There is a passage in one of the writings of Lord Macaulay in which that brilliant essayist maintained that natural theology is not a progressive science. Macaulay's tendency to paradox was often aggravated by the superficial way in which he used his multifarious knowledge. As in the course of this work I am about to do that which he regarded as idle, namely, to inquire whether natural religion, aside from revelation, is of any value as a means of reaching a belief in the existence and attributes of God and the immortality of man, I cite the passage in which Macaulay makes the assertion that natural theology has made no progress from the time of the Greek philosophers to the present day: "As respects natural religion, revelation being for the present altogether left out of the question, it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day is more favorably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him just the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe that the early Greeks had. We say just the same, for the discoveries of modern astronomers and anatomists have really added nothing to the force of that argument which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf, flower, and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates in Xenophon's hearing confuted the little atheist Aristophanes, is exactly the reasoning of Paley's 'Natural Theology.' Socrates makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the other great question, the question what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be in the right than a Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest light on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. In truth, all the philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted without the aid of revelation to prove the immortality of man, from Plato down to Franklin, appear to us to have failed deplorably. "Then, again, all the great enigmas which perplex the natural theologian are the same in all ages. The ingenuity of a people just emerging from barbarism is quite sufficient to propound those enigmas. The genius of Locke or Clarke is quite unable to solve them. It is a mistake to imagine that subtile speculations touching the Divine attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar manner the delight of intelligent children and of half-civilized men. The number of boys is not small who, at fourteen, have thought enough on these questions to be fully entitled to the praise which Voltaire gives to Zadig: 'Il en savait ce qu'on a su dans tous les ages; c'est à dire, fort peu de chose.'