for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical
balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony,
according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and
we may paint it over with the figures of the various animals and noble
savages which ought to have sprung up out of its fornea, and we may
stripe its history to suit our notions of the progress of such a world,
and soaring high into the clouds, after a little preliminary amusement
in the discovery of eternal red-hot fire-mists, and condensing comets,
and so forth, we may come down upon the summit of some of this earth's
mountains, say Ararat, and take a survey of the Bible process of
world-making. Finding that the Creator of the world had to make his
materials--a business in which no other world-maker ever did
engage--and, further, that God's plan of making it by no means
corresponds to our patent process and that the article is not at all
like what we intend to produce when we go into the business, and that it
does not work according to our expectations, we can denounce the whole
as a very mean affair, and the Book which describes it as not worth
reading. If one wants some new subject for merriment, and does not mind
making a fool of himself, and is not to be terrified by old-fashioned
notions about God Almighty, and is perfectly confident that God can tell
him nothing that he does not know better already, and merely wants to
see whether he is not trying to pass off old fables upon wide-awake
people for facts--this dogmatic plan will suit him.

On the other hand, if one is tolerably convinced that he does not know
everything, not much of the world he lives in, less of its history, and
nothing at all about the best way of making it, and that when it needs
mending it will not be sent to his workshop; that he knows nothing about
what happened before he was born unless what other people tell him, and
that, though men do err, yet all men are not liars, that all the
blessings of education, civilization, law and liberty, from the penny
primer to the Constitution of the United States, came to him solely
through the channel of abundant, reliable testimony; that the only way
in which he can ever know anything beyond his eyesight with certainty,
is to gather testimony about it, and compare the evidence, and inquire
into the character of the witnesses; that when one has done so, he
becomes so satisfied of the truth of the re