Since, however, it is impossible to forget that we have sometimes seen heads, which are supposed to be very much indeed in advance of the age, shaken ominously at the very chapter which the text bequeaths and commends to the special acceptance of you and me,--I propose that, in the very briefest manner, we now review the contents of that chapter; in order that we may discover what is the special absurdity, or impossibility, or improbability, or by whatever other name the thing is to be called,--which makes it quite out of the question that you or I should undertake the act of Faith here assigned us. I read then, that "In the beginning, GOD created the Heaven and the Earth:"--by which I understand, that, at some remote period,--which may or may not baffle human Arithmetic[272],--it was the pleasure of GOD the FATHER, GOD the SON, GOD the HOLY GHOST,--_three_ Persons, coeternal and coequal,--_one_ GOD,--out of nothing, to create the entire Universe. "All things that are in Heaven, and that are in Earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him[273];" and they were created out of nothing. The word in the original does not indeed necessarily imply as much: but since there is _no_ word in Hebrew, (any more than there is in Greek, Latin, or English,) peculiarly expressive of the notion of creating out of nothing, it need not excite our surprise that Moses does not employ such a word to describe what God did "in the beginning."--_Then_ it was, in the grey of that far distant morning I mean, that all those glittering orbs which sow the vault of Heaven with brightness and with beauty, flashed into sudden being. "Thou, even Thou, art LORD alone: Thou hast made Heaven, the Heaven of Heavens, _with all their host[274]_." Suns, the centres of systems, many of them so distant from this globe of ours, that sun and system scarce shew so bright as a single lesser star: suns, I say, with their marvellous equipage of attendant bodies,--_our_ sun among the rest, with all those wandering fires which speed their unwearied courses round it: suns, and planets with their moons, bathed once and for ever in the fountain of that Light which GOD inhabited from all Eternity, then marshalled themselves in mysterious order, according to "the counsel of His will[275]:" yea, and with their furniture, unimagined and unimaginable, went careering through the untrodden realms of space, each on its several errand of glory, because of obedience to its Maker's sovereign Law[276]. "By the Word of the LORD," (as it is written,) "were the Heavens made; and all the hosts of them by the breath of His mouth[277]!"