rpowering, but startling.

4. Then came dissatisfaction with the theories by which unbelievers
sought to account for the existence and order of the universe. They
supposed the universe to be eternal, and attributed the production of
plants, and animals, and man to the blind unconscious working of
lifeless matter. They attributed to dead matter the powers which
believers attributed to a living God. They were obliged to believe that
senseless atoms could produce works transcending the powers of the
mightiest minds on earth. To reconcile their belief in the eternity of
the universe, and in the unchanging properties of matter, with the
phenomena of change and progress, they supposed an infinite succession
of worlds, or of beginnings and endings of the same world, and imagined
the earth running exactly the same course, and having exactly the same
history, every time it came into existence. Hence it became with them an
article of faith, that we had ourselves lived an infinite number of
times, and should live an infinite number of times more in the future,
repeating always exactly the same life, with exactly the same results.
It was also an article of faith that we were mere machines, governed by
powers over which we had no control; that our ideas of liberty, and our
feelings of responsibility, or of good and ill desert, were all
delusions; that all the errors, and crimes, and miseries of our race
were inevitable, and were to be eternally repeated; and that a change
for the better was eternally impossible. But time would fail me to
mention all their theories. It is enough to say that the wild and
unsatisfactory nature of these dreams helped to drive me back to
Christianity.

5. There was, of course, no tendency in unbelief to promote virtue, or
to check vice. Its natural tendency was to utter depravity. And
Christianity retained such an influence over me, even to the last, that
I could never reconcile myself to a vicious life.

6. Then came another trouble. Infidelity could give no guarantee that
wrong should not finally triumph, and right be finally crushed. It is
belief in God alone that can give assurance that virtue shall be
ultimately rewarded, and vice ultimately punished. The Christian can
believe past doubt, that "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap;" that "with what judgment we judge, we shall be judged; and with
what measure we mete, it shall be measured to us again." But the infidel
has no foundation