pleased, and endeavour to find out their properties and essences;
and then to tell him, that however trifling these little bits of
matter might appear to him, that they possessed such curious
powers of selection, combination, arrangement, and almost of
creation, that upon being put into the ground, they would choose,
amongst all the dirt and moisture that surrounded them, those
parts which best suited their purpose, that they would collect
and arrange these parts with wonderful taste, judgement, and
execution, and would rise up into beautiful forms, scarcely in
any respect analogous to the little bits of matter which were
first placed in the earth. I feel very little doubt that the
imaginary being which I have supposed would hesitate more, would
require better authority, and stronger proofs, before he believed
these strange assertions, than if he had been told, that a being
of mighty power, who had been the cause of all that he saw around
him, and of that existence of which he himself was conscious,
would, by a great act of power upon the death and corruption of
human creatures, raise up the essence of thought in an
incorporeal, or at least invisible form, to give it a happier
existence in another state.

The only difference, with regard to our own apprehensions,
that is not in favour of the latter assertion is that the first
miracle we have repeatedly seen, and the last miracle we have not
seen. I admit the full weight of this prodigious difference, but
surely no man can hesitate a moment in saying that, putting
Revelation out of the question, the resurrection of a spiritual
body from a natural body, which may be merely one among the many
operations of nature which we cannot see, is an event
indefinitely more probable than the immortality of man on earth,