endowed with intelligence, man must have received from the Creator that which the Creator had not to give, is an article inseparable from the profession of faith of those moderate Atheists who are content to regard man as a creature. There are, however, others of a more uncompromising temper, who do not hesitate to pronounce creation, in the sense of formation of something out of nothing, to be an incomprehensible myth; and it cannot be denied to these that, however difficult it be to conceive an uncreated universe existing from all eternity, the conception of an eternally existent Creator is not one whit easier. Fairly enough, therefore, these may proceed to argue that in the production of that compound, man, the share of the agency usually styled creative must have been limited to combining and arranging the elemental particles of his corporeal moiety. Quite fairly, advancing still farther, they may hazard a conjecture that it is from the union of the corporeal constituents of man that the generation of his spiritual moiety has resulted. But for such generation it is plainly indispensable that the corporeal constituents should have been not inert particles but self-acting forces, and that, as such, they must have been in possession of more or less intelligence, which intelligence again either was or was not equal in amount to that of the human spirit or mind generated by them. If it were not equal, then the forces must have given to their offspring more than they had themselves got to give--which is sheer nonsense. If it were equal, then, inasmuch as the human mind is quite clever enough to discover uses for the various parts of the human body and of other organisms, the forces to which the human mind owes its origin must be at least equally clever. The elementary forces by whose action the human and other organic bodies have been constructed, must have been perfectly aware what they were constructing, and what services the resulting structures would be fitted to render. In other words, they must in their constructive operations have worked towards specific ends, according to preconceived plan and set design, wittingly contriving various machines for various purposes. The advanced Atheists, with whose speculations we are here especially concerned, are thus at liberty to choose between two horns of a dilemma, but must not hope to escape both. Either they stand self-refuted by assuming something to have been made out of nothing--a process which they began by pronouncing impossible--or they must imagine intelligence, competent to devise all organisms, to be diffused throughout the universe, thereby showing themselves to have assumed their sectarian appellation without sufficient warrant, and to be in reality rather Pantheists than Atheists.