“The earth was invisible and unfinished.”  In saying “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” the sacred writer passed over many things in silence—­water, air, fire, and the results from them, which, all forming in reality the true complement of the world, were, without doubt made at the same time as the universe.  By this silence history wishes to train the activity of our intelligence, giving it a weak point for starting, to impel it to the discovery of the truth.

Thus, we are told of the creation of water; but, as we are told that the earth was invisible, ask yourself what could have covered it and prevented it from being seen?  Fire could not conceal it.  Fire brightens all about it, and spreads light rather than darkness around.  No more was it air that enveloped the earth.  Air by nature is of little density and transparent.  It receives all kinds of visible objects and transmits them to the spectators.  Only one supposition remains:  that which floated on the surface of the earth was water, the fluid essence which had not yet been confined to its own place.

Thus the earth was not only invisible; it was still incomplete.  Even to-day excessive damp is a hindrance to the productiveness of the earth.  The same cause at the same time prevents it from being seen and from being complete, for the proper and natural adornment of the earth is its completion:  corn waving in the valleys, meadows green with grass and rich with many-colored flowers, fertile glades and hilltops shaded by forests.  Of all this nothing was yet produced; the earth was in travail with it in virtue of the power that she had received from the Creator.  But she was waiting for the appointed time and the divine order to bring forth.

“Darkness was upon the face of the deep.”  A new source for fables and most impious imaginations may be found by distorting the sense of these words at the will of one’s fancies.  By “darkness” these wicked men do not understand what is meant in reality—­air not illumined, the shadow produced by the interposition of a body, or finally a place for some reason deprived of light.  For them “darkness” is an evil power, or rather the personification of evil, having his origin in himself in opposition to, and in perpetual struggle with, the goodness of God.  If God is light, they say, without any doubt the power which struggles against Him must be darkness, “darkness” not owing its existence to a foreign origin, but an evil existing by itself.  “Darkness” is the enemy of souls, the primary cause of death, the adversary of virtue.  The words of the prophet, they say in their error, show that it exists and that it does not proceed from God.  From this what perverse and impious dogmas have been imagined!  What grievous wolves, tearing the flock of the Lord, have sprung from these words to cast themselves upon souls!  Is it not from hence that have come forth Marcions and Valentinuses and the detestable heresy of the Manicheans which you may, without going far wrong, call the putrid humor of the churches?