Hor Theologic Or a Series of Essays Author:David Lloyd General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1823 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: 28 ESSAY III. On the wonders of Creation. The term Creation implies the producing of something out of nothing; and, consequently, of being and perception out of nonentity. -- This is the greatest of all wonders; and must be reckoned among the things which are impossible to all created beings. The creation of matter, implying the production of something out of nothing, is a subject which quite baffled the wisdom and researches of the acutest among the ancient sages: hence arose their well known postulate, ex nihilo nihil fit, -- which was admitted or implied in every system of ancient cosmogony as an axiomatical truth. This principle led them to assert and maintain the absurd dogmas of materialism, and the eternity of the world : -- but such conclusions have their own confutation implied in the relative genus of the terms by which they are expressed. Reason tells us that ihefost man was not his own creator. He did not always exist, since creation implies a beginning: and what is prior to a beginning implies nonentity. Hence man, when created, was called into being from a state of non. existence; and, by the same reasoning, matter was. " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, -- and all the hosts of them." Here we behold a " first cause:" here we see the order of the above axiom plainly reversed, so as not only physically to advocate the cause of truth; but plainly to prove and establish it: forsince nothing can produce but nothing; creation could only be produced by a prior Something which could not be inert matter. Creation, then, must have been the operation of a Being uncreated, ...« less