These two grand aspects of the Divine manifestation are marked in the Elohistic and Jehovistic portions of the first revelation given to the Semitic race. They are still more distinctly recognized in Paul's discourse before the assembled Athenian philosophers, where Christian theology was for the first time presented to the Greek mind--God the Creator and Conservator of the world (Acts xvii. 24, 25); God the Father, Teacher, Ruler, and Judge of humanity (Acts xvii. 26-31). CHAPTER III. THE CREATION. God is the Absolute, Infinite, and Perfect Being, in whom, through whom, and for whom are all things. This is the Christian conception of God; and it is the only conception which furnishes an adequate and satisfactory explanation of all the facts of the universe. Here we have a First Principle, an Originative Cause which is sufficient to account for all existence. But what conception are we to form of the nature and mode of this Origination? Was it a pure, supernatural Origination, an absolute Creation? or was it simply a formation out of a first substance existing coeval with and independent of God? Was that act of creation determined by necessity? was it an unconscious emanation from, or a necessary development of that First Principle? Or was it a conscious, free exertion of power for the realization of a foreseen and predetermined plan--a mental Order? What is the Biblical conception of Creation? This is the question we must now endeavor to answer. Until very recently it has been the practice of theologians to attempt the determination of the Biblical notion of Creation on purely philological grounds. It is now generally conceded that this method is inadequate and inconclusive. The Greeks probably never conceived the idea of an absolute creation (commonly, though we judge incorrectly, styled creation _ex nihilo_), and consequently the Greek language has no terms expressive of a primal origination, an absolute beginning of the world. Ποιεῖν, the term employed in the LXX. (Gen. i. 1), and also by St. Paul (Acts xvii. 24), means to endow with a certain quality (ποῖος = _qualis_)--to construct, make, form, build, and evidently conveys the notion of _formation_ rather than _origination_, the production of qualitative phenomena rather than real entity; κτίζειν is also ordinarily used in the sense of forming, fashioning, building, and seems to imply pre-existing materials.