our minds in
the union of a Material universe and a Spiritual universe,--a creation
visible, ponderable, tangible, terminating in a creation invisible,
imponderable, intangible; completely dissimilar, separated by the void,
yet united by indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives
equally from the one and from the other! Let us mingle in one world
these two worlds, absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but
conjoined by fact. However abstract man may suppose the relation which
binds two things together, the line of junction is perceptible. How?
Where? We are not now in search of the vanishing point where Matter
subtilizes. If such were the question, I cannot see why He who has, by
physical relations, studded with stars at immeasurable distances the
heavens which veil Him, may not have created solid substances, nor why
you deny Him the faculty of giving a body to thought.

"Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe
are one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from
substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that presses
upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in
us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and
unnamed things compose--in order to fit the problem of Creation to the
measure of your logic--a block of finite Matter; but were it infinite,
God would still not be its master. Now, reasoning with your views, dear
pastor, no matter in what way God the infinite is concerned with this
block of finite Matter, He cannot exist and retain the attributes with
which man invests Him. Seek Him in facts, and He is not; spiritually and
materially, you have made God impossible. Listen to the Word of human
Reason forced to its ultimate conclusions.

"In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only
two states are possible between them,--either God and Matter are
contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter. Were
Reason--the light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its
existence--accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not
invent a third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God.
Let human philosophies pile mountain upon mountain of words and of
ideas, let religions accumulate images and beliefs, revelations and
mysteries, you must face at last this terrible dilemma and choose
between the two propositions which compose it; you have no optio