with desperate
earnestness.

Locke wrote rather disparagingly of 'many among us,' who will be found
upon Inquiry, to fancy God in the shape of a man fitting in heaven, and
have other absurd and unfit conceptions of him.' As though it were
possible to think of shapeless Being, or as though it were criminal in
the superstitious to believe 'God made man after his own image.'

That Christians as well as Turks 'really have had whole sects earnestly
contending that the Deity was corporeal and of human shape', is a fact,
so firmly established as to defy contradiction. And though every sincere
subscriber to the Thirty Nine Articles must believe, or at least must
believe he believes in Deity without body, parts, or passions, it is
well known that 'whole sects' of Christians do even now 'fancy God in
the shape of a man sitting in heaven, and entertain other absurd and
unfit conceptions of him.'

Mr. Collibeer, who is considered by Christian writers 'a most ingenious
gentleman', has told the world in his Treatise entitled 'The Knowledge
of God,' that Deity must have some form, and intimates it may probably
be the spherical; an intimation which has grievously offended many
learned Theists who considered going so far an abuse of reason, and warn
us that 'its extension beyond the assigned boundaries, has proved an
ample source of error.' But what the 'assigned boundaries' of reason
are, they don't state, nor by whom 'assigned.' That if there is a God he
must have _some_ form is self-evident and why Mr. Collibeer should be
ostracized by his less daringly imaginative brethren, for preferring a
spherical to a square or otherwise shaped Deity, is to my understanding
what God's grace is to their's.

But admitting the unfitness, and absurdity, and 'blasphemy' of such
conceptions, it is by no means clear that any other conceptions of the
'inconceiveable' would be an improvement upon them. Undoubtedly, the
matter-God-system has its difficulties, but they are trifles in
comparison with those by which the spirit-God system is encompassed;
for, one obvious consequence of faith in bodiless Divinity is an utter
confusion of ideas in those who preach it, as regards possibilities and
impossibilities.

The universe is an uncaused existence, or it was caused by something
before it. By universe we mean matter, the sum total of things, whence
all proceeds, and whither all returns. No truth is more obviously true
than the truth that matter, or som