unaccountable accidents and blind chance? Can he possibly conceive that such wonderful order should spring out of confusion? or that such perfect beauty should be ever formed by the fortuitous operations of unconscious, unactive particles of matter? As well, nay better, and more easily, might he suppose that an earthquake might happen to build towns and cities; or the materials carried down by a flood fit themselves up without hands into a regular fleet. For what are towns, cities, or fleets, in comparison of the vast and amazing fabric of the universe! In short, Atheism offers such violence to all our faculties, that it seems scarce credible it should ever really find any place in the human understanding. Atheism is unreasonable, because it gives no tolerable account of the existence of the world. This is one of the greatest difficulties with which the Atheist has to contend. For he must suppose either that the world is eternal, or that it was formed by chance and a fortuitous concourse of the parts of matter. That the world had a beginning, is evident from universal tradition, and the most ancient history that exists; from there being no memorials of any actions performed previously to the time assigned in that history as the æra of the creation; from the origin of learning and arts, and the liability of the parts of matter to decay. That the world was not produced by chance, is also evident. Nothing can be more unreasonable than to ascribe to chance an effect which appears with all the characters of a wise design and contrivance. Will chance fit means to ends, even in ten thousand instances, and not fail in a single one? How often might a man, after shaking a set of letters in a bag, throw them on the ground, before they would become an exact poem, or form a good discourse in prose? In short, the arguments in proof of Deity are so numerous, and at the same time so obvious to a thinking mind, that to waste time in disputing with an Atheist, is approaching too much toward that irrationality, which may be considered as one of the most striking characteristics of the sect. The more noted Atheist, since the Reformation, are Machiavel, Spinoza, Hobbes, Blount, and Vanini. To these may be added Hume, and Voltaire the corypheus of the sect, and the great nursing father of that swarm of them which has appeared in these last days.