s, particularly if extravagant. Most
likely then, such readers of our Apology as have that organ 'large' will
be delighted with Newton's rhodomontade about a God who resists nothing,
feels nothing, and yet with condescension truly divine, not only
contains all things, but permits them to move in His motionless and
'universal presence'; for 'news' more extravagant, never fell from the
lips of an idiot, or adorned the pages of a prayer-book.

By the same great _savan_, we are taught that God governs all, not as
the soul of the world, but as the Lord and sovereign of all things; that
it is in consequence of His sovereignty He is called the Lord God, the
Universal Emperor--that the word God is relative, and relates itself
with slaves--and that the Deity is the dominion or the sovereignty of
God, not over his own body, as those think who look upon God as the soul
of the world, but over slaves--from all which _slavish_ reasoning, a
plain man who had not been informed it was concocted by Europe's pet
philosopher, would infallibly conclude some unfortunate lunatic had
given birth to it. That there is no creature now tenanting Bedlam who
would or could scribble purer nonsense about God than this of Newton's,
we are well convinced--for how could the most frenzied of brains imagine
anything more repugnant to every principle of good sense than a
self-existent, eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent Being, creator of all
the worlds, who acts the part of 'universal emperor,' and plays upon an
infinitely large scale, the same sort of game as Nicholas of Russia, or
Mohammed of Egypt plays upon a small scale. There cannot be slavery
where there is no tyranny, and to say as Newton did, that we stand in
the same relation to a universal God, as a slave does to his earthly
master, is practically to accuse such God, at reason's bar, of
_tyranny_. If the word of God is relative, and relates itself with
slaves, it incontestably follows that all human beings are slaves, and
Deity is by such reasoners degraded into the character of universal
slave-driver. Really theologians and others who declaim so bitterly
against 'blasphemers,' and take such very stringent measures to punish
'infidels,' who speak or write of their God, should seriously consider
whether the worst, that is, the least religious of infidel writers, ever
penned a paragraph so disparaging to the character of that God they
affect to adore, as the last quoted paragraph of Newton's. If even