comprehension of all. "The earth was invisible." Why? Because the

"deep" was spread over its surface. What is "the deep?" A mass of
water of extreme depth. But we know that we can see many bodies
through clear and transparent water. How, then, was it that no part of
the earth appeared through the water? Because the air which
surrounded it was still without light and in darkness. The rays of the