Pythagoras held that nature’s substances and laws are eternal. Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:144; 2:250, seems to make the creation of the world an eternal process, conceiving of it as a self-sundering of the Deity, in whom in some way the world was always contained (Schurman, Belief in God, 140). Knight, Studies in Philos. and Lit., 94, quotes from Byron’s Cain, I:1—“Let him Sit on his vast and solitary throne, Creating worlds, to make eternity Less burdensome to his immense existence And unparticipated solitude.... He, so wretched in his height, So restless in his wretchedness, must still Create and recreate.” Byron puts these words into the mouth of Lucifer. Yet Knight, in his Essays in Philosophy, 143, 247, regards the universe as the everlasting effect of an eternal Cause. Dualism, he thinks, is involved in the very notion of a search for God. W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 117—“God is the source of the universe. Whether by immediate production at some point of time, so that after he had existed alone there came by his act to be a universe, or by perpetual production from his own spiritual being, so that his eternal existence was always accompanied by a universe in some stage of being, God has brought the universe into existence.... Any method in which the independent God could produce a universe which without him could have had no existence, is accordant with the teachings of Scripture. Many find it easier philosophically to hold that God has eternally brought forth creation from himself, so that there has never been a time when there was not a universe in some stage of existence, than to think of an instantaneous creation of all existing things when there had been nothing but God before. Between these two views theology is not compelled to decide, provided we believe that God is a free Spirit greater than the universe.” We dissent from this conclusion of Dr. Clarke, and hold that Scripture requires us to trace the universe back to a beginning, while reason itself is better satisfied with this view than it can be with the theory of creation from eternity. (_a_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s omnipotence. Omnipotence does not necessarily imply actual creation; it implies only power to create. Creation, moreover, is in the nature of the case a thing begun. Creation from eternity is a contradiction in terms, and that which is self-contradictory is not an object of power.