universe, we can form no clear, vivid, distinct, or,
in point of fact, _any_ conception of such a Being. When he explains
that it is infinite and omnipresent, like poor Paddy's famed ale, the
explanation 'thickens as it clears;' for being ourselves _finite_, and
necessarily present on one small spot of our very small planet, the
words _infinite_ and _omnipresent_ do not suggest to us either positive
or practical ideas--of course, therefore, we have neither positive nor
practical ideas of an infinite and omnipresent Being.

We can as easily understand that the universe ever did exist, as we now
understand that it does exist--but we cannot conceive its absence for
the millionth part of an instant--and really it puzzles one to conceive
what those people can be dreaming about who talk as familiarly about the
extinction of a universe as the chemist does of extinguishing the flame
of his spirit-lamp.

The unsatisfactory character of all speculations having for their object
'nonentities with formidable names,' should long ere this have opened
men's eyes to the folly of _multiplying causes without necessity_--
another rule of philosophising, for which we are indebted to
Newton, but to which no religious philosophiser pays due attention.
Newton himself, in his Theistical character, wrote and talked as though
most blissfully ignorant of that rule. The passages given above from his
'Principia' palpably violate it. But Theists, however learned, pay
little regard to any rules of philosophising, which put in peril their
fundamental crotchet. If they did, Atheism would need no apologist, and
Theism have no defenders; for Theism, in all its varieties, presupposes
a supernatural Causer of what experience pronounces natural effects.

The Author is aware that 'Natural Theologians' seek to justify their
rebellion against the rules of philosophising, to which the reader's
attention has been specially directed, by appealing to (what they call)
evidences of design in the universal fabric. But though they think so
highly of the design argument, it is not the less true that that
argument rests on mere assumption of a disputed fact; that even though
it were proved the universe was designed, still whether designed by one
God, two Gods, or two million of Gods, would be unshown; and that Paley,
'the most famous of natural Theologians'--Paley, who wrote as never man
wrote before on the design question, has been satisfactorily refuted _in
his own