Sometimes tasting the sweets of life, and at others, its evils, the first gave them pleasing sensations, the last, pain and distress. Having, then, nothing to guide them in drawing conclusions but the objects by which they were surrounded, they inferred that the mighty power which was every moment visible to their senses, and from which they received every thing that contributed to their happiness, resided in a being like themselves, but possessing wisdom and goodness. To these children of nature, who saw “God in the clouds, and heard him in the wind,” by a simple process of the mind, such conclusions were very natural. The first theologians, then, who, by way of reasoning, we place at the fountain head of all religious systems which have come down to us, were convinced of the existence of a Supreme Power who governed the destinies of the human race. Power, then, was the first idea which man had, in the infancy of his rea-son, as to the existence of a God; and it is all that the great-est and wisest of the human race have ever discovered of the Being called by that name. And in this view of the subject, there is no man living who is an Atheist. The power that presented itself to untaught man, required no laborious investigation to discover. It struck his senses with as equal a force as it does the profoundest philosopher. On the contrary, the wisdom and goodness ascribed to God, resulted from a knowledge of the order and wonderful adaptation which pervades the universe, the investigation of which has employed master minds in all subsequent ages. But untutored man must be overwhelmed with thinking of that power to whose bounds he could set no limits. The wisdom and munificence that run through all nature, were to him unknown. To those, therefore, from whom theology took its rise, it was a world of confusion. Ignorant of cause and effect in the order of nature, and their imaginations being active, while their reasoning powers were undeveloped, every thing they saw or felt was to them a mixture of pleasurable or painful sensations. The pleasure, ease, or comfort which they enjoyed, would be considered as the gift of a good power which conferred such blessings. On the other hand, it would appear inconsistent to them to ascribe the evils attending them to the author of good, they being incapable of judging that good (pleasure) and evil (pain) could proceed from the same power.