Absurd as it seems, there are persons claiming to be philosophers who not only assert that they did, but will tell you how they did it. One class of them think they found it out by supposing everything in the universe reduced to very fine powder, consisting of very fine grains, which they call atoms; or, if that is not fine enough, into gas, of which it is supposed the particles are too fine {64} to be perceived, and then by different arrangements of these atoms, according to the laws of attraction, electricity, or some other law, the various elements of the world were made, and arranged in their present forms. But then the difficulty is only multiplied millions of times. Each bit of paving stone, no matter how small you break it, can no more make itself or move itself, than could the whole stone composed of all these bits. So we are landed back at the sublime question, _did the paving stones make themselves_? Others will tell you that millions of years ago the world existed as a vast cloud of fire-mist. What this fire-mist is they do not know, but only that there are certain comets, which come within fifty or sixty millions of miles of this earth, which they suppose may be composed of fire-mist. Hence they imagine that the earth also may have been made from the same fire-mist. But where did the mist come from? Did the mist make itself? Where did the fire come from? Did it kindle of its own accord? Who put the fire and the mist together? Was it red hot enough from all eternity to melt granite? Then why is it any cooler now? If it existed as a red hot fire-mist from eternity, why should it ever begin to cool at all? Infidels claim that there was nothing else in all the universe except this fire-mist. Then the cause of all this must have been in the mist itself. In other words, _the fire-mist made itself, then the paving stones and the infidels afterwards_. {65} Others suppose that the world was once in a stage of solution, in primeval oceans, and that the mixing of these waters caused them to deposit a sediment, which hardened into rock, then vegetated into plants and trees, then grew into animals, these in turn developed into monkeys, and finally the monkeys into men. Thus it is clearly demonstrated that there is no need for the Creator if we only had somebody to make these primeval oceans, somebody to mix them together, and somebody to establish these laws of development.