The author of “The Unseen Universe” (page 17) wrongly calls John Stuart Mill a Manichæan. But Mill disclaims belief in the _personality_ of this principle that resists and limits God,—see his posthumous Essays on Religion, 176-195. F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 4-16—“Before the creation of the world all was chaos ... but with the creation, order began.... God did not cease from creation, for creation is going on every day. Nature is God at work. Only after surprising changes, as in spring-time, do we say figuratively, ‘God rests.’ ” See also Frothingham, Christian Philosophy. With regard to this view, we remark: (_a_) The maxim _ex nihilo nihil fit_, upon which it rests, is true only in so far as it asserts that no event takes place without a cause. It is false, if it mean that nothing can ever be made except out of material previously existing. The maxim is therefore applicable only to the realm of second causes, and does not bar the creative power of the great first Cause. The doctrine of creation does not dispense with a cause; on the other hand, it assigns to the universe a sufficient cause in God. Lucretius: “Nihil posse creari De nihilo, neque quod genitum est ad nihil revocari.” Persius: “Gigni De nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti.” Martensen, Dogmatics, 116—“The nothing, out of which God creates the world, is the eternal possibilities of his will, which are the sources of all the actualities of the world.” Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:292—“When therefore it is argued that the creation of something from nothing is unthinkable and is therefore peremptorily to be rejected, the argument seems to me to be defective. The process is thinkable, but not imaginable, conceivable but not probable.” See Cudworth, Intellectual System, 3:81 _sq._ Lipsius, Dogmatik, 288, remarks that the theory of dualism is quite as difficult as that of absolute creation. It holds to a point of time when God began to fashion preëxisting material, and can give no reason why God did not do it before, since there must always have been in him an impulse toward this fashioning. (_b_) Although creation without the use of preëxisting material is inconceivable, in the sense of being unpicturable to the imagination, yet the eternity of matter is equally inconceivable. For creation without preëxisting material, moreover, we find remote analogies in our own creation of ideas and volitions, a fact as inexplicable as God’s bringing of new substances into being.