"And you are not the first person who has objected to this as a great inconsistency. I am afraid the discussion will take more time than we ought to spare, but now that the question has been asked and the objection presented, I must take time to answer it, even if it consume the whole half hour. "In considering this subject, as well as many others, we need to remember that the existence of difficulties is no objection to a principle or a fact. Difficulties wholly inexplicable by man attend facts and principles which must be true. A fact may be incomprehensible, though undeniable. The great Doctor Johnson said, 'There are insuperable objections against a plenum, and insuperable objections against a vacuum, yet one of these must be true.' What did he mean by that, Samuel?" "He meant, I suppose, that we could not explain the possibility that any space should be wholly empty of matter, and could no more explain the possibility that any space should be filled with matter, but that all space must be filled, or else there must be empty space. Whether we can explain the possibility or not, one of them must be true." "That is right. The same is true of many other facts besides a plenum and a vacuum. We cannot conceive of infinite space; we cannot conceive that space should not be infinite, but bounded. We cannot conceive of the creation of the world from nothing, and no more can we conceive of its eternal existence. The truth is that the mind of man cannot grasp such subjects so as to reason upon them correctly. No sooner do we attempt to reason about the infinite things of God than we run into absurdities and reach the most contradictory conclusions. And in this respect it makes no difference with what principle or proposition we start if it only contain some infinite element. Let me give you a simple illustration from geometry--an illustration which, very likely, is familiar to you: the larger a circle, the less is the curvature of the line which bounds it; that is, the more nearly does that line approach a straight line. An infinite circle must be bounded by a straight line, because with any degree of curvature the circle would be less than infinite. But a straight line cannot bound a circle. The attempt to reason about an infinite circle brings us at once to the most palpable absurdities and contradictions. Or take this illustration: the whole of a thing is greater than any of its parts. But divide a line of infinite length in the middle, and each part is infinite. We reach the conclusion either that the half is equal to the whole or that other wholly incomprehensible proposition, that one infinity is twice as great as another infinity. I have made these statements to show you that the existence of difficulties does not indicate, much less prove, that a fact is not real and true.