The very utmost which any man can assert in
this matter is a negative, a want of knowledge, or a want of power. He
can say, "Human power can not destroy matter;" and, if he pleases, he
may reason thence that human power did not create it. But to assert that
matter is eternal because man can not destroy it, is as if a child
should try to beat the cylinder of a steam engine to pieces, and,
failing in the attempt, should say, "I am sure this cylinder existed
from eternity, because I am unable to destroy it."

But not only is the assertion of the eternity of matter unproven, and
impossible to be proved, it is capable of the most demonstrable
refutation, by one of the recent discoveries of science. The principle
of the argument is so plain that a child of four years old can
understand it. It is simply this, that all substances in heaven and
earth are compounded of several elements; but no compound can be
eternal.

We say to our would-be philosophers, When you tell us that matter is
eternal, how does that account for the formation of this world? What is
this matter you speak of? This world consists not of a philosophical
abstraction called matter, nor yet of one substance known by that name,
but of a great variety of material substances, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon,
sulphur, iron, aluminum, and some fifty others already discovered.[2]
Now, which of these is the eterna-matter you speak of? Is it iron, or
sulphur, or clay, or oxygen? If it is any one of them, where did the
others come from? Did a mass of iron, becoming discontented with its
gravity, suddenly metamorphose itself into a cloud of gas, or into a
pail of water? Or are they all eternal? Have we fifty-seven eternal
beings? Are they all eternal in their present combinations? or is it
only the single elements that are eternal? You see that your
hypothesis--that matter is eternal--gives me no light on the formation
of this world, which is not a shapeless mass of a philosophical
abstraction called matter, but a regular and beautiful building,
composed of a great variety of matters. Was it so from eternity? No man
who was ever in a quarry, or a gravel pit, will say so, much less one
who has the least smattering of chemistry or geology. Do you assert the
eternity of the fifty-seven single substances, either separate or
combined in some other way than we now find them in the rocks, and
rivers, and atmosphere of the earth? Then how came they to get together
at all, and particu