nearer the
completion of his world-making? As Cornwallis declared that the conquest
of India resolved itself ultimately into a question of bullocks, the
prime consideration in the construction of the world, after you have got
your materials, is that of transportation. When one beholds the three
great stones in the temple of Baalbec, each weighing eleven hundred
tons, built into the wall twenty feet high, and a fourth in the quarry,
a mile away, nearly ready for removal, he asks, "How did the builders
move those immense stones, and raise them to their places?" And when we
behold the quarry out of which these stones were taken, and all the
other quarries of the world, and all the everlasting mountains, and the
whole of this solid earth, and boundless sea, brought, as our theorists
affirm, from far beyond the orbit of the most distant planet, we raise
the question of transportation, and demand some account of the wagon and
team which hauled them to their places. We can not get rid of the
necessity for transportation by evaporating the building stones into
gas, for a world of gas weighs just as many tons as the world made out
of it. Before we can make a world we must have _power_; but we can never
get power out of the world to build itself. The atheists' world is only
a great machine. The first law of mechanics is that action and reaction
are equal; consequently machinery can never create power. You will never
lift yourself by pulling at your boot-straps; much less can a machine
lift and carry itself.

It is no matter how big you make the wheels of your machine, as big as
the orbits of the planets if you like, still it is only a machine,
unless it has a mind in it; and your big machine can no more create
power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch. Nor does it make
the least difference in respect to making power, of what materials your
perpetual motion peddler makes his machine--whether of a skein of silk
on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon
diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds
into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these
materials, as destitute of power as the smaller machines made out of it.
The atheists' universe is only a big machine, and no machine can create
power, no more than a paving stone.

It has been, however, proposed to manufacture power by the law of
gravitation, according to which all bodies attract each