and certain of; and, in short, be reduced to believe that we have no eligibility or choice of two courses, or things proposed, about which we fairly deliberate upon any occasion.  Nothing does religion more honour than to see men necessitated to fall into such gross and monstrous extravagance as soon as they call in question the truths she teaches.  On the other hand, if we own that man is truly free, we acknowledge in him a principle that never can be seriously accounted for, either by the combinations of atoms or the laws of local motion, which must be supposed to be all equally necessary and essential to matter, if one denies a first mover.  We must therefore go out of the whole compass of matter, and search far from combined atoms some incorporeal principle to account for free-will, if we admit it fairly.  Whatever is matter and an atom, moves only by necessary, immutable, and invincible laws:  wherefore liberty cannot be found either in bodies, or in any local motion; and so we must look for it in some incorporeal being.  Now whose hand tied and subjected to the organs of this corporeal machine that incorporeal being which must necessarily be in me united to my body?  Where is the artificer that ties and unites natures so vastly different?  Can any but a power superior both to bodies and spirits keep them together in this union with so absolute a sway?  Two crooked atoms, says an Epicurean, hook one another.  Now this is false, according to his very system; for I have demonstrated that those two crooked atoms never hook one another, because they never meet.  But, however, after having supposed that two crooked atoms unite by hooking one another, the Epicurean must be forced to own that the thinking being, which is free in his operations, and which consequently is not a collection of atoms, ever moved by necessary laws, is incorporeal, and could not by its figure be hooked with the body it animates.  Thus which way so ever the Epicurean turns, he overthrows his system with his own hands.  But let us not, by any means, endeavour to confound men that err and mistake, since we are men as well as they, and no less subject to error.  Let us only pity them, study to light and inform them with patience, edify them, pray for them, and conclude with asserting an evident truth.

Sect.  LXXXVIII.  We must necessarily acknowledge the Hand of a First Cause in the Universe without inquiring why that first Cause has left Defects in it.

Thus everything in the universe—­the heavens, the earth, plants, animals, and, above all, men—­bears the stamp of a Deity.  Everything shows and proclaims a set design, and a series and concatenation of subordinate causes, over-ruled and directed with order by a superior cause.