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.
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