The Hebrew wisdom imperatively asserts an unbeginning creative One, who neither became the world; nor is the world eternally; nor made the world out of himself by emanation, or evolution;--but who willed it, and it was! [Greek: Ta athea egeneto, kai egeneto chaos,]--and this chaos, the eternal will, by the spirit and the word, or express 'fiat',--again acting as the impregnant, distinctive, and ordonnant power,--enabled to become a world--[Greek: kosmeisthai.] So must it be when a religion, that shall preclude superstition on the one hand, and brute indifference on the other, is to be true for the meditative sage, yet intelligible, or at least apprehensible, for all but the fools in heart. The Greek philosopheme, preserved for us in the Æschylean Prometheus, stands midway betwixt both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it assumes an X Y Z,--(I take these letters in their algebraic application)--an indeterminate 'Elohim', antecedent to the matter of the world, [Greek: hulae akosmos]--no less than to the [Greek: hulae kekosmaemenae.] In this point, likewise, the Greek accorded with the Semitic, and differed from the Phoenician--that it held the antecedent X Y Z to be super-sensuous and divine. But on the other hand, it coincides with the Ph¦nician in considering this antecedent ground of corporeal matter,--[Greek: t_on s_omat_on kai tou s_omatikou,]--not so properly the cause of the latter, as the occasion and the still continuing substance. 'Maleria substat adliuc'. The corporeal was supposed co-essential with the antecedent of its corporeity. Matter, as distinguished from body, was a 'non ens', a simple apparition, 'id quod mere videtur'; but to body the elder physico-theology of the Greeks allowed a participation in entity. It was 'spiritus ipse, oppressus, dormiens, et diversis modis somnians'. In short, body was the productive power suspended, and as it were, quenched in the product. This may be rendered plainer by reflecting, that, in the pure Semitic scheme there are four terms introduced in the solution of the problem, 1. the beginning, self-sufficing, and immutable Creator; 2. the antecedent night as the identity, or including germ, of the light and darkness, that is, gravity; 3. the chaos; and