It may seem strange, but it is true, that some Christian philosophers and divines have been, in ancient and modern times, the advocates of the eternity of matter. The ancient Christians adopted it from Plato. Thus we find Justin Martyr maintaining that God formed the world from an eternal, unorganized material. And the schoolmen, who followed Aristotle, taught that "God had created the world from eternity." On this ground, even some Protestant theologians have asserted that it was absurd to speak of an eternal God who is not an eternal Creator. A principle which has thus been adopted by so many acute minds unenlightened by revelation, and by some who possessed that divine testimony, must be sustained by some plausible arguments. The principal one relied on is, that the changes which are going on in the material world are proved to be only transmutations, which follow one another in series that return into themselves, and which may, therefore, have been going on from eternity; and if this be admitted, it is as easy to suppose matter to be self-sustained, and to have fallen into its present order of itself, as to suppose the interference of an infinite Spirit. "How do we know," says Dr. Chalmers, in stating the atheistic argument, "that the world is a consequent at all? Is there any greater absurdity in supposing it to have existed, as it now is, at any specified point of time, throughout the millions of ages that are past, than that it should so exist at this moment? Does what we suppose might have been then, imply any greater absurdity, than what we actually see to be at present? Now, might not the same question be carried back to any point or period of duration, however remote? or, in other words, might we not dispense with a beginning for the world altogether?" "For aught we can know _a priori_," says Hume, "matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself as well as mind does; and there is no more difficulty in conceiving that the several elements, from an internal, unknown cause, may fall into the most exquisite arrangement, than to conceive that their ideas, in the great universal mind, from a like internal cause, fall into that arrangement. If this material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other, and so on without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that divine Being, so much the better."