The acuteness and, accuracy of this reasoning can only be disputed by
persons wedded to system, who either lack capacity to understand what is
advanced in opposition to it, or,

Being convinced against their will,
Are of the same opinion still.

Experience, the only safe guide on religious as well as other topics,
lends no sanction to belief in design apart from material agency. By
artfully taking for granted what no Atheist can admit and assuming cases
altogether dissimilar to be perfectly analogous, our natural theologians
find no difficulty in proving that God is, was, and ever will be; that
after contemplating His own perfections, a period sufficiently long for
'eternity to begin and end in,' He said, let there be matter, and there
was matter; that with Him all things are possible, and He, of course,
might easily have kept, as well as made, man upright and happy, but
could not consistently with his own wisdom, or with due regard to his
own glorification. Wise in their generation, these 'blind leaders of the
blind' ascribe to this Deity of their own invention, powers impossible,
acts inconceivable, and qualities incompatible; thus erecting doctrinal
systems on no sounder basis than their own ignorance; deifying their own
monstrous errors, and filling the earth with misery, madness, and crime.

The writer who declared theology _ignorance of natural causes reduced to
system_, did not strike wide of the true mark. It is plain that the
argument from design, so vastly favoured by theologians, amounts to
neither more nor less than ignorance of natural causes reduced to
system. An argument to be sound must be soundly premised. But here is an
argument whose primary premise is a false premise--a mere begging of the
very question in dispute. Did Atheists _admit_ the universe was