Here is St Paul’s first chapter of Genesis. _In the beginning was the election of grace._ There is nothing unprepared, nothing unforeseen in God’s dealings with mankind. His wisdom and knowledge are as deep as His grace is wide (Rom. xi. 33). Speaking of his own vocation, the apostle said: “It pleased God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, to reveal His Son in me” (Gal. i. 15, 16). He does but generalize this conception and carry it two steps further back--from the origin of the individual to the origin of the race, and from the beginning of the race to the beginning of the world--when he asserts that the community of redeemed men was chosen in Christ before the world’s foundation. “The world” is a work of time, the slow structure of innumerable yet finite ages. Science affirms on its own grounds that the visible universe had a beginning, as it has its changes and its certain end. Its structural plan, its unity of aim and movement, show it to be the creation of a vast Intelligence. Harmony and law, all that makes science possible is the product of thought. Reason extracts from nature what Reason has first put there. The longer, the more intricate and grand the process, the farther science pushes back the beginning in our thoughts, the more sublime and certain the primitive truth becomes: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The world is a system; it has a method and a plan, therefore a foundation. But before the foundation, there was _the Founder_. And man was in His thoughts, and the redeemed Church of Christ. While yet the world was not and the immensity of space stretched lampless and unpeopled, _we_ were in the mind of God; His thought rested with complacency upon His human sons, whose “name was written in the book of life from the foundation of the world.” This amazing statement is only the logical consequence of St Paul’s experience of Divine grace, joined to his conviction of the infinite wisdom and eternal being of God.