unt some of my lovers are
Pantheists. They deify nature; deify everything, and call it all God. A
few ignorant Christians, on this very account, are ready to give up
their warfare with Pantheists. But the battle is not won because the
word "God" is pronounced; for sober reason says, If nature is _all_
God, she is _a_ God, who is no God; or a nature without a God, just as
you choose to express it. After all, it remains an axiom, that "you can
not get more out of a thing than there is in it." So, of necessity,
there must be, somewhere in this universe, _Eternal life and mind_.
Reader, "how readest thou?"

BLIND FORCE OR INTELLIGENCE, WHICH?

In the discussion of this question I think it proper to submit a few
axiomatic or common-sense truths which are universally admitted by the
unbiased mind.

_First._ "Every effect must have a cause."

_Secondly._ "Every series must have a unit lying at its base."

_Thirdly._ "In every beginning there must be that which began."

_Fourthly._ "Something is eternal."

_Fifthly._ "There can not be an endless succession of dependent things."

_Sixthly._ "There must be that upon which the first dependent link in
the chain of dependent things depended."

_Seventhly._ "That thing, whatever it may be, upon which the first
dependent thing depended, must be eternal."

Was it blind force or intelligence, which?

The existence of a supreme intelligence is the first great leading
thought made known in the Bible.

The first that is made known in unbelief, is the existence of "the
unknown."

When a man adopts the idea of the unknown, he lays down all his strength
to oppose the idea of a supreme intelligence, for what right has he to
dogmatize about the unknown? The use of the word force will not help us
to a better understanding of things. Force is simply the manifestation
of energy, and there must, necessarily, be something lying behind it to
which it, as an attribute or quality, belongs. That "something" the
Bible calls "spirit." It has never been christened with a name by the
unbeliever. Force is the bridge between it and matter, and the bridge
between it and all things upon which it operates. The unbeliever's
"unknown" lies behind force. Has he ever given it a name?

So far as science is concerned, it is paying her proper respect to say
she demands an intelligence in order to account for the wonderful things
with which she has to deal. Laycock, treating upon the questions o