sensible of the wonderful art that fills all nature. Poetry did
only ascribe to inanimate creatures the art and design of the
Creator, who does everything in them. From the figurative language
of the poets those notions passed into the theology of the heathens,
whose divines were the poets. They supposed an art, a power, or a
wisdom, which they called numen, in creatures the most destitute of
understanding. With them great rivers were gods; and springs,
naiads. Woods and mountains had their particular deities; flowers
had their Flora; and fruits, Pomona. After all, the more a man
contemplates Nature, the more he discovers in it an inexhaustible
stock of wisdom, which is, as it were, the soul of the universe.

SECT. XC. We must necessarily conclude that there is a First Being
that created the Universe.

What must we infer from thence? The consequence flows of itself.
"If so much wisdom and penetration," says Minutius Felix, "are
required to observe the wonderful order and design of the structure
of the world, how much more were necessary to form it!" If men so
much admire philosophers, because they discover a small part of the
wisdom that made all things, they must be stark blind not to admire
that wisdom itself.

SECT. XCI. Reasons why Men do not acknowledge God in the Universe,
wherein He shows Himself to them, as in a faithful glass.

This is the great object of the universe, wherein God, as it were in
a glass, shows Himself to mankind. But some (I mean, the
philosophers) were bewildered in their own thoughts. Everything
with them turned into vanity. By their subtle reasonings some of
them overshot and lost a truth which a man finds naturally and
simply in himself without the help of philosophy.

Others, intoxicated by their passions, live in a perpetual avocation
of thought. To perceive God in His works a man must, at least,
consider them with attention. But passions cast such a mist before
the eyes, not only of wild savages, but even of nations that seem to
be most civilised and polite, that they do not so much as see the
light that lights them. In this respect the Egyptians, Grecians,
and Romans were no less blind or less brutish than the rudest and
most ignorant Americans. Like these, they lay, as it were, buried
within sensible things without going up higher; and they cultivated
their wit, only to tickle themselves with softer sensations, without
observing from what spring they p