Here is the basis of the divine dominion. God is sovereign lord and proprietor because he is creator, and man and nature are the work of his hands. Hence the Mosaic books insist not only on the unity of God, but even with more emphasis, if possible, on God as creator. The first verse of Genesis asserts creation in opposition to emanation, generation, or formation: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." All through the Old Testament, especially in the hagiographical books and the prophets, there is a perpetual recurrence to God as creator, to the fact that he has made the world and all things therein, and hence the call upon all creatures to sing his praise, so often repeated in the Psalms. Indeed, it was not so much by belief in the unity of God as in the fact that God is sole and universal creator, that the Jews were distinguished from the Gentiles. It may be doubted if the Gentiles ever wholly lost the belief in the existence of one God. We think we find in all heathen mythologies traces of a recognition of one God hovering, so to speak, over their manifold gods and goddesses, who were held to be tutelar divinities, never the divinity itself. But the Gentiles, as we have already said, had lost, and did in no sense admit, the fact of creation. We find no recognition of God as creator in any Gentile philosophy, Indian, Persian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, or Roman. The Gentiles were not generally atheists, we suspect not atheists at all; but they were invariably pantheists. Pantheism is the denial of the proper creative act of God, or, strictly speaking, that God creates substances or existences capable of acting from their own centre and producing effects as second causes. {14} The Jews were the only people, after the great Gentile apostasy, that preserved the tradition of creation. God as creator is the basis of all science, all faith, all religion; hence the first article of the Creed: "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." In this fact is founded the inviolable right of the Almighty to govern all his works, man among the rest, as seems to him good. We cannot deny this if we once admit the fact of creation; and if we deny the fact of creation, we deny our own existence and that of the entire universe.