and that he were eminent in his way too; you would not imagine that it came by chance; would you?"

Ans. There is no argument here: we know men, and we know houses are their works, from experience and observation; but we have had no access for experience or observation in the framing of worlds. Neither can we know by a man's workmanship, except we antecedently know his manner by some former known works of his, who the workman is, so as to be able to say, This is he. And these shew you nothing of his moral character. But we are obliged to revelation for telling us, that "He who built all things is God."

But, proceeds the man of the natural knowledge of God; "Were you to cast thousands of thousands of all the letters in the alphabet together promiscuously, into a large dice-box, and them shake, and jumble, and tumble them forth upon a board, would they by chance arrange themselves into the form of that grand and elegant poem, Paradise Lost?"-Alas for the poor man, and those who are deceived by such cob-web sophistries! But cob-webs entangle flies, and spiders devour them, and grow still more poisonous they older the grow; and it may be added, that Beelzebub, as the name signifies, is the god of flies and vermin.

Is not their paradise, think you, in a fair way of being for ever lost, who have the god of paradise to forge out for themselves, the best way they may, from such unlikely-like masses as the arguments, or similies rather, of the cave, the house, the dice-box, and such like doughty demonstrations! For such, my plain, honest, country friends, really is their way and manner, and spirit of argumentation, and their very expressions too, which I dare say you may have heard in their doctrines, and read in their systems (if you have been so unhappy as to know such depths of Satan) of natural religion, a hundred times over and over-And which, as to the main substance, they have only retailed and hawked about from a few stale heathen authors.

One of these last, called Cicero, or Tully the orator,

has left us a precious treatise about the nature of the gods, (for the very title says, he acknowledged many,) whose authority and opinion ever since have been powerfully boasted of as decisive in this case:-That there is no nation or people under heaven so barbarous, as not to have worshipped some god, gods, goddess, or goddesses; either he-gods, or she-gods, you must know, of some kind or other, according to their humour; for it seems a humour of that kind they had. And so, the universal consent of all nations is brought in for a proof of the being of God; and that he is discoverable, and has actually been discovered, by natural reason-For, in this case, the voice of the people must be the voice of God! and, instead of God making the people for himself, the people must needs be trying their hand at making for themselves a god or gods, goddess or goddesses! O sweet doctrine to the enemy of God and man! Nay, the very notion or apprehension of the people, however come by, that there is such a sort of being or beings, which they call god or gods, he or she, (for the sex makes no difference,) though as unlike in character and power as Satan to the Holy Ghost, must needs, with some masters of reason, pass for a notable demonstration of the being of God!

Thus, like silly school-boys, they get their lesson from their book, as their master has prescribed their task; and then having conned it over a sufficient time by themselves, away they go like men of abilities, and set up for noble champions of natural religion, redoubted wights! the very oracles of reason, to be sure!

Yet how come men, owning revelation, to set up heathen philosophers, modern gazetteers, or travellers, or human reason, and the grossest lies, in opposition to the word of God, which expressly asserts, That though all nations worshipped their own gods, as they had gods many, and lords many; yet not one of any nation either knew or worshipped God, even the living and true God, besides whom there is no god, but only those who were taught of himself by his own word and

Spirit, as has been already abundantly made out by that word.

DR. CLARKE'S DEMONSTRATION OF THE BEING AND ATTRIBUTES OF GOD.

But see! here comes an able reasoner indeed-even the famous Dr. Clarke, surpassing all who have gone before him on the topics of his handling! And now for demonstration-Yes, yes, a very plain and rational "Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God."

As for the Being of God, that is, of a first, original, unoriginated cause of all things, independent of all, and existent of himself alone, nothing is more plain in the eye of reason, according to this author; nay, revelation cannot prove it, nor be received as a revelation before it be proved; nor does revelation attempt to prove it. So that if reason can't demonstrate to itself the being of God, the being of God must remain unknown for ever, for all that revelation can do; seeing it is a business only to be made out by the dint of reasoning itself, if you will be so kind as credit the philosophers. "What!" say they, "revelation attempt to prove an impossibility!" But the good doctor-(O self-denied, unself-sufficient man!) he shall do it presently, thus.Attend to the process of the argument.

"No being can produce another being or thing before itself exist." Very true. "But the world exists: therefore the world behoved to be produced by some other being, which must have existed before the world. And what can that being, which must have existed before the world, to produce it, be, but God?"

But here, if any one ask, How came that First Being itself, which is called God, so necessary for the production of the world, to exist? for if the Doctor and his familiar, Reason, are to set revelation aside, and take the proof in their own hands, they must account for that too-and nothing more easily done, if you make no unhappy reply, thus-by confining the argu

ment, like a river within its proper banks, to one species of things, and expressing yourself by the noted simile of a chain consisting of many thousand links; you begin at the link nearest you, which is yourself, and you reason with yourself; for as yet you have nothing to do with revelation; though, if you go on climbing your chain aright, after you have come to the uppermost link, that is, the First Cause, you may perhaps arrive at revelation in the sequel, before all be over, provided always you make no mistake or false step in your progress, but argue with your own bosom, after this clear and demonstrative manner following-" "Well, here I am, with all my powers, members, and faculties of body and mind about me; but how came I to be this being that I am? Aye, there's the question. I could not be the cause of my own being, that's certain; for, as already agreed upon, nothing can act, or cause another thing to be, before itself be first caused to be-and that for this plain reason, that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, and in the same respect; existence and non-existence being a contradiction in terms, which, however, behoved to agree before a thing could exist to act as the cause of its own existence-for the cause, in the nature of things, must be before the thing caused. Who acted then as the immediate cause of my being? Why, my parents. Now, my parents could not be the cause of their own being, more than I of mine; and for the same reason, because they could not act as the causes of another being before they themselves existed, as the effects of some former cause or causes, which behoved to be their parents, who also must have sprung from parents before them, and they from theirs; till at the last and long-run, mounting, in a rising progression, by what I may call a numberless flight of genealogical stairs, from son to father, I come up to the first man that ever in the world I can suppose to have existed.Well, shall I stop now? I have done my utmost in this way of subordinate and successive causes; I have exhausted all my reasoning powers; I have run to the

end of my metaphysical line; I am lost in amazement, confusion, and absolute ignorance. Farther than this first man, I have no knowledge-no understanding at all, nor conception-How he should have been able to have caused his own being, or to have been at all, more than I, or any other man or creature, without some certain first cause, to have caused his existence, it is downrightly impossible for me to conceive: and therefore, upon this very account, because it is impossible for me either to believe or conceive this, I do believe, and conceive, and conclude, that there must of necessity be something which had no cause at all of its existence Which therefore behoves to be the original cause of all things; which can be nothing else but God." Whose necessary existence the grave and good divine has found means, as you have seen, to unhinge from its own proper evidence, the demonstration of the Holy Ghost, and the power of God himself in his word, and to fix it again in a way more satisfactory to himself and thousands of others, by the pure dint and force of his own great and unassisted genius, altogether without the word!

But, without irony, which the scripture has exemplified as lawful to be used in cases of this kind, if you were not compelled by matter of fact, (as the book and argument are tossed about every where in the academical schools, and not seldom advanced in the pulpit and common conversation, by your natural-religion men,) would you deem it possible that any man in his right mind, who has not a design against the Godhead, can think of adopting this for a demonstration of the being of a God?

Here, I confess, it is with the highest reluctance and regret that I have been obliged, for the sake of injured truth, to particularize this or any other author, and endeavour to expose his capital argument; which I take to be a wicked speech for God-even a lie laid for a foundation to truth; the natural and unavoidable tendency of which is, slily to undo the universal existence,