s of Newton's,
we are well convinced--for how could the most frenzied of brains imagine
anything more repugnant to every principle of good sense than a
self-existent, eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent Being, creator of all
the worlds, who acts the part of 'universal emperor,' and plays upon an
infinitely larger scale, the same sort of game as Nicholas of Russia, or
Mohammed of Egypt, plays upon a small scale. There cannot be slavery
where there is no tyranny, and to say, as Newton did, that we stand in
the name relation to a universal God, as a slave does to his earthly
master, is practically to accuse such God, at reason's bar of _tyranny_.
If the word God is relative, and relate itself with slaves, it
incontestably follows that all human beings are slaves, and Deity is by
such reasoners degraded into the character of universal slave-driver.
Really, theologians and others who declaim so bitterly against
'blasphemers,' and take such very stringent measures to punish
'infidels', who speaks or write of their God, should seriously consider
whether the worst, that is, the least superstitious of infidel writers,
ever penned a paragraph so disparaging to the character of that God they
effect to adore, as the last quoted paragraph of Newton's.

If even it could be demonstrated that there is a super-human Being, it
cannot be proper to clothe Him in the noblest human attributes--still
less can it be justifiable in pigmies, such as we are, to invest Him
with odious attributes belonging only to despots ruling over slaves.
Besides, how can we imagine a God, who is 'totally destitute of body and
of corporeal figure,' to have any kind of substance? Earthly emperors we
know to be substantial and common-place sort of beings enough, but is it
not sheer abuse of reason to argue as though the character of God were
at all analogous to theirs; or rather, is it not shocking abuse of our
reasoning facilities to employ them at all about a Being whose
existence, if we really have an existence, is perfectly enigmatical, and
allowed to be so by those very men who pretend to explain its character
and attributes? We find no less a sage than Newton explicitly declaring
as incontestible truth, that God exists necessarily--that the same
necessity obliges him to exist always and everywhere--that he is all
eyes, all ears, all brains, all arms, all feeling, all intelligence, all
action--that he exists in a mode by no means corporeal, an yet this same
sage