pride of philosophy is unwilling to admit its ignorance of their causes.  From the phenomena, which are the objects of our senses, we attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities.  From this hypothesis we invent this general name, to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences.  The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves.  They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.  Words have been used by sophists for the same purposes, from the occult qualities of the peripatetics to the effluvium of Boyle and the crinities or nebulae of Herschel.  God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; He is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.  Even His worshippers allow that it is impossible to form any idea of Him:  they exclaim with the French poet,

Pour dire ce qu’il est, il faut etre lui-meme.

Lord Bacon says that atheism leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety, laws, reputation, and everything that can serve to conduct him to virtue; but superstition destroys all these, and erects itself into a tyranny over the understandings of men:  hence atheism never disturbs the government, but renders man more clear-sighted, since he seas nothing beyond the boundaries of the present life.—­Bacon’s “Moral Essays”.

La premiere theologie de l’homme lui fit d’abord craindre at adorer les elements meme, des objets materiels at grossiers; il randit ensuite ses hommages a des agents presidant aux elements, a des genies inferieurs, a des heros, ou a des hommes doues de grandes qualites.  A force de reflechir il crut simplifier les choses en soumettant la nature entiere a un seul agent, a un esprit, a una ame universelle, qui mettait cette nature et ses parties en mouvement.  En remontant de causes en causes, les mortels ont fini par ne rien voir; at c’est dans cette obscurite qu’ils ont place leur Dieu; c’est dans cat abime tenebreux que leur imagination inquiete travaille toujours a se fabriquer des chimeres, qui les affligeront jusqu’a ce que la connaissance da la nature les detrompe des fantomes qu’ils ont toujours si vainement adores.

Si nous voulons nous rendre compte de nos idees sur la Divinite, nous serons obliges de convanir que, par le mot “Dieu”, les hommes n’ont jamais pu designer que la cause la plus cachee, la plus eloignee, la plus inconnue des effets qu’ils voyaient:  ils ne font usage de ce mot, que lorsque le jeu des causes naturelles at connues cesse d’etre visible pour eux; des qu’ils perdent le fil de ces causes, on des que leur esprit ne peut plus en suivre la chaine, ils tranchent leur difficulte, at terminent leurs recherches en appellant Dieu la derniere des causes, c’est-a-dire celle qui