“The primary sense of _create_ and _cry_”—says Noah Webster, and we are careful to adduce in this place the testimony of a man whom no one will suppose to have been led astray by ontological speculations—“is the same, to throw, to drive out, to bring forth, precisely as in the Shemitic BARA.” The Hebrew text may indeed be correctly but inadequately rendered: “In the beginning God _bore_ (or _bare_, preserving in the English word the radical letters of the original BARA) the heavens and the earth.” For the same lexicographer says in another place, “The verb _to bear_, I suppose to be radically the same as the Shemitic BARA, to produce: the primary sense is, to throw out, to bring forth, to thrust, to drive along.” The author of the epistle to the Hebrews says: “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” These things which _do not appear_ are real existences; for the apostle says, “the things which are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen (that is, which do not appear,) are eternal.” The text therefore does not affirm that the worlds were made out of nothing, but implies, on the contrary, that they were framed out of invisible (that is, virtual or potential) things. Plato says: “Let us lay down two classes of being, the seen and the unseen; the unseen, eternal in their relations; the seen, never the same but ever changing.” A cause which creates from nothing as material on which to operate, must of necessity itself stand as substance to its own creature: in such a case, the creator and the creature must be consubstantial. The dogma therefore that the worlds are created absolutely out of nothing, is _Pantheism_. The statement that the worlds are created out of nothing is not found in Scripture, neither is it possible that it should be found there; for the idea is absurd in itself, since out of nothing, nothing can come, and a universe absolutely created out of nothing would be a mere prolongation of Supreme Power; and moreover, there is no Hebrew word, nor known collocation of Hebrew words, capable of expressing such an absolute creation. The verb BARA, as we have seen, signifies something quite different.