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a personal God. We are to feel all this for a being (if an 
infinite Cosmos can be called a being) who has neither per- 
sonality, intelligence, nor will, who is the prey of inexorable law, 
who is incapable alike of affection and of thought ; who, if he 
has children, has not made a single provision for their wants, 
cares not for them, and in due time inexorably devours them. 
Surely the theories of Atheism are rational compared with a 
Pantheism, which offers such adulation to a Cosmos which can 
neither see, hear, feel, nor think, which is alike incapable of 
affections and intelligent volition. Truly, one is reminded 
of the mocking of Elijah, “ Cry aloud, for he is a god. Surely 
he sleepeth, and must be awaked.” 
45. One of the atheistic friends of our author, whose works 
he advises the reader not to glance at but to study, pronounces 
that it would have been better if the universe had never existed ; 
and if no life had ever arisen in the earth any more than in the 
moon. This assertion is certainly not invalidated by Strauss’s 
thin logic. “If it be true,” says he, “it follows that the 
thought that it would have been better if the universe had 
never existed, had better not to have existed likewise.” One 
can hardly help thinking that the following passage must have 
been written in irony. 
46. “ Sallies of this kind, as we remarked, impress our intelli- 
gence as absurd, but our feelings as blasphemous. We consider 
it arrogant and profane on the part of a single individual to 
oppose himself with such audacious levity to the Cosmos whence 
he springs, from which also he derives that spark of reason 
which he misuses.” 
47. But I must now draw attention to some of the principles 
from which the author considers that these are natural conclusions. 
48. He begins with the conception of the Cosmos, which he 
defines “ not only as the sum total of all phenomena, but also 
of all forces and of all laws. The All,” says he, “ being the All ; 
nothing can exist outside it ; it seems even to include the void 
beyond.” After having pointed out the various changes through 
which its various parts have passed, he goes on to assert that 
this infinite Cosmos constitutes a unity. “ The Cosmos itself,” 
says he, “ the sum total of infinite worlds, in all stages of growth 
and decay, abides eternally unchanged in the constancy of its 
absolute energy amidst the everlasting revolution and mutation 
of its parts.” 
49. I have quoted these passages for the purpose of showing 
that the fundamental difficulties of this philosophy fully equal 
those of theism, against which it is in vain for it to urge that it 
enters into the regions of the unknowable. If the universe is 
