more and more of fog and moonshine,--fog floating in German cellars from
fumes of lager-beer, and moonshine gleaming from the imaginations of the
drinkers. Some, like Socrates and Plato, will have a God supreme,
personal, glorious, somewhat like the true; and with him many inferior
deities,--animating the stars, the earth, mountains, valleys, plains, the
sea, rivers, fountains, the air, trees, flowers, and all living things.
Some will deny a personal God, and conceive, instead, the intelligent mind
of the universe, without love. Some will contend for mere law,--of
gravitation and attraction; and some will suggest that all is the result
of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Here, having passed through the
shadows and the darkness, we have reached the blackness of
infidelity,--blank atheism. No God--yea, all the way the "_fools_" were
saying in their hearts, no God. What now is man? Alas! some, the Notts and
Gliddons, tell us, man was indeed _created_ millions of ages ago, the Lord
only knows when, in swarms like bees to suit the zones of the
earth,--while other some, the believers in the _vestiges of creation_, say
man is the result of development,--from fire, dust, granite, grass, the
creeping thing, bird, fish, four-footed beast, monkey. Yea, and some of
these last philosophers are even now going to Africa to try to find men
they have heard tell of, who still have tails and are jumping and climbing
somewhere in the regions around the undiscovered sources of the Nile.

This is the progress and the result of the Edwards theory; because, deny
or hesitate about revelation, and man cannot prove, _absolutely_, any of
the things we are considering. Let us see if he can. Edwards writes, "On
the supposition that the will or law of God is the primary foundation,
reason, and standard of right and virtue, every attempt _to prove the
moral perfection or attributes of God is absurd_." Here, then, Edwards
believes, that, to reach the primary foundation of right and virtue, he
must not take God's word as to his perfection or attributes, no matter how