(_e_) Creation from eternity, moreover, is inconsistent with the divine independence and personality. Since God’s power and love are infinite, a creation that satisfied them must be infinite in extent as well as eternal in past duration—in other words, a creation equal to God. But a God thus dependent upon external creation is neither free nor sovereign. A God existing in necessary relations to the universe, if different in substance from the universe, must be the God of dualism; if of the same substance with the universe, must be the God of pantheism. Gore, Incarnation, 136, 137—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.... It enjoys all the riches of pantheism without its inherent weakness on the moral side, without making God dependent on the world, as the world is dependent on God. On the other hand, Christianity converts an unintelligible deism into a rational theism. It can explain how God became a creator in time, because it knows how creation has its eternal analogue in the uncreated nature; it was God’s nature eternally to produce, to communicate itself, to live.” In other words, it can explain how God can be eternally alive, independent, self-sufficient, since he is Trinity. Creation from eternity is a natural and logical outgrowth of Unitarian tendencies in theology. It is of a piece with the Stoic monism of which we read in Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 177—“Stoic monism conceived of the world as a self-evolution of God. Into such a conception the idea of a beginning does not necessarily enter. It is consistent with the idea of an eternal process of differentiation. That which is always has been under changed and changing forms. The theory is cosmological rather than cosmogonical. It rather explains the world as it is, than gives an account of its origin.” 4. Spontaneous generation. This theory holds that creation is but the name for a natural process still going on,—matter itself having in it the power, under proper conditions, of taking on new functions, and of developing into organic forms. This view is held by Owen and Bastian. We object that (_a_) It is a pure hypothesis, not only unverified, but contrary to all known facts. No credible instance of the production of living forms from inorganic material has yet been adduced. So far as science can at present teach us, the law of nature is “omne vivum e vivo,” or “ex ovo.”