The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880Various
Religion
The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880
Various
Religion and science -- Periodicals
Out of nothing, nothing comes. Into nothing, nothing goes. These are
foundation axioms underlying the entire system of Christian theology.
The first looks backward, and the second looks forward. The first
correllates with the saying, "So things which are seen were not made of
things which do appear." The converse of this is the following: Things
which are seen were made of unseen things; that is, the visible universe
is the manifestation of the invisible. The real universe is the
invisible. There is nothing that can not be thrown into the invisible.
Even the diamond has been thrown into solution, and all solutions may be
thrown into the invisible by heat. The question, What is matter? has
puzzled the best minds of earth, and puzzled all, both infidels and
Christians, as much as any other question. The visible, organic universe
was created, but it was created out of the invisible. The invisible is
eternal. There is an eternal world, and that is the invisible and real
universe, without which the visible would not be, for of nothing,
nothing comes. All matter is to be referred to antecedent
substance--that which lies under and causes it to be. Substance,
strictly speaking, lies in the invisible. Matter, properly speaking, is
an effect, which is the visible manifestation of an unseen substance,
and this is eternal.
God created the universe by means of eternal substance. He is the king
eternal. The time never was when he was the king of nothing. It is said
of Leibnitz that he thought inert matter insufficient to explain the
phenomena of body, and had recourse to the entelechies of Aristotle, or
the _substantial forms_ of scholastic philosophy, conceiving of them as
primitive forces, constituting the substance of matter, atoms of
substance, but not of matter _imperishable_, but subject to
transformation. This view of the atomic theory is two-fold: First, the
atomic invisible, as the very term _atom_ indicates, for it is from "ha
temno," which means _not cut_--literally _indivisible_. You can't cut an
atom chemically or otherwise, unless you are working upon that which is
an atom in the loose and more modern sense of the term. You may reduce
matter chemically to the invisible or underlying substance, but beyond
this you can not cut? Can you run it into nothing? No. Into nothing
nothing goes. Physicists are indebted to the oldest philosophers, who
lived prior to Democrites, for the use of the term atom. Those oldest
philosophers used the term to indicate something that was not matter,
viz: immaterial substance. The term in its primary sense is applicable
nowhere else.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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