Clothed
in no other panoply than their own conceits they deem themselves
invulnerable. While uttering the wildest incoherencies their
self-complacency remains undisturbed. They remind one of that ambitious
crow who, thinking more highly of himself than was quite proper,
strutted so proudly about with the Peacock's feathers in which he had
bedecked himself.--Like him, they plume themselves upon their own
egregious folly, and like him should get well _plucked_ for their pains.

Let any one patiently examine their much talked of argument from design,
and he will be satisfied that these are no idle charges. That argument
has for its ground-work beggarly assumption, and for its main pillar,
reasoning no less beggarly. Nature must have had a cause, because it
evidently is an effect. The cause of Nature must have been one God,
because two Gods, or two million Gods, could not have agreed to cause
it. That cause must be omnipotent, wise, and good, because all things
are double one against another, and He has left nothing imperfect. Men
make watches, build ships or houses, out of pre-existing metals, wood,
hemp, bricks, mortar, and other materials, therefore God made nature out
of no material at all. Unassisted nature cannot produce the phenomena we
behold, therefore such phenomena clearly prove there is something
unnatural. Not to believe in a God who designed Nature, is to close both
ears and eyes against evidence, therefore Universalists are wilfully
deaf and obstinately blind.

These are samples of the flimsy stuff, our teachers of what nobody
knows, would palm upon us as demonstration of the Being and Attributes
of God.

By artfully taking for granted what no Universalist can admit, and
assuming cases altogether dissimilar to be perfectly analogous, our
natural theologians find no difficulty in proving that God is, was, and
ever will be; that after contemplating His own perfections, a period
sufficiently long for 'eternity to begin and end in,' He said, let there
be matter, and there was matter; that with Him all things are possible,
and He, of course, might easily have kept, as well as made, man upright
and happy, but could not consistently with his own wisdom, or with due
regard to his own glorification. Wise in their generation, these 'blind
leaders of the blind' ascribe to this Deity of their own invention
powers impossible, acts inconceivable, and qualities incompatible; thus
erecting doctrinal systems on no sounder