d not have been made IN heaven and earth, the world could not
have been made IN the world, nor could they have been made when there
was nothing to make them of." The solution of this fundamental inquiry
St. Augustine finds in saying, "Thou spakest, and they were made."

But the difficulty does not end here. St. Augustine goes on to remark
that the syllables thus uttered by God came forth in succession, and
there must have been some created thing to express the words. This
created thing must, therefore, have existed before heaven and earth, and
yet there could have been no corporeal thing before heaven and earth. It
must have been a creature, because the words passed away and came to an
end but we know that "the word of the Lord endureth forever."

Moreover, it is plain that the words thus spoken could not have been
spoken successively, but simultaneously, else there would have been time
and change--succession in its nature implying time; whereas there was
then nothing but eternity and immortality. God knows and says eternally
what takes place in time.

CRITICISM OF ST. AUGUSTINE. St. Augustine then defines, not without
much mysticism, what is meant by the opening words of Genesis: "In
the beginning." He is guided to his conclusion by another scriptural
passage: "How wonderful are thy works, O Lord! in wisdom hast thou made
them all." This "wisdom" is "the beginning," and in that beginning the
Lord created the heaven and the earth.

"But," he adds, "some one may ask, 'What was God doing before he made
the heaven and the earth? for, if at any particular moment he began
to employ himself, that means time, not eternity. In eternity nothing
transpires--the whole is present.'" In answering this question, he
cannot forbear one of those touches of rhetoric for which he was so
celebrated: "I will not answer this question by saying that he was
preparing hell for priers into his mysteries. I say that, before God
made heaven and earth, he did not make any thing, for no creature could
be made before any creature was made. Time itself is a creature, and
hence it could not possibly exist before creation.

"What, then, is time? The past is not, the future is not, the
present--who can tell what it is, unless it be that which has no
duration between two nonentities? There is no such thing as 'a long
time,' or 'a short time,' for there are no such things as the past and
the future. They have no existence, except in the soul."

The s