(_e_) But this idea of production without the use of preëxisting materials unquestionably existed among the Hebrews. The later Scriptures show that it had become natural to the Hebrew mind. The possession of this idea by the Hebrews, while it is either not found at all or is very dimly and ambiguously expressed in the sacred books of the heathen, can be best explained by supposing that it was derived from this early revelation in Genesis. E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 94—“_Rom. 4:17_ tells us that the faith of Abraham, to whom God had promised a son, grasped the fact that God calls into existence ‘_the things that are not_.’ This may be accepted as Paul’s interpretation of the first verse of the Bible.” It is possible that the heathen had occasional glimpses of this truth, though with no such clearness as that with which it was held in Israel. Perhaps we may say that through the perversions of later nature-worship something of the original revelation of absolute creation shines, as the first writing of a palimpsest appears faintly through the subsequent script with which it has been overlaid. If the doctrine of absolute creation is found at all among the heathen, it is greatly blurred and obscured. No one of the heathen books teaches it as do the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews. Yet it seems as if this “One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost.” Bib. Com., 1:31—“Perhaps no other ancient language, however refined and philosophical, could have so dearly distinguished the different acts of the Maker of all things [as the Hebrew did With its four different words], and that because all heathen philosophy esteemed matter to be eternal and uncreated.” Prof. E. D. Burton: “Brahmanism, and the original religion of which Zoroastrianism was a reformation, were Eastern and Western divisions of a primitive Aryan, and probably monotheistic, religion. The Vedas, which represented the Brahmanism, leave it a question whence the world came, whether from God by emanation, or by the shaping of material eternally existent. Later Brahmanism is pantheistic, and Buddhism, the Reformation of Brahmanism, is atheistic.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:471, and Mosheim’s references in Cudworth’s Intellectual System, 3:140.