up the first proposition, and suppose God contemporaneous with Matter.  Is subjection to the action or the co-existence of an alien substance consistent with being God at all?  In such a system, would not God become a secondary agent compelled to organize Matter?  If so, who compelled Him?  Between His material gross companion and Himself, who was the arbiter?  Who paid the wages of the six days’ labor imputed to the great Designer?  Has any determining force been found which was neither God nor Matter?  God being regarded as the manufacturer of the machinery of the worlds, is it not as ridiculous to call Him God as to call the slave who turns the grindstone a Roman citizen?  Besides, another difficulty, as insoluble to this supreme human reason as it is to God, presents itself.

“If we carry the problem higher, shall we not be like the Hindus, who put the world upon a tortoise, the tortoise on an elephant, and do not know on what the feet of their elephant may rest?  This supreme will, issuing from the contest between God and Matter, this God, this more than God, can He have existed throughout eternity without willing what He afterwards willed,—­admitting that Eternity can be divided into two eras.  No matter where God is, what becomes of His intuitive intelligence if He did not know His ultimate thought?  Which, then, is the true Eternity,—­the created Eternity or the uncreated?  But if God throughout all time did will the world such as it is, this new necessity, which harmonizes with the idea of sovereign intelligence, implies the co-eternity of Matter.  Whether Matter be co-eternal by a divine will necessarily accordant with itself from the beginning, or whether Matter be co-eternal of its own being, the power of God, which must be absolute, perishes if His will is circumscribed; for in that case God would find within Him a determining force which would control Him.  Can He be God if He can no more separate Himself from His creation in a past eternity than in the coming eternity?

“This face of the problem is insoluble in its cause.  Let us now inquire into its effects.  If a God compelled to have created the world from all eternity seems inexplicable, He is quite as unintelligible in perpetual cohesion with His work.  God, constrained to live eternally united to His creation is held down to His first position as workman.  Can you conceive of a God who shall be neither independent of nor dependent on His work?  Could He destroy that work without challenging Himself?  Ask yourself, and decide!  Whether He destroys it some day, or whether He never destroys it, either way is fatal to the attributes without which God cannot exist.  Is the world an experiment? is it a perishable form to which destruction must come?  If it is, is not God inconsistent and impotent? inconsistent, because He ought to have seen the result before the attempt,—­moreover why should He delay to destroy that which He is to destroy?—­impotent, for how else could He have created an imperfect man?