divided the light from the darkness."_
Accordingly, though the obscurity of the divine word has certainly
this advantage, that it causes many opinions about the truth to be
started and discussed, each reader seeing some fresh meaning in
it, yet, whatever is said to be meant by an obscure passage should
be either confirmed by the testimony of obvious facts, or should
be asserted in other and less ambiguous texts. This obscurity is
beneficial, whether the sense of the author is at last reached after
the discussion of many other interpretations, or whether, though
that sense remain concealed, other truths are brought out by the
discussion of the obscurity. To me it does not seem incongruous with
the working of God, if we understand that the angels were created
when that first light was made, and that a separation was made
between the holy and the unclean angels, when, as is said, "God
divided the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day,
and the darkness He called Night." For He alone could make this
discrimination, who was able also, before they fell, to foreknow that
they would fall, and that, being deprived of the light of truth, they
would abide in the darkness of pride. For, so far as regards the day
and night, with which we are familiar, He commanded those luminaries
of heaven that are obvious to our senses to divide between the light
and the darkness. "Let there be," He says, "lights in the firmament
of the heaven, to divide the day from the night;" and shortly after
He says, "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule
the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: the stars also. And
God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the
earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the
light from the darkness."[486] But between that light, which is the
holy company of the angels spiritually radiant with the illumination
of the truth, and that opposing darkness, which is the noisome
foulness of the spiritual condition of those angels who are turned
away from the light of righteousness, only He Himself could divide,
from whom their wickedness (not of nature, but of will), while yet it
was future, could not be hidden or uncertain.