larly how did they put themselves in their present
shapes?

Each of them is a piece of matter of which _inertia_ is a primary and
inseparable property. Matter _of itself_ can not begin to move, or
assume a quiescent state after being put in motion.

Will you tell us that the fifty-seven primary elements danced about till
the air, and sea, and earth, somehow jumbled themselves together into
the present shape of this glorious and beautiful world, with all its
regularity of day and night, and summer and winter, with all its
beautiful flowers and lofty trees, with all its variety of birds, and
beasts, and fishes? To bring the matter down to the level of the
intellect of the most stupid pantheist, tell us in plain English, _Did
the paving stones make themselves?_ For the paving stones are _made_ out
of a dozen different chemical constituents, and each one is built up
more ingeniously than the house you live in. _Now, did the paving stones
make themselves?_

No conviction of the human mind is more certain than the belief that
every combination of matter proves the existence of a combiner, that
every house has had a builder, and that every machine has had a maker.
No matter how simple the combination, if it be only two laths fastened
together by a nail, or two bricks cemented with mortar, or the sole of
an old pegged boot, all the atheists in the world could not convince you
that those two laths, or those two bricks, or those two bits of leather
existed in such a combination from all eternity. If any wise philosopher
tried to persuade you that for anything you could tell they might have
been always so, you would reply, "No, sir! You can't cram such stuff
down my throat. Even a child's common sense shows him that those two
laths were not always so nailed together; that those two bricks were not
always so placed, one on the top of the other; and that those two pieces
of old sole leather were not always pegged together in the sole of a
boot." There is no conviction more irresistible than our belief that
_no compound can possibly be eternal_.

But the universe is the greatest of all compounds. Everything in it is
compound. Chemists speak of simple substances, or elements of matter,
and it is well enough to separate the elements of things in our
thoughts, for the sake of distinct consideration, and to speak of the
properties of pure oxygen, or of pure hydrogen, or of pure carbon, or of
pure gold, or of pure iron, or of pure sil