impossibility. What the nature of that something may be is a secondary
question, and however determined cannot affect the primary dogma--things
are things whatever may be their individual or their aggregate nature.
Nor is it of the least consequence what name or names we may see fit to
give things, so that each word has its fixed and true meaning. Whether,
for example, we use for the sign of that something which is, the word
Universe, or God, or Substance, or Spirit, or Matter, or the letter X,
is of no importance, if we understand the word or letter used to be
merely the sign of that something. Words are seldom useful except when
they are the sign of true ideas; evidently therefore, their legitimate
function is to convey such ideas; and words which convey no ideas at
all, or what is worse, only those which are false, should at once be
expunged from the vocabularies of nations. Something is. The
Universalist calls it matter. Other persons may choose to call it other
names: let them. He chooses to call it this one--and no other.

There ever has been something. Here, again, is a point of unity. All are
equally assured there ever has been something. Something is, something
must always have been, cry the religious, and the cry is echoed by the
irreligious. This last dogma, like the first, admits not of being
evidenced. As nothing is inconceivable, we cannot even imagine a time
when there was nothing. Universalists say, something ever was, which
something is matter. Theists say, something has been from all eternity,
which something is not matter but God. They boldly affirm that matter
began to be. They affirm its creation from nothing, by a something,
which was before the universe. Indeed, the notion of universal creation
involves first, that of universal annihilation, and secondly, that of
something prior to everything. What creates everything must be before
everything, in the same way that he who manufactures a watch must exist
before the watch. As already remarked, Universalists agree with Theists,