The Literal Meaning of Genesis
it and be created by God when given to individual human beings, just as bodies come from parents. In the other case (the first hypothesis) it was not the reason-principle of the soul, like the reason-principle of offspring in the parent, but when day was made, the soul itself was created as was the day and heaven and earth and the lights of heaven. On either hypothesis, therefore, it is appropriate for Scripture to say, God made man to Hts image.
5. But it is not easy to see how the third hypothesis does not contradict the interpretation in which man is understood to have been made on the sixth day to the image of God and to have been visibly created after the seventh day. There is a difficulty in saying that new souls are made when neither they nor their reason-principle (like the reason-principle of the offspring in the parent) were made on the sixth day along with the works, both finished and begun,' from which God rested on the seventh day. If we hold such an opinion, we should take care that the lesson of Scripture be not lost when it carefully teaches us that God finished all His works in six days and made them very good, if He was to create further beings which He had not made in their own substances or causally in their reason-principles.
In this case we should understand that God has in Himself (although He has not placed it in any creature) the reason of all individual souls which are to be made and given to infants coming into the world. But since souls are not creatures of a different kind from that according to which man was made to the image of God on the sixth day, it is not correct to say that God makes a creature now which He did not then finish. For He made a soul then of the same nature as the souls He makes now, and it follows, therefore, that He does not now make some new kind of creature which He did not then create in the works He finished. This activity of God is not contrary to the causal reasons of future things which He originally laid away in the universe, but rather it is according to them. For in human bodies, whose continued propagation was provided from those first works down through the ages, it was fitting that there should be infused souls such as God now makes and infuses.
6. Consequently, no matter which one of the three interpre-