Chapter I: The whole creation is an act of divine power

It would be useless to observe that, in seeking to account to ourselves for the events that gave the earth its present physiognomy, we do not have the foolish pretension of resolving all difficulties, of unveiling secrets that the Creator of all things has reserved to himself, and of fully feeding the insatiable curiosity of man’s pride. Nature, like religion, contains mysteries that will remain forever inaccessible to every created intelligence. Does one comprehend, and will one ever comprehend, the essence and characteristics of that triple invisible force known by the name of molecular attraction , terrestrial attraction, celestial attraction? One sees its phenomena and establishes its effects, but the nature of the cause escapes all investigations; or rather, this word attraction is the statement of a general fact, and not the very formula of a law.

Ask the most skillful chemist what that latent property of bodies is by which their molecules attract one another, draw together as though instinctively, attach themselves, cement themselves, coagulate, and penetrate one another so profoundly, so intimately, that they resist, with a powerful energy, the blind force that would wish to disunite them. He will be obliged to confess his ignorance and to say: I do not know.

But now science itself undertakes, at this moment, to give the human mind a lesson in modesty, to teach it to distrust its lights, its discoveries, even its dogmas, and to circumscribe the circle of its pretensions. It is a whole revolution that is taking place in the creed of the academies.

Our forefathers of the eighteenth century knew only four elements: water, earth, air, and fire. The progress of chemistry has permitted us to recognize the error of our predecessors, to analyze these substances, to divide them, to subdivide them, to atomize them, so to speak, and to torment them in such a way as to discover that they were compound bodies and not elements. The discovery of a new element

was signaled as progress for science and, for its author, as a title to public admiration and gratitude. Today, if we are not mistaken, sixty-seven are counted.

Modern science had also admitted until now the existence of various forces, such as light, caloric, electricity, magnetism, affinity, gravity, etc. It maintained that these forces were properties inherent in matter itself. This was the axis around which all the phenomena of the physical world unfolded, the mechanism that imparted all its movements to it.

Well then! these two scientific dogmas, concerning which it was not permitted to raise the slightest doubt, have just been attacked, and solidly, if not victoriously, combated. Two scholars of the first order, Mr. Grove, one of the most honored members of the Royal Society of London, and the elder Mr. Seguin, one of our most distinguished physicists, have established, in a work entitled Correlation of Physical Forces, that all these elements are not elements; that all these forces are not forces. They maintain that there is only one element, matter: one force, one mover, a spiritual mover: “Heat, light, and electricity,” says the first, “do not exist as fluid causes; all these effects are the pure and simple result of an affection of matter, caused by forces which, without being necessarily intelligent,

have absolutely nothing physical about them, and which, all correlative among themselves, are connected with movement, itself caused by an absolutely spiritual mover.¹”

The second summarizes, in these terms, the doctrine of Mr. Grove in notes placed at the end of his work: “What is simpler than to relate everything to a single element, matter? to a single agent that modifies it, movement?… To see, as we do, Mr. Grove and I, in all bodies diverse assemblages of one and the same matter, in all phenomena movements imparted to this unique matter—is this not to render a still more striking homage to unity and creative power, according to the motto that characterizes all the works of God: simplicity and economy in the means, richness and variety in the results?²”

Let us not be surprised at this humiliating necessity in which the genius of man finds itself, of burning today what it had worshiped yesterday. It is the consequence of the decree that divine wisdom pronounced against man, condemning him, in punishment for his pride, to labor without end, without respite, and without ever attaining, despite the most prodigious efforts, an adequate knowledge of all things: “He delivered the world to the disputes of men,” Ecclesiastes teaches us,

“so that they may not know the work that the Lord made from beginning to end.³”

“Where were you,” God says to Job, “when I was laying the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have intelligence. Do you know who regulated all its measures, or who stretched the measuring line over it? Do you know upon what its bases are established, or who laid its cornerstone? Who will speak worthily of the disposition of the heavens, etc.?⁴”

We are therefore naturally led to rely, with regard to the works of creation, where everything depended upon the good pleasure of God, upon what he deigned to reveal to us. For here the supernatural bursts forth on every side; and how much are those who do not see it there to be pitied! Now, two great miraculous facts, and only two, are reported to us in the sacred history of primitive times: creation and the universal flood.

In the description of the marvels of creation, Moses confines himself to establishing the effects in such a way as to awaken in man no idea of their cause other than that of the divine will. Everything there is stamped

with the seal of an infinite wisdom and power, not only in the whole but also in the details. It is God who conceived, executed, and ordered all things. Nature did not act by itself; it obeyed the voice of its Creator. The acts of each day, from the creation of heaven and earth to that of man, were all accomplished outside the laws that govern the physical world today. Thus, all the beings of the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom were created in a state of perfect development; vegetables, plants, and trees were not created in the state of seed, germ, or shoot, but in their complete development, fit to produce seeds and bear fruits. The animals of each species—quadrupeds, reptiles, fish, birds—all were created in a state of formation and growth advanced enough that they could reproduce immediately. Man himself, God created in the fullness of age, in the complete exercise of his physical, intellectual, and moral faculties. But if it is thus with vegetables, animals, and finally man, that prototype of the created world, why should it be otherwise with the earth, heaven, the stars, the sea, the mountains, etc.? Why would God have needed a longer time, indefinite centuries, to form them? Assuredly, since everything here is miraculous, the prodigy will not be greater on one side than on the other.

It is the forgetting of this fundamental principle that is the source of so many errors and of most of the objections of our adversaries. One persists in seeking the productive cause of the various phenomena of creation not in the action of God, creator of everything that exists, but in a multitude of secondary causes discovered or imagined by the human mind, and even often in more or less hazardous hypotheses that rest neither upon observation nor upon any solid foundation supplied by induction. One takes good care not to refuse God the title of creator; it is his role that one wishes to diminish. But, frankly, after having acknowledged this title to him, does logic permit one to cavil with him over the time that he thought he ought to employ in accomplishing his work?

It is claimed that it is the laws of nature that organized everything, and that geological facts would be contrary to those laws if one admitted that the structure of the globe was the work of six ordinary days. But what, then, is this nature of which one always speaks? And what, in fact, are the laws of nature, if not an order that it pleased God to establish, to which all creatures—but creatures alone—must conform? Now, this order apparently did not exist when God created the world. If he judged it fitting to establish it afterward, in order to open a wider field to the action of creatures, he nonetheless remains free and independent, able to depart from it for reasons and by means

known to him. One is therefore in no way warranted in relying upon the observation of present phenomena, causes, and effects in order to explain the facts of creation. These are not questions of science, questions of agreement and disagreement with present laws; they are simple questions of testimony and faith. It is not revelation that must accommodate itself to the demands of reason; it is for reason to submit itself to revelation, so as not to strike and shatter itself against the mysteries that beset it.