“I do not defend,” replied Mr. Merton, “the ancient pagan superstitions, nor the strict honesty, any more than the immaculate purity, of the ancient priesthoods; but I have learned not to explain great effects by petty causes, like the shallow-pated philosophers of the last century, and the historians of the school of Voltaire, Hume, and Robertson, who had no more comprehension of the real causes and concatenation of events than a respectable goose. All heathenism was founded on delusion, but not a delusion originating with, and kept up by, the trickery and jugglery of priests, who were often greater dupes than any others. No art, craft, jugglery, or fraud, could be carried on for three thousand years in the bosom of cultivated nations without detection. There were men in ancient heathendom as able and as willing to detect human imposture, as are our modern philosophers, who tell us so gravely in their elaborate works how the priests contrived to work their miracles, and to keep the people in subjection. The only sound philosophy proceeds on the assumption of the general good faith of mankind, or that they dupe and are duped, save in individual cases, without malice prepense. “In these oracles there was a superhuman intelligence, and an intelligence which was neither that of those who consulted nor that of those who gave the response, and it tells you itself why the oracles after the birth of our Saviour and the spread of Christianity, became mute. Me puer Hebræus, divos Deus ipse gubernans, Cedere sede jubet, tristemque redire sub Orcum; Aris ergo dehinc tacitus abscedito nostris. The Hebrew youth, himself God and master of the gods, had reduced them to silence. Whence this third intelligence? It cannot come from the odic agent, for that is unintelligent.” “I do not agree with Mr. Sowerby,” said Mr. Winslow. “I believe all existence is intelligent, and all forces intelligent forces. God is infinite intelligence. He is the principle and similitude of all things, and therefore every thing must, like him, be intelligent.” “That was my view,” said I, “or else I should have had no hesitation in explaining a large portion of the mysterious phenomena by the old notion of demonic invasion.” “Yet this view,” replied Mr. Merton, “is decidedly untenable. God, in the sense of creator, is the principle of all things, and in the sense that the ideas or types after which he creates them are in his eternal reason, he is their similitude; but it is not necessary to suppose that every creature imitates him in all his attributes, which would suppose that a cabbage has intellect and will, and a granite block is endowed with charity. The infinite intelligence of God supposes that all are created, ordered, and governed by, and according to, intelligence, but not that every creature is intelligent, or an intelligence. We might as well say that every creature is infinite, for God is infinity, as well as intelligence.