"Very good. Perhaps you can't. I suppose we cannot comprehend infinity, because we are essentially finite ourselves. But it by no means follows that we cannot apprehend and believe in attributes which we are unable to comprehend. We can certainly do that." "No. After you reach your limit of comprehension, you may say, all beyond that is infinite,--but you only push the object of your thought out of view. After you have reiterated the years till you are tired, you say, beyond that is infinite. You only mean that you are tired of computing and adding." "Then you cannot believe in an Infinite Creator?" said the minister. "I can believe in nothing that is not founded on reason. I should be very glad to believe in an Infinite Creator, only it is entirely impossible, you see, for the mind to conceive of a being who is not himself created." "Yet you can believe in a world that is not created?" said the minister. "You can believe that a world full of adaptations, full of signs of intelligence and design, could be uncreated. How do you make that out?" "There remains no greater difficulty to me," said Remington, "in believing in an uncreated world than you have in believing in an uncreated God. Why is it stranger that Chaos should produce harmony than that Nothing should produce God?" He looked at us, smiling as he said this, which he evidently considered unanswerable. "You are quite right," said my husband, gravely. "It is impossible that nothing should produce God, and therefore I say God is eternal. It is not impossible that something should produce the world, and therefore I believe the world is not eternal. That point is the one on which the whole argument hangs in my mind." "It does not become me to dispute a clergyman," said Mr. Remington, smiling affectedly, as if only courtesy prevented his coming in with an entirely demolishing argument. To my great surprise Lulu instantly answered, and with an intelligence that showed she had followed the argument entirely,-- "I am certain, George, that Mr. Prince has altogether the best of it. Yours is merely a technical difficulty,--merely words. You can conceive a thousand things which you can never fully comprehend. And this, too, is a proof of the Infinite Father in our very reasoning,--that, if we could comprehend Him, we should be ourselves infinite. As it is, we can believe and adore,--and, more than that, rejoice that we cannot in this finite life of ours do more." "If we believed we could comprehend Him," said I, "we should soon begin to meddle with God's administration of affairs." "Yes,--and in fatalism I have always thought there was a profound reverence," said Lulu.