210 
Nature herself has been discovered. And a very pretty 
nature, indeed, is the materialistic nature which has been 
embodied by authority, and held up for the contemplation and 
admiration of mankind. Instead of the benign nature of the 
Epicurean, which gave to all, which made all, and which pro- 
vided for all, we have a benighted nature in the shape of a 
blind, insatiable, relentless, irresistible fate, falsely called 
law — working like a dull, senseless machine of overwhelming 
might, maiming, crushing, distorting, destroying, and thus 
continuing and preserving, — destitute of intelligence and 
reason, — ^devoid of justice and mercy. A nature not con- 
tributing to the happiness or enjoyment of any, working 
upon a world peopled with machines and continued by the 
destruction of the products of ever-recurring, ever-failing, 
unintelligent, undesigned experiment. A nature whose law is 
in part worked out by length and strength of tooth and claw. 
A nature which must be detested by the good, and despised 
by all who can think, and see, and reason. Such is the natural 
world which is held up for our admiration with the consoling 
assurance of dictatorial authority that it sprang from chaos in 
obedience to everlasting self- originating (?) law, and that it will 
return to chaos, in obedience to the same, — all life and work 
and thought being but the undulations of cosmic nebulosity, 
and dependent upon the never-ceasing gyrations of infinite, 
everlasting atoms, as they bound through the ages from void 
to void. 
This, the dullest, the narrowest, the most superficial of all 
creeds — materialism, which includes some mixture of anti- 
theism and atheism of various forms and hues — has been half 
accepted by hundreds of persons during the last few years. 
I believe all materialistic doctrines, vary as they may in detail, 
will be found to agree in accepting as a truth — if, indeed, they 
are not actually based on it — the monstrous assumption that 
the living and the non-living are one, and that every living 
thing is just as much a machine as a watch, or a windmill, or 
a hydraulic apparatus. 
According to the material contention, everything owes its 
existence to the properties of the material particles out of 
which it is constructed. But is it not strange that it never 
seems to have occurred to the materialistic devotee that neither 
the watch, nor the steam-engine, nor the windmill, nor the 
hydraulic apparatus, nor any other machine known to, or made 
by, any individual in this world, is dependent for its construc- 
tion upon the properties of the material particles of the matter 
out of which its several parts have been constructed ? Who 
would think of asserting that in the properties of brass and 
