Surely, the mockery of madness could go no further. What can the morally impotent or the morally imperfect do for us? Even to the careless eye of common sense, it is clear at a glance, that with the _Impersonal_ our distinctive spiritual life can have no possible relations. If this be so, the very first idea of Supernatural Power is not advanced.--Contrariwise, it is distorted, frustrated, nullified. And with it is destroyed our trust in our own conscious nature. The instinct of immortality lives and moves within us only to betray.--Man,--whose being is the highest reason for the world's whole being,--is henceforth a palpable inconsistency. There cannot in the dreams of fiction be found a stranger tissue of more startling,--or one might venture to say,--more revolting moral absurdities. And a moral absurdity contradicts the constitution of Man's mind, quite as thoroughly as an absurdity purely intellectual. It is, in reality, the most self-condemned of all conceivable contradictions. Let us place side by side with this issue, _first_, the commonly conceived relation between a Personal supreme Being and his creation;--_secondly_, the apprehension of Theistic truth within the soul, as it comes to us substantiated by religious men. We shall, at all events, gain the advantage of a strong contrast between Theism and non-Theism;--and strong contrast with shadows is often a strong enlightenment. First, then, to consider the idea of Creation as the work not of a blind thing, but a supremely wise and powerful Being. It is plain that (to say the very least) this idea is encompassed with slighter and fewer difficulties. If a doubter is not convinced by the ordinary argument from Design, he cannot avoid admitting the fact of its possibility;--that it is applicable, and has been applied, argued, and reargued, without any overwhelming rejoinder or refutation. And there are _two_ obvious reasons why it has never been successfully refuted. One--the evident truth that, whatever rival theories[172] might or might not be expected to do, this theory explains the world. Next--that no other attempted explanations have ever found a First ground for any existing thing. In the theory of Design it continues an open question how far we may conceive the Creator's first act as a grand finality,--the launch of a vast assemblage of worlds formed,--or, being formed;--so built upon law and guided by far-stretching wisdom, that the Universe sails gloriously through the Ocean of Space like a thing of Life; each breath of Force, each wave of Time wafting it securely on. But, let any idea of a true creation be admitted, and no belief in existing laws of any kind, will ever banish the great and good God from the world which He has created and made. His presence adds glory to its fabric, and, when we walk in its garden of delights, we feel that He walks and speaks there too.[173]