th such a care for the creatures he has
made, suffer his own existence to be a perpetual doubt? If the course
of nature does not give sufficient proof, why does not the hand divine
shew itself by an extraordinary interposition of power? It is allowed
miracles ought not to be cheap or plenty. One or two at least every
thousand years might be admitted. But this is a perpetual standing
miracle, that such a Being as the depicted God, the author of nature
and all its works, should exist and yet his existence be perpetually in
doubt, or require a Jesus, a Mahomet or a Priestley to reveal it. Is
not the writing of this very answer to the last of those three great
luminaries of religion a proof, that no God, or no _such_ God at least,
exists. Hear the admirable words of the author of "The System of
Nature;" _Comment permet il qu'un mortel comme moi ose attaquer ses
droits, ses titres, son existence meme?_

Dr. Clarke, Mr. Hume and Helvetius, are writers whose arguments for and
against a Godhead Dr. Priestley has much noted. The former says, "the
Deity must have been infinite, if self-existent, because all things in
the universe are made by him." Are all things in the universe infinite?
Why an infinite maker of a finite work? It is juster to argue, that
whatever is self-existent must have been eternal. Nor is there any
great objection to the converse of the proposition properly taken, that
whatever is not self-existent must have been created and therefore
cannot have been eternal. If this is fair arguing, matter cannot
according to Dr. Priestley's system have been created and be eternal
also. But Dr. Priestley has no inclination to reconcile his opinions
with those of Dr. Clarke. He has chosen a fairer method, and that is,
to refute the arguments of former asserters of a Deity as well as to
establish his own. Dr. Clarke he most effectually exposes where he
enters upon the subject of space. It seems as if Dr. Clarke, having
asserted that the Deity necessarily existed, had a mind that nothing
else should necessarily exist but the Deity; and conscious that space
at least also necessarily existed, he makes universal space an
attribute of the Deity. With this reverie in his head he raises a
syllogism of complete nonsense (_vide Priestley's Letters_, P. 170.)
where he supposes space to be nothing though he also supposes it to be
an attribute of the Deity. Making it therefore an attribute of the
Deity and knowing that space is eternal