you continue this investigation with us you will find it
so. How did you obtain this idea? Have you seen God? No. Have you heard
him speak? No. If we had we could not be honest without being
Christians?

_Christian_--Gentlemen, have you not contraband goods in your warehouse?
As your eyes have not seen, nor your ears heard, nor your powers of
observation perceived him, and as you acknowledge that every one of your
ideas entered the mind through the aid of one or another of the five
senses, now, I ask, are you logically any better off than before you
found yourselves obliged to relinquish your atheism? Do you not now, as
well as then, occupy unreasonable ground? Having rather conceded that
atheists are fools, and turned _deists_, are you really any better off?
Can you give a reason for your present infidelity? Out of your own
mouths you stand condemned as unreasonable and foolish. You pretend to
venerate reason, while you discard her first principles. You need not
try to evade me at this point by an appeal to nature. Here you can find
no aid, for nature tells us of no first cause. The apple tree, before
this window, now so richly laden with fruit, tells not of its first
cause. If you say it came from an apple-seed, and that from an apple,
and that from another tree, another seed, and another tree, and so on,
in a circle you may always go, for nature does not tell you of a first
tree as a cause uncaused, nor of a Creator, a God. She does not go
behind herself. Gentlemen, have you any reply? If you have, I would like
to hear it.

Reason timidly says: "Mr. C., in your very severe strictures on the
deists, are you not condemning yourself? You pretend to place full
confidence in the teachings of your Bible, and does it not say: 'The
heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his
handiwork?' Can nature thus declare and not make known?"

_Christian_--Yes, your quotation tells the truth; yet in this also you
have taken too much for granted. There stands a clock; it keeps correct
time, but does it declare the glory of any one?

_Deists_--Yes, that of its maker.

_Christian_--But who was its maker. You say you do not know. That is
true, and, for ought you know, or can learn from its mechanism there
might have been several makers connected with its origin. If you had
stood by and seen it made, then you might have told me all about it. In
that which you call the works of nature, neither you, nor I, nor any of