tly long for
'eternity to begin and end in,' He said, let there be matter, and there
was matter; that with Him all things are possible, and He, of course,
might easily have kept, as well as made, man upright and happy, but
could not consistently with his own wisdom, or with due regard to his
own glorification. Wise in their generation, these 'blind leaders of the
blind' ascribe to this Deity of their own invention, powers impossible,
acts inconceivable, and qualities incompatible; thus erecting doctrinal
systems on no sounder basis than their own ignorance; deifying their own
monstrous errors, and filling the earth with misery, madness, and crime.

The writer who declared theology _ignorance of natural causes reduced to
system_, did not strike wide of the true mark. It is plain that the
argument from design, so vastly favoured by theologians, amounts to
neither more nor less than ignorance of natural causes reduced to
system. An argument to be sound must be soundly premised. But here is an
argument whose primary premise is a false premise--a mere begging of the
very question in dispute. Did Atheists _admit_ the universe was
contrived, designed, or adapted, they could not _deny_ there must have
been at least one Being to contrive, design, or adapt; but they see no
analogy between a watch made with hands out of something, and a universe
made without hands out of nothing--Atheists are unable to perceive the
least resemblance between the circumstance of one intelligent body
re-forming or changing the condition of some other body, intelligent or
non-intelligent, and the circumstance of a bodiless Being creating all
bodies; of a partless Being acting upon all parts; and of a passionless
Being generating and regulating all passions. Atheists consider the
general course of nature, though strangely unheeded, does proclaim with
'most miraculous organ,' that dogmatisers about any such 'figment of
imagination,' would, in a rational community, be viewed with the same
feelings of compassion, which, even in these irrational days, are
exhibited towards confirmed lunatics.

The Author was recently passing an evening with some pleasant people in
Ashton-under-Lyne, one of whom related that before the schoolmaster had
much progress in that _devil dusted_ neighbourhood, a labouring man
walking out one fine night, saw on the ground a watch, whose ticking was
distinctly audible; but never before having seen anything of the kind he
thought it