an object of admiration. Divines! You never cease telling us, that
the designs of God are impenetrable; that _his ways are not our ways,
nor his thoughts our thoughts_; that it is absurd to complain of his
administration, of the motives and springs of which we are totally
ignorant; that it is presumption to tax his judgments with injustice,
because we cannot comprehend them. But when you speak in this strain,
do you not perceive, that you destroy with your own hands all your
profound systems, whose only end is to explain to us the ways of
the divinity, which, you say, are impenetrable? Have you penetrated
his judgments, his ways, his designs? You dare not assert it, and
though you reason about them without end, you do not comprehend
them any more than we do. If, by chance, you know the plan of God,
which you wish us to admire, while most people find it so little
worthy of a just, good, intelligent, and reasonable being, no
longer say, this plan is impenetrable. If you are as ignorant of
it as we are, have some indulgence for those who ingenuously confess,
they comprehend nothing in it, or that they see in it nothing divine.
Cease to persecute for opinions, of which you understand nothing
yourselves; cease to defame each other for dreams and conjectures,
which every thing seems to contradict. Talk to us of things intelligible
and really useful to men; and no longer talk to us of the impenetrable
ways of God, about which you only stammer and contradict yourselves.

By continually speaking of the immense depths of divine wisdom,
forbidding us to sound them, saying it is insolence to cite God
before the tribunal of our feeble reason, making it a crime to judge
our master, divines teach us nothing but the embarrassment they are in,
when it is required to account for the conduct of a God, whose conduct
they think marvellous only because they are utterly incapable of
comprehending it themselves.