perceived thus much, he will perhaps think it rather 'too bad' as well
as absurd, to call Universalists 'madmen' for lacking faith in the
monstrous dogma that Nature was caused by 'something amounting to
nothing' itself uncaused.

There is something. That truth admits not of being evidenced. It is,
nevertheless, accepted. It is accepted by men of all religious opinions,
equally with men of no religious opinions. If any truth be self-evident
and eternal, here is that truth. To call it in question would be worse
than idle. We may doubt the reality of an external world, we may be
sceptical as to the reality of our own bodies, but we cannot doubt that
there is something. The proposition falls not within the domain of
scepticism. It must be true. To suppose it false is literally
impossible. Its falsehood would involve contradiction, and all
contradiction involves Impossibility. But, if proof of this were needed,
we have it in the fact that no man, sage or simple, ever pretended to
deny there is something. Whatever men could doubt or deny they have
doubted or denied, but in no country of the world, in no age, has the
dogma--there is something--been denied or even treated as doubtful. Here
then Universalists, Theists, and Polytheists agree. They agree of
necessity. There is no escape from the conclusion that something is,
except we adopt the unintelligible dogma--there is nothing--which no
human being can, as nothing amounts to nothing, and of what amounts to
nothing no one can have an idea. To define the word something by any
other word would be labour in vain. There is no other word in any
language whoso meaning is better understood, and they who do not
understand what it means, if such persons there be, are not likely to
understand the meaning of any word or words whatever. Ideas of nothing
none have. That there is something, we repeat, must be true, all dogmas
or propositions being necessarily true whose denial involves an