fficulty, because they may as well be regarded for all
purposes of worship or argument as one God: or the many must have been
in essence more or less disunited; in which case, as a state of any
thing short of pure concord carries in itself the seeds of dissolution,
needs must that one or other of the many (long before any possible
beginnings, as we count beginnings, looking down the past vista of
eternity), would have taken opportunity by such disturbing causes to
become absolute monarch: whether by peaceful persuasion, or hostile
compulsion, or other mode of absorbing disunions, would be indifferent;
if they were not all improbable, as unworthy of the God. Perpetuity of
discord is a thing impossible; every thing short of unity tends to
decomposition. Any how then, given the element of eternity to work in,
a one great Supreme Being was, in the created beginning, an _a priori_
probability. That all other assumptions than that of His true and
eternal Oneness are as false in themselves as they are derogatory to the
rational views of deity, we all now see and believe; but the direct
proofs of this are more strictly matters of revelation than of reason:
albeit reason too can discern their probabilities. Wise heathens, such
as Socrates and Cicero, who had not our light, arrived nevertheless at
some of this perception; and thus, through conscience and intelligence,
became a law unto themselves: because that, to them, as now to any one
of us who may not yet have seen the light, the anterior likelihood
existed for only one God, rather than more; a likelihood which prepares
the mind to take as a fundamental truth, "The Lord our God is one
Jehovah."

Next; Self-existence combined with unity must include the probable
attribute, or character, Ubiquity; as I now proceed to show. On the same
principle as that by which we have seen Something to be likelier than
Nothing, we conclude that the same Something is more probable to be
every where, than the same Nothing (if the phrase were not absurd), to
be any where: we may, so to speak, divide infinity into spaces, and
prove the position in each instance: moreover, as that Something is
essentially--not a unit as of many, but--unity involving all, it follows
as most probable that this Whole Being should be ubiquitous; in other
parlance, that the one God should be every where at once: also, there
being no limit to what we call Space, nor any imaginable hostile power
to place a constraint upon