_Illustration drawn from the Arts._--The artist makes use of colors previously existing when he would produce a painting, and of marble already in the block, when he would chisel a statue or a temple. In reality he only combines. Yet it would be but a poor definition of any one of these sublime arts to say that painting, sculpture, architecture, is merely the putting together of previous materials to form new wholes. We object to such a definition, not because it affirms what is not true, but because it does not affirm the chief and most important truth; not because of what it states, but because of what it omits to state. These are creative arts. They give us indeed not new substances, but new forms, new products, new ideas. So is imagination a creative faculty. The individual elements may not be new, but the grand product and result is new, a creation of the mind's own. And this is of more consequence than the fact that the elementary conceptions were already in the mind. The one is the essential characteristic, the other a comparatively unimportant circumstance; the one describes the thing itself, the other the mere _modus operandi_ of the thing.
_Illustration drawn from the Creation of the material World._--What is _creation_ in its higher and more proper sense, as applied to the formation, by divine power, of the world in which we dwell? There was a moment, in the eternity of the past, when the omnipotent builder divided the light from the darkness, and the evening and the morning were the first day. The elements may have existed before--heat, air, earth, water, the various material and diffused substance of the world about to be--but latent, confused, chaotic those elements, not called forth and appointed each to its own proper sphere. Light slumbers amid the chaotic elements unseen. He speaks the word, and it comes forth from its hiding-place, and stands revealed in its own beauty and splendor. Has God made nothing, in so doing? Has he conceived nothing, _created_ nothing? And when the work goes on, and is at length complete, and the fair new world hangs poised and trembling on its axis, perfect in every part, and rejoicing the heart of the builder, is there no new power displayed in all this, no creation here? And do we well and adequately express the sublime mystery when we say that the deity has merely arranged and combined materials previously existing, to form a new whole?