If a great number of men of subtle and penetrating wit have not discovered God with one cast of the eye upon nature, it is not matter of wonder, for either the passions they have been tossed by have still rendered them incapable of any fixed reflection, or the false prejudices that result from passions have, like a thick cloud, interposed between their eyes and that noble spectacle.

A man deeply concerned in an affair of great importance, that should take up all the attention of his mind, might pass several days in a room treating about his concerns without taking notice of the proportions of the chamber, the ornaments of the chimney, and the pictures about him, all of which objects would continually be before his eyes, and yet none of them make any impression upon him.  In this manner it is that men spend their lives.  Everything offers God to their sight, and yet they see Him nowhere.

They pass away their lives without perceiving that sensible representation of the Deity.  Such is the fascination of worldly trifles that obscure their eyes.  Nay, oftentimes they will not so much as open them, but rather affect to keep them shut, lest they should find Him they do not look for.  In short, what ought to help most to open their eyes serves only to close them faster.  I mean the constant duration and regularity of the motions which the Supreme Wisdom has put in the universe.

But, after all, whole nature shows the infinite art of its Maker.  When I speak of an art, I mean a collection of proper means chosen on purpose to arrive at a certain end; or, if you please, it is an order, a method, an industry, or a set design.  Chance, on the contrary, is a blind and necessary cause, which neither sets in order nor chooses anything, and has neither will nor understanding.  Now, I maintain that the universe bears the character and stamp of a cause infinitely powerful and industrious; and, at the same time, that chance—­that is, the fortuitous concourse of causes void of reason—­cannot have formed this universe.

Who will believe that so perfect a poem as Homer’s “Iliad” was not the product of the genius of a great poet, but that the letters of the alphabet, being confusedly jumbled and mixed, were by chance, as it were by the cast of a pair of dice, brought together in such an order as is necessary to describe, in verses full of harmony and variety, so many great events; to place and connect them so well together; to paint every object with all its most graceful, most noble, and most affecting attendants; in short, to make every person speak according to his character in so natural and so forcible a manner?  Let people subtilise upon the matter as much as they please, yet they never will persuade a man of sense that the “Iliad” was the mere result of chance.  How, then, can a man of sense be induced to believe, with respect to the universe, what his reason will never suffer him to believe in relation to the “Iliad”?