e soul of man
did not make itself. The body of man did not make itself. They must have
had an intelligent Creator, who is God. God is known by his works to be
distinct from them, and superior to them. The work is not the workman.
The house is not the builder. The watch is not the watchmaker. The sum
of all the works of any worker is not the agent who produced them. Let
an architect spend his life in building a city, yet the city is not the
builder. The maker is always distinct from, and superior to, the thing
made. You and I, and the universe, are made. Our Maker, then, is
distinct from, and superior to us. One plan gives order to the universe;
therefore, one mind originated it. The Creator is over all his
creatures.

2. _Our consciousness confirms it._ If a blind god could not make a
seeing man, a god destitute of the principle of self-consciousness (if
such an abuse of language may be tolerated for a moment) could not
impart to man the conviction, _I am_,--the ineradicable belief that I am
not the world, nor any other person; much less, everybody; but that I am
a person, possessed of powers of knowing, thinking, liking and
disliking, judging, approving of right, and disapproving of wrong, and
choosing and willing my conduct. My Maker has at least as much common
sense as he has given me. He that teacheth man knowledge, shall he not
know?

3. _Our ignorance and weakness demand a Governor of the world wiser than
ourselves._ The soul of man is not the highest intelligence in the
universe. It can not know the mode of its own operation on the body it
inhabits, much less the plan of the world's management. Man may know
much about what does not concern him, and about things over which he has
no control; but it is the will of God that his pride should feel the
curb of ignorance and impotence where his dearest interests are
concerned, that so he may be compelled to acknowledge that God is
greater than man. He may be able to tell the place of the distant
planets a thousand years hence, but he can not tell where himself shall
be next year. He can calculate for years to come the motions of the
tides, which he can not control, but can not tell how his own pulse
shall beat, or whether it shall beat at all, to-morrow. Ever as his
knowledge of the laws by which God governs the world increases, his
conviction of his impotence grows; and he sees and feels that a wiser
head and stronger hand than that of any creature, planned and
admi