"These were Jehovah's words: From an eternity of idleness, I, God, awoke; in seven days' toil made earth From nothing; rested, and created man; I placed him in a paradise, there Planted the tree of evil; so that he Might eat and perish." And so says the church. * Spirit is literally air, and air is matter in a gaseous or fluid form; but this is not the sense in which the word is used by the theologian. LUCIAN.--That is going still deeper into theological absurdity. No axiom can be clearer than this,--"out of nothing cometh nothing." There could be no creation of that which necessarily and eternally exists in and of itself There can be but one infinite being, one nature, i.e. the boundless universe, (call it god, or by any other name you please) and this all-in-all self-existent being, produces in itself, by an internal or innate action, whatever changes matter undergoes by this essential action or motion; whether in the production of living creatures, or inanimate forms: thus universal matter is at once both agent and patient--efficient cause and subject; it produces nothing but what is its own modification. Spiritualism is supported only by fraud, and ignorance of materialism. MOD.--Are not the words creator and creation used in the Bible? what do they mean? LUCIAN.--The learned confess that we have a very false translation of that book. In the Talmud of Jerusalem, creator and creation merely signify the giver, and the act of giving forms to matter* There is not one word in the Bible about a creation from nothing; this notion, according to Mosheim,** was the invention of the Christians. All identities of matter arise from motion alone; and as no portion of it can ever cease to be in motion, that motion is perpetually destroying existing forms, and out of these producing fresh identities of matter; but this is change of form alone, and chemistry has proved the self-existence of the material principle, in the demonstration that no particle of it can be annihilated. * The word Tsour has been adopted in Genesis, where it is, say the learned, falsely translated creator, though it merely signifies, "the giver of forms." According to Volney, that name is also one of the definitions of Osiris. ** Appendix to Cudworth. MOD.--In our Bible account of the creation, there are certainly some apparent contradictions, or incongruities, such as the getting up of three whole days before the sun was "made and set in the firmament;" now it appears to us that, as the sun is the sole source of day, they were a little preposterous in forgetting to make him first.