LUCIAN.--Man has nothing to do with that which he can neither know nor comprehend;* and it is impossible for him to believe in that which is beyond his comprehension. Materialists maintain the existence of an all-ruling POWER; but every attempt to personify that Power,--and all pretensions to any knowledge of it beyond that which is gathered from the process of Nature, in her works, they hold as deceitful and pernicious; regarding all pretended revelations said to be supernaturally made to man, as the work of the most dangerous and wicked impostors: and their revelations as the direst curses that were ever entailed upon mankind. It would be a perversion of terms to speak of more than one infinite Being: whether then is it most rational to suppose it to be that which we know to exist, or that which we do not know** to exist? So far is it from being difficult to suppose the eternity of matter, it is hardly possible to imagine anything but its eternity. Previous to what you call its creation by your immaterial artificer, was he a vacuum living in a vacuum?*** As the Christian's definition of his deity confounds all language, it is its own best refutation. With a face of gravity, he talks of his body spiritual that has no body; an incorporeal something that is essentially nothing; an immaterial substance that is non-substantial; and though this body is immaterial, it possesses the form and likeness, together with the bodily members, of a man! These are the pestilent offspring of theology--your distracting chimeras, which "Turns them to a shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name." * Man neither can nor ought to have anything to do with that which is confessedly inconceivable; if he pretends to know or say anything of such a being, he immediately falls into contradictions. When did a theologian understand himself when speaking of his deity or deities?--Never. ** We have five witnesses in favor of the existence of matter, viz., seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting; but where is the proof of the existence of anything that is immaterial? It is fancy alone that creates such a chimera. *** The old fact that nature abhors a vacuum is still unrefuted; we may indeed go farther and say that she will not allow it, for the art of man has never produced a space where there was nothing. "Your imagination bodies forth In forms of things unknown;--" Amongst the initiated in the mysteries of antiquity, the term God was used only as being expressive of an effect, whose cause is Nature. MOD.--Men are so accustomed to trace and find the origin of artificial objects, that a supposed analogy readily presents itself, that matter must have had an origin also; and, backed by superstition, they will not give up their "Great First Cause."