to that of Master Abraham Slender, when with stammering lips he 'sings
small like a woman.' To assume everything they are always ready; but to
prove anything concerning their Immense Supernatural, they are never
prepared. Regularly drilled to argue in a circle, they foolishly imagine
everybody else should do the same, and marvel at the man who rigidly
adheres to just rules of philosophising and considers experience of
natural derivation a far safer guide than their crude, undigested,
extravagant, contradictory notions about the confessedly _unknown_.

The rule of philosophising just adverted to--that rule which forbids us,
in any case, to choose the greater of two difficulties--is of immense
importance, and should be carefully considered by every one anxious to
arrive at correct conclusions with respect to theology. For if believers
in God do depart from that rule--if their belief necessarily involve its
violation--to persist in such belief is to persist in what is clearly
opposed to pure reason. Now, it has been demonstrated, so far as words
can demonstrate any truth whatever, that the difficulty of him who
believes Nature never had an author, is infinitely less than the
difficulty of him who believes it had a cause itself uncaused. In the
'Elements of Materialism,' an unequal but still admirable work by Dr.
Knowlton, a well-known American writer, this question of comparative
difficulty is well handled, and the Author of this Apology conceives
most satisfactorily exhausted.

'The sentiment,' says the Doctor,' that a being exists which never
commenced existence, or what is the same thing, that a being exists
which has existed from all eternity, appears to us to favour Atheism,
for if one being exist which never commenced existence--why not
another--why not the universe? It weighs nothing, says the Atheist, in
the eye of reason, to say the universe appears to man as though it were