be labour in vain.  There is no other word in any language whose meaning is better understood, and they who do not under stand what it means, if such persons there be, are not likely to understand the meaning of any word or words whatever.  Ideas of nothing none have.  That there is something, we repeat, must be true; all dogmas or propositions being necessarily true whose denial involves an impossibility.  What the nature of that something may be is a secondary question, and however determined cannot affect the primary dogma—­things are things whatever may be their individual or their aggregate nature.  Nor is it of the least consequence what name or names we may see fit to give things, so that each word has its fixed and true meaning.  Whether, for example, we use for the sign of that something which is, the word Universe, or God, or Substance, or Spirit, or Matter, or the letter X, is of no importance, if we understand the word or letter used to be merely the sign of that something.  Words are only useful, when they are the signs of true ideas; evidently therefore, their legitimate function is to convey such ideas; and words which convey no ideas at all, or what is worse, only those which are false, should at once be expunged from the vocabularies of nations.  Something is.  The Atheist calls it matter.  Other persons may choose to call it other names; let them.  He chooses to call it this one and no other.

There ever has been something.  Here again, is a point of unity.  All are equally assured there ever has been something.  Something is, something must always have been, cry the religions, and the cry is echoed by the irreligious.  This last dogma, like the first, admits not of being evidenced.  As nothing is inconceivable, we cannot even imagine a time when there was nothing.  Atheists say, something ever was, which something is matter.  Theists say, something has been from all eternity, which something is not matter, but God.  They boldly affirm that matter began to be.  They affirm its creation from nothing, by a something, which was before the universe.  Indeed, the notion of universal creation involves first, that of universal annihilation, and second, that of a something prior to everything.  What creates everything must be before everything, in the same way that he who manufactures a watch must exist before the watch.  As already remarked.  Atheists agree with Theists, that something ever has been; but the point of difference lies here.  The Atheist says, matter is the eternal something, and asks proof of its beginning to be.  The Theist insists that matter is not the eternal something, but that God is, and when pushed for an account of what he means by God, he coolly answers, a Being, having nothing in common with anything, who, nevertheless, by his Almighty will created everything.