If even it could be demonstrated that there is a super-human Being, it
cannot be proper to clothe Him in the noblest human attributes--still
less can it be justifiable in pigmies, such as we are, to invest Him
with odious attributes belonging only to despots ruling over slaves.
Besides, how can we imagine a God, who is 'totally destitute of body and
of corporeal figure,' to have any kind of substance? Earthly emperors we
know to be substantial and common-place sort of beings enough, but is it
not sheer abuse of reason to argue as though the character of God were
at all analogous to theirs; or rather, is it not shocking abuse of our
reasoning facilities to employ them at all about a Being whose
existence, if we really have an existence, is perfectly enigmatical, and
allowed to be so by those very men who pretend to explain its character
and attributes? We find no less a sage than Newton explicitly declaring
as incontestible truth, that God exists necessarily--that the same
necessity obliges him to exist always and everywhere--that he is all
eyes, all ears, all brains, all arms, all feeling, all intelligence, all
action--that he exists in a mode by no means corporeal, an yet this same
sage, in the self-same paragraph, acknowledges God is _totally unknown
to us_.

Now, we should like to be informed by what _reasonable_ right Newton
could pen a long string of 'incontestible truths,' such as are here
selected from his writings, with respect to a Being of whom, by his own
confession, he had not a particle of knowledge. Surely it is not the
part of a wise man to write about that which is 'totally unknown' to
him, and yet that is precisely what Newton did, when he wrote concerning
God.

So much for the Theism of Europe's chief religious philosopher. Turn we