Let any one patiently examine their much talked of argument from design, and he will be satisfied that these are no idle charges.  That argument has for its ground-work beggarly assumption, and for its main pillar, reasoning no less beggarly.  Nature must have had a cause, because it evidently is an effect.  The cause of Nature must have been one God, because two Gods, or two million Gods, could not have agreed to cause it.  That cause must be omnipotent, wise, and good, because all things are double one against another, and He has left nothing imperfect.  Men make watches, build ships or houses, out of pre-existing metals, wood, hemp, bricks, mortar, and other materials, therefore God made nature out of no material at all.  Unassisted nature cannot produce the phenomena we behold, therefore such phenomena clearly prove there is something unnatural.  Not to believe in a God who designed Nature, is to close both ears and eyes against evidence, therefore Universalists are wilfully deaf and obstinately blind.

These are samples of the flimsy stuff, our teachers of what nobody knows, would palm upon us as demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.

By artfully taking for granted what no Universalist can admit, and assuming cases altogether dissimilar to be perfectly analogous, our natural theologians find no difficulty in proving that God is, was, and ever will be; that after contemplating His own perfections, a period sufficiently long for ‘eternity to begin and end in,’ He said, let there be matter, and there was matter; that with Him all things are possible, and He, of course, might easily have kept, as well as made, man upright and happy, but could not consistently with his own wisdom, or with due regard to his own glorification.  Wise in their generation, these ’blind leaders of the blind’ ascribe to this Deity of their own invention powers impossible, acts inconceivable, and qualities incompatible; thus erecting doctrinal systems on no sounder basis than their own ignorance; deifying their own monstrous errors, and filling the earth with misery, madness, and crime.

The writer who declared theology ignorance of natural causes reduced to system, did not strike wide of the true mark.  It is plain that the argument from design, so vastly favoured by theologians, amounts to neither more nor less than ignorance of natural causes reduced to system.  An argument to be sound must be soundly premised.  But here is an argument whose primary premise is a false premise—­a mere begging of the very question in dispute.  Did Universalists admit the universe was contrived, designed, or adapted, they could not deny there must have been at least one Being to contrive, design, or adapt; but they see no analogy between a watch made with hands out of something, and a universe made without hands out of nothing.  Universalists are unable to perceive the least resemblance between the circumstance of one intelligent body re-forming or