t services the resulting structures would be fitted
to render. In other words, they must in their constructive operations
have worked towards specific ends, according to preconceived plan and
set design, wittingly contriving various machines for various purposes.
The advanced Atheists, with whose speculations we are here especially
concerned, are thus at liberty to choose between two horns of a dilemma,
but must not hope to escape both. Either they stand self-refuted by
assuming something to have been made out of nothing--a process which
they began by pronouncing impossible--or they must imagine intelligence,
competent to devise all organisms, to be diffused throughout the
universe, thereby showing themselves to have assumed their sectarian
appellation without sufficient warrant, and to be in reality rather
Pantheists than Atheists.

A third hypothesis indeed remains for any who are content to believe
that Nature's elementary forces having, without knowing what they were
about, constructed the human body, the human mind, until then a
houseless wanderer, lit upon it by chance, and, observing it to be a
habitation suitably swept and garnished, entered in and dwelt there.
Upon this supposition there must be, within the limits of our terrene
sphere, two distinct species of intelligence, a greater and a
lesser--the one competent to construct all sorts of marvellously complex
and marvellously serviceable machines, yet incompetent to understand
their utility, the other fully perceiving the utility of the machines,
yet utterly incompetent to fabricate them. But there are probably few
adventurers on the ocean of speculation who would not prefer total
shipwreck to the shelter of such a harbour of refuge as this.

Atheism must in fairness be acknowledged to have much mended its manners
within the last two or three generations. Its tone and language are no
longer of the rude, scoffing sort at which Voltaire may be readily
pictured as breaking into voluble protest, or Hume as contemptuously
opening his eyes and shrugging his shoulders. Though grown more civil,
however, it cannot be complimented on having grown more rational. At
most may it be credited with being more elaborately irrational than of
old. It now no longer denies, it only ignores. It does not pronounce God
non-existent. It only insists that there is not complete proof that God
exists; thereupon, however, proceeding to argue as if He did not exist,
and thereby, not simp