With the first words of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Judaism declared the world to be a unity and God its Creator and Master. Heathenism had always beheld in the world certain blind forces of nature, working without plan or purpose and devoid of any moral aims. But Judaism sees in the world the work of a supreme Intellect who fashioned it according to His will, and who rules in freedom, wisdom, and goodness. “He spoke, and it was; He commanded, and it stood.”(422) Nature exists only by the will of God; His creative _fiat_ called it into existence, and it ceases to be as soon as it has fulfilled His plan. 2. That which the scientist terms nature—the cosmic life in its eternal process of growth and reproduction—is declared by Judaism to be God’s creation. Ancient heathen conceptions deified nature, indeed, but they knew only a cosmogony, that is, a process of birth and growth of the world. In this the gods participate with all other beings, to sink back again at the close of the drama into fiery chaos,—the so-called “twilight of the gods.” Here the deity constitutes a part of the world, or the world a part of the deity, and philosophic speculation can at best blend the two into a pantheistic system which has no place for a self-conscious, creative mind and will. In fact, the universe appears as an ever growing and unfolding deity, and the deity as an ever growing and unfolding universe. Modern science more properly assumes a self-imposed limitation; it searches for the laws underlying the action and interaction of natural forces and elements, thus to explain in a mechanistic way the origin and development of all things, but it leaves entirely outside of its domain the whole question of a first cause and a supreme creative mind. It certainly can pass no opinion as to whether or not the entire work of creation was accomplished by the free act of a Creator. Revelation alone can speak with unfaltering accents: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” However we may understand, or imagine, the beginning of the natural process, the formation of matter and the inception of motion, we see above the confines of space and time the everlasting God, the absolutely free Creator of all things.