but an independent Being can have no relations, and consequently must
act without motives. Now, as no intelligent _human_ action can be
imagined without necessary precursors in the shape of motives, reasoning
from analogy, it seems impossible that the unchangeable and independent
Being, Clarke was so sure must ever have existed, could have created the
universe, seeing he could have had no _motive_ or _inducement_ to create
it.

The third dogma may be rated a truism--it being evidently true that a
thing or Being, which has existed from eternity without any eternal
cause of its existence, must be self-existent: but of course that dogma
leaves the disputed question, namely, whether matter, or something _not_
matter, is self-existent, just where it found it.

The fourth dogma is not questioned by Universalists, as they are quite
convinced that it is not possible for us to comprehend the substance or
essence of an immaterial Being.

The other dogmas we need not enlarge upon, as they are little more than
repetition or expansion of the preceding one. Indeed, much of the
foregoing would be superfluous, were it not that it serves to
illustrate, so completely and clearly theistical absurdities. The only
dogma worth overturning, of the eight here noticed, is the _first_, for
if that fall, the rest must fall with it. If, for example, the reader is
convinced that it is more probable matter is mutable as regards _form_
but eternal as regards _essence_, than that it was willed into existence
by a Being said to be eternal and immutable, he at once becomes a
Universalist--for if matter always was, no Being could have been before
it, nor can any exist after it. It is because men in general are shocked
at the idea of matter without beginning and without end, that they do