There must, for example, unless consciousness and reason are utterly untrustworthy, be an eternal Being. Present existence necessarily implies to the human intellect eternal existence. The man who says that a finite mind cannot rise to the idea of an eternal Being talks foolishly, for all the thinking of a finite mind implies belief in what he says is inaccessible to human thought. No man can thoughtfully affirm his own existence, or the existence even of a passing fancy of his mind, or of a grain of sand, without feeling that that affirmation as certainly implies that something existed from all eternity as any mathematical demonstration whatever implies its conclusion. And this truth, that the most transient thing cannot be conceived of as existing unless an eternal Being exist, may be syllogistically expressed and exhibited in a variety of ways, because the contradictions involved in denying it are numerous. This is what has been done by the authors above mentioned with much ingenuity, and by some of them in a manner which never has been and never can be refuted. It may be doubted whether they did wisely in throwing their arguments into syllogistic form; but as nobody ventures to undertake the refutation of them, they must be admitted to be substantially valid. The reasonings of men like Clarke and Fiddes, Lowman and Ramsay, have sufficiently proved that whoever denies such propositions as these,--Something has existed from eternity; The eternal Being must be necessarily existent, immutable, and independent; There is but one unoriginated Being in the universe; The unoriginated Being must be unlimited or perfect in all its attributes, &c.,--inevitably falls into manifest absurdities.