Dr. Chalmers, in his work on natural theology,[3] has not, we think, correctly apprehended the bearings of the argument for the existence of a God drawn from the fact of the existence of a material world. “We do not perceive,” he says, “how, on the observation of an unshapen mass, there can from its _being_ alone, be drawn any clear or strong inference in favor of its non-eternity: or that simply because it now is, a time must have been when it was not. We cannot thus read in the entity of matter, a prior non-entity, or an original commencement for it: and something more must be affirmed of matter than merely that it is, ere we can discern that either an artist’s mind or an artist’s hand has at all been concerned with it.” Is this either sound reasoning or good philosophy? The fact of the entity of matter does, necessarily and directly, lead to the inference that it had a beginning. It could not originate itself, and just the more as it is viewed in its mere materiality, so much the stronger and irresistible the conclusion that there was no potentiality inherent in itself to cause it to begin to exist. Strip these hills of all their verdure—remove from the mind all consideration of their beauty, variety, and softness of outline—divest that landscape of its ebb and flow of tide—of all that constitutes the scene one of the most charming on the face of the earth, and in its desolation and sterility you would still in idea revert to a period when it was not. These shapeless, inert, barren masses of rock, and soil, and sand, did not place themselves there by any power of their own. Whether on Mount Horeb or Bencleugh, the mind will learn, from its own inner voice, that the traces of Jehovah are there—a Power, beyond and above, that called these rude piles into being—the absence of all form and vitality in themselves the proof and the witness of the Creator’s mind and the Creator’s hand. Death cannot originate anything into life. Matter, as matter, cannot constitute nor begin of itself to be. A scene like this could not now commence its own being, and at no period in the past did it possess a single property of self-existence. The entity and eternity of matter are, therefore, two physically impossible things, as nothing but the one supreme intelligent God can be at once self-existent and eternal, and that which is God cannot be material.