Origination and formation are so immediately and inseparably united in the Biblical notion of Creation that the revelation of the one is the revelation of the other, and we can not deny the former without logically involving ourselves in the denial of the latter. He who gave to matter its forms must have given it its essential properties, upon which many of its forms depend; and He who gave to matter its essential properties must have given it _origination_, for how can we conceive of substance devoid of all attributes? Whether, therefore, the account in Genesis "be found to have in view, mainly or solely, a universal or a partial creation; whether the _principium_ there mentioned be the particular beginning of the special work there described, or the _principium principiorum_,--the beginning of all beginnings--the Bible is in either case a protest against the dogma of the eternity of the world, or of the eternity of matter."[130] This notion of Creation as a pure supernatural origination is the only one which reason can accept as adequate, satisfactory, and complete. Formation without origination is a conception of creation which is logically incomplete. It fails to meet the demand of reason for an Absolute First Principle adequate to the production and explanation of all existence. There are outlying elements of the problem which it can not grasp in the unity of a Fundamental Idea. Matter with its properties, Number, Time, and Space, with their relations, are still lying outside of its field, and setting themselves up as self-existent and independent realities, which by their apparent or conceded independence must necessarily impose _conditions_ upon the Divine activity, and perpetually embarrass the human mind in its effort to think of God as the free and unconditioned Cause. Reason demands that absolute unity shall stand at the fountain-head of being, and every system of philosophy which allows of more than one self-existent and independent and underived reality bewilders and staggers the understanding, and vitiates all its processes of thought. After this concession every argument for the being of God seems to us a _petitio principii_. Reason and Revelation, then, are agreed in the affirmation that the Universe, both as to its matter and form, had its origin in the creative Word and Will of God. How far this affirmation is sustained by the _à posteriori_ inductions of physical science is a question of the deepest interest, and to this we now invite attention. This question naturally divides itself into two subordinate inquiries, one relating to the _form_, the other to the _matter_ of the universe, which may be thus presented: 1. Had the existing _Order_ of the universe a beginning? Had the forms, relations, laws, and harmonies of the universe a beginning? 2. Had that which is the ground of all forms, the subject of all changes and relations, a beginning? Had the _Matter_ of the universe a beginning?