ponderable, tangible, terminating in a creation invisible, imponderable, intangible; completely dissimilar, separated by the void, yet united by indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives equally from the one and from the other!  Let us mingle in one world these two worlds, absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but conjoined by fact.  However abstract man may suppose the relation which binds two things together, the line of junction is perceptible.  How?  Where?  We are not now in search of the vanishing point where Matter subtilizes.  If such were the question, I cannot see why He who has, by physical relations, studded with stars at immeasurable distances the heavens which veil Him, may not have created solid substances, nor why you deny Him the faculty of giving a body to thought.

“Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe are one and the same matter.  We will not separate properties from substances, nor objects from effects.  All that exists, all that presses upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and unnamed things compose—­in order to fit the problem of Creation to the measure of your logic—­a block of finite Matter; but were it infinite, God would still not be its master.  Now, reasoning with your views, dear pastor, no matter in what way God the infinite is concerned with this block of finite Matter, He cannot exist and retain the attributes with which man invests Him.  Seek Him in facts, and He is not; spiritually and materially, you have made God impossible.  Listen to the Word of human Reason forced to its ultimate conclusions.

“In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only two states are possible between them,—­either God and Matter are contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter.  Were Reason—­the light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its existence —­accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not invent a third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God.  Let human philosophies pile mountain upon mountain of words and of ideas, let religions accumulate images and beliefs, revelations and mysteries, you must face at last this terrible dilemma and choose between the two propositions which compose it; you have no option, and one as much as the other leads human reason to Doubt.

“The problem thus established, what signifies Spirit or Matter?  Why trouble about the march of the worlds in one direction or in another, since the Being who guides them is shown to be an absurdity?  Why continue to ask whether man is approaching heaven or receding from it, whether creation is rising towards Spirit or descending towards Matter, if the questioned universe gives no reply?  What signifies theogonies and their armies, theologies and their dogmas, since whichever side of the problem is man’s choice, his God exists not?  Let us for a moment take