olding that abundance even from the unthankful. In
fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the
scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the
Creation.

CHAPTER X - CONCERNING GOD, AND THE LIGHTS CAST ON HIS EXISTENCE

AND ATTRIBUTES BY THE BIBLE.

THE only idea man can affix to the name of God, is that of a first
cause, the cause of all things. And, incomprehensibly difficult as it is
for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief
of it, from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is
difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end;
but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the
power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but
it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time.

In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the
internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence
to himself, that he did not make himself; neither could his father make
himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any
tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising
from this evidence, that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to
the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally
different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of
which all things exist; and this first cause, man calls God.

It is only by the exercise of reason, that man can discover God. Take
away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything;
and in this case it would be just as consistent to read even the book
called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How then is it that those
people pretend to reject reason?

Almost the only parts in the book called the Bible, that convey to
us any idea of God, are some chapters in Job, and the 19th Psalm; I
recollect no other. Those parts are true deistical compositions;
for they treat of the Deity through his works. They take the book of
Creation as the word of God; they refer to no other book; and all the
inferences they make are drawn from that volume.

I insert in this place the 19th Psalm, as paraphrased into English verse
by Addison. I recollect not the prose, and where I write this I have not
the opportunity of seeing it:

The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue etherial sky,
And spangled heave