lf, though
created, as "an eternal image of the generating Father."[363] This one
thing, at any rate, can not be denied, that Plato recognizes creation in
its fullest sense as the act of God.

The admission that something has always existed besides the Deity, as a
mere logical condition of the exercise of divine power (_e.g._, space),
would not invalidate the argument for the existence of God. The proof of
the Divine Existence, as Chalmers has shown, does not rest on the
existence of matter, but on the orderly arrangement of matter; and the
grand question of Theism is not whether the _matter of the world_, but
whether the _present order of the world_ had a commencement.[364]

2d. Doubt is cast by our author upon the validity of "_the principle of
the Unconditioned or the Infinite_." "Supposing it were conceded that
some faint glimmering of this great truth [the existence of a First
Cause] might, by induction, have been discovered by contemplative minds,
by what means could they have _demonstrated_ to themselves that he is
eternal, self-existent, immortal, and independent?"[365] "Between things
visible and invisible, time and eternity, beings finite and beings
infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith, _the connection is not
perceptible_ to human observation. Though we push our researches,
therefore, to the extreme point whither the light of nature can carry
us, they will in the end be abruptly terminated, and we must stop short
at an immeasurable distance between the creature and the Creator."[366]

[Footnote 363: Plato, "Timaeus," Sec. xiv.]

[Footnote 364: Chalmers's "Natural Theology," bk. i. ch. v.; also
Mahan's "Natural Theology," pp. 21-23.]

[Footnote 365: Watson's "Institutes of Theol.," vol. i. p. 274.]

[Footnote 366: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 273.]

To this assertion that the connection of things visible and things
invisible, finite and infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith,
is utterly imperceptible to human thought, we might reply by quoting the
words of that Sacred Book whose supreme authority our author is seeking,
by this argument, to establish. "The _invisible_ things of God, even his
eternal power and god-head, from the creation, are clearly _seen_, being
_understood by the things which are made_." We may also point to the
fact that in every age and in every land the human mind has
spontaneously and instinctively recognized the existence of an invisible
Power and Presence pervading nat