ething not matter, exists of itself,
and consequently is not an effect, but an uncaused cause of all effects.

From such conviction, repugnant though it be to vulgar ideas, there is
no rational way of escape; for however much we may desire, however much
we may struggle to believe there was a time when there was nothing, we
cannot so believe. Human nature is constituted intuitively or
instinctively to feel the eternity of something. To rid oneself of that
feeling is impossible. Nature or something not Nature must ever have
been, is a conclusion to which what poets call Fate--

Leads the willing and drags the unwilling.

But does this undeniable truth make against Universalism? Far from
it--so far, indeed, as to make for it. The reason is no mystery. Of
matter we have ideas clear, precise, and indispensable, whereas of
something not matter we cannot have any idea whatever, good, bad, or
indifferent. The Universe is extraordinary, no doubt, but so much of it
as acts upon us is perfectly conceivable, whereas, any thing within,
without, or apart from the Universe, is perfectly inconceivably.

The notion of necessarily existing matter seems fatal to belief in God;
that is, if by the word God be understood something not matter, for 'tis
precisely because priests were unable to reconcile such belief with the
idea of matter's self-existence or eternity, that they took to imagining
a 'First cause.'

In the 'forlorn hope' of vanquishing the difficulty of necessarily
existing _Matter_, they assent to a necessarily existing _Spirit_, and
when the nature of spirit is demanded from these assertors of its
existence, they are constrained to avow that it is material or nothing.

Yes, they are constrained to make directly or indirectly one or other of
these admissions; for, as between truth and falsehood, there is no
middle passage; so between something and nothing, there is no
intermediate existence. Hence the serious dilemma of Spiritualists, who
gravely tell us their God is a spirit, and that a spirit is not any
thing, which not any thing or nothing (for the life of us we cannot
distinguish between them) 'framed the worlds' nay, _created_ as well as
framed them.

If it be granted, for the mere purpose of explanation, that spirit is an
entity, we can frame 'clear distinct ideas of'--a real though not
material existence, surely no man will pretend to say an uncreated
Spirit, is less inexplicable than uncreated Matter. Al