cannot attach rational ideas to
names assumed to stand for something above nature. It is easy to talk
about seeing the Creator in creation, looking through nature up to
nature's God, and the like, but very difficult to have any idea whatever
of a God without body, parts, or passions; that is to say, the God set
forth in one of the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles.

No such God can be believed to exist by reasoners who rigidly abide by
John Locke's rule of philosophising, and if it be urged that he, the
author of the rule, was a Theist and a Christian--our answer is, that in
such case, like many other philosophers, he practically gave the lie to
his own best precept.

Books have been written to exhibit the difficulties of (what priests
choose to call) Infidelity; and without doubt unbelief _has_ its
difficulties. But according to a universally recognised rule of
philosophising, of two difficulties we are in all cases to choose the
least. From a rule so palpably just no one can reasonably depart, and
the Atheist, while freely admitting a great difficulty on his own side,
is satisfied there can be demonstrated an infinitely greater difficulty
on the side of his opponents. The Atheist labours to convince mankind
they are not warranted by the general course of Nature in assigning to
it a Cause, inasmuch as it is more in accordance with experience to
suppose Nature the uncaused cause, than to imagine, as religionists do,
that there is an uncaused cause of Nature.

Theologians ask, who created Nature? without adducing satisfactory
evidence that Nature was created, and without reflecting that if it is
difficult to believe Nature self-existent, it is much more difficult to
believe some self-existent Super-nature, capable of producing it. In
their anxiety to get rid of a natural difficulty, they invent a
supernatural one, and accuse Atheists of 'wilful blindness,' and
'obstinate deafness,' for not choosing so unphilosophic a mode of
explaining universal mystery. Call upon them to define their
'all-creative Deity,' and they know not what to answer. Ask them who,
what, or where He is, and at once you have them on the hip; at once you
spy their utter ignorance, and reduce them to a condition very similar
to that of Master Abraham Slender, when with stammering lips he 'sings
small like a woman.' To assume everything they are always ready; but to
prove anything concerning their Immense Supernatural, they are never
prepared