an sect gives
a great handle to atheism by their general dogma, that, without a
revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a God.
Now one sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians: the
other five sixths then, who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian
revelation, are without a knowledge of the existence of a God! This
gives completely a _gain de cause_ to the disciples of Ocellus, Timasus,
Spinosa, Diderot, and D'Holbach. The argument which they rest on as
triumphant and unanswerable is, that in every hypothesis of cosmogony,
you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to
the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to
solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say then, that it is more
simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world,
as it is now going on, and may for ever go on by the principle of
reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal
pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or creator of the world, a being
whom we see not and know not, of whose form, substance, and mode, or
place of existence, or of action, no sense informs us, no power of the
mind enables us to delineate or comprehend. On the contrary, I hold
(without appeal to revelation), that when we take a view of the
universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the
human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate
skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The
movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by
the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our
earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters, and atmosphere;
animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles;
insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or
mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is
impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is
in all this, design, cause, and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a
fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and
regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their
regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of
the necessity of a superintending power, to maintain the universe in
its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have
come into view; comets, in t