basis than their own ignorance;
deifying their own monstrous errors, and filling the earth with misery,
madness, and crime.

The writer who declared theology _ignorance of natural causes reduced to
system_, did not strike wide of the true mark. It is plain that the
argument from design, so vastly favoured by theologians, amounts to
neither more nor less than ignorance of natural causes reduced to
system. An argument to be sound must be soundly premised. But here is an
argument whose primary premise is a false premise--a mere begging of the
very question in dispute. Did Universalists _admit_ the universe was
contrived, designed, or adapted, they could not _deny_ there must have
been at least one Being to contrive, design, or adapt; but they see no
analogy between a watch made with hands out of something, and a universe
made without hands out of nothing. Universalists are unable to perceive
the least resemblance between the circumstance of one intelligent body
re-forming or changing the condition of some other body, intelligent or
non-intelligent, and the circumstance of a bodiless Being creating all
bodies; of a partless Being acting upon all parts; and of a passionless
Being generating and regulating all passions. Universalists consider the
general course of nature, though strangely unheeded, does proclaim with
'most miraculous organ,' that dogmatisers about any such 'figment of
imagination' would, in a rational community, be viewed with the same
feelings of compassion, which, even in these irrational days, are
exhibited towards confirmed lunatics.

The author, while passing an evening with some pleasant people in
Ashton-under-Lyne, heard one of them relate that before the schoolmaster
had made much progress in that _devil-dusted_ neighbourhood, a labouring
man walking out one fine night, saw on the ground a watch, whose ticking
was distinctly audible; but never before having seen anything of the
kind, he thought it a living creature, and full of fear ran back among
his neighbours, exclaiming that he had seen a most marvellous thing, for
which he could conceive of no better name than CLICKMITOAD. After
recovering from their surprise and terror, this 'bold peasant' and his
neighbours, all armed with pokers and other formidable weapons, crept up
to the ill-starred ticker, and smashed it to pieces.

The moral of this anecdote is no mystery. Our clickmitoadist had never
seen watches, knew nothing about watches, and hearin