ith lying disguises, and
persuade men that there is a God:--

There's an eternal God does hear and see
And understand every impiety;
Though it in dark recess or thought committed be.

But this poetical fable ought to be rejected, he thought, along with
Callimachus, who thus saith:--

If you believe a God, it must be meant
That you conceive this God omnipotent.

But God cannot do everything; for, if it were so, then a God could make
snow black, and the fire cold, and him that is in a posture of sitting
to be upright, and so on the contrary. The brave-speaking Plato
pronounceth that God formed the world after his own image; but this
smells rank of the old dotages, old comic writers would say; for how did
God, casting his eye upon himself, frame this universe? Or how can God
be spherical, and be inferior to man?

Anaxagoras avers that bodies did consist from all eternity, but the
divine intellect did reduce them into their proper orders, and effected
the origination of all beings. But Plato did not suppose that the
primary bodies had their consistence and repose, but that they were
moved confusedly and in disorder; but God, knowing that order was better
than confusion, did digest them into the best methods. Both these were
equally peccant; for both suppose God to be the great moderator of human
affairs and for that cause to have formed this present world; when it
is apparent that an immortal and blessed being, replenished with all his
glorious excellencies, and not at all obnoxious to any sort of evil, but
being wholly occupied with his own felicity and immortality, would not
employ himself with the concerns of men; for certainly miserable is the
being which, like a laborer or artificer, is molested by the troubles
and cares which the forming and governing of this world must give him.
Add to this, that the God whom these men profess was either not at all
existing before this present world (when bodies were either reposed or
in a disordered motion), or that at that time God did either sleep, or
else was in a constant watchfulness, or that he did neither of these.
Now neither the first nor the second can be entertained, because they
suppose God to be eternal; if God from eternity was in a continual
sleep, he was in an eternal death,--and what is death but an eternal
sleep?--but no sleep can affect a deity, for the immortality of God and
alliance to death are vastly different. But if God was in