By the same great savan, we are taught that God governs all, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord and sovereign of all things; that it is in consequence of His sovereignty He is called the Lord God, the Universal Emperor—­that the word God is relative, and relates itself with slaves—­and that the Deity is the dominion or the sovereignty of God, not over his own body, as those think who look upon God as the soul of the world, but over slaves—­from all which slavish reasoning, a plain man who had not been informed it was concocted by Europe’s pet philosopher, would infallibly conclude some unfortunate lunatic had given birth to it.  That there is no creature now tenanting Bedlam who would or could scribble purer nonsense about God than this of Newton’s, we are well convinced—­for how could the most frenzied of brains imagine anything more repugnant to every principle of good sense than a self-existent, eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent Being, creator of all the worlds, who acts the part of ‘universal emperor,’ and plays upon an infinitely large scale, the same sort of game as Nicholas of Russia, or Mohammed of Egypt plays upon a small scale.  There cannot be slavery where there is no tyranny, and to say as Newton did, that we stand in the same relation to a universal God, as a slave does to his earthly master, is practically to accuse such God, at reason’s bar, of tyranny.  If the word of God is relative, and relates itself with slaves, it incontestably follows that all human beings are slaves, and Deity is by such reasoners degraded into the character of universal slave-driver.  Really theologians and others who declaim so bitterly against ‘blasphemers,’ and take such very stringent measures to punish ‘infidels,’ who speak or write of their God, should seriously consider whether the worst, that is, the least religious of infidel writers, ever penned a paragraph so disparaging to the character of that God they affect to adore, as the last quoted paragraph of Newton’s.  If even it could be demonstrated that there is a super-human Being, it cannot be proper to clothe him in the noblest human attributes—­still less can it be justifiable in pigmies, such as we are, to invest Him with odious attributes belonging only to despots ruling over slaves.  Besides, how can we imagine a God who is ’totally destitute of body and of corporeal figure,’ to have any kind of attributes?  Earthly emperors we know to be substantial and common-place sort of beings enough, but is it not sheer abuse of reason to argue as though the character of God were at all analogous to theirs; or rather, is it not a shocking abuse of our reasoning faculties to employ them at all about a Being whose existence, if it really have an existence, is perfectly enigmatical, and allowed to be so by those very men who pretend to explain its character and attributes?  We find no less a sage than Newton explicitly declaring as incontestable truth, that God exists necessarily—­that the same necessity obliges him to exist always and everywhere—­that he is all eyes, all ears, all brains, all arms, all feeling, all intelligence, all action—­that he exists in a mode by no means corporeal, and yet this same sage, in the self-same paragraph, acknowledges God is totally unknown to us.