246 
OF THE NATURAL ATTRIBUTES. 
ganization is found in plants, than what obtains in animals 
A solution is wanted for one as well as the other. 
Upon the whole; after all the schemes and struggles of a 
reluctant philosophy, the necessary resort is to a Deity 
The marks of design are too strong to be gotten over 
Design must have had a designer. That designer mus 
have been a person. That person is God. 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
OF THE NATURAL ATTRIBUTES OF THE DEITY. 
It is an immense conclusion, that there is a God; a 
perceiving, intelligent, designing Being; at the head of cre¬ 
ation, and from whose will it proceeded. The attributes of 
such a Being, suppose his reality to be proved, must be 
adequate to the magnitude, extent, and multiplicity of his 
operations: which are not only vast beyond comparison with 
those performed by any other power, but, so far as respects 
our conceptions of them, infinite, because they are unlimit¬ 
ed on all sides. 
Yet the contemplation of a nature so exalted, however 
surely we arrive at the proof of its existence, overwhelms 
our faculties. The mind feels its powers sink under the 
subject. One consequence of which is, that from painful 
abstraction the thoughts seek relief in sensible images. 
Whence may be deduced the ancient, and almost univer¬ 
sal propensity to idolatrous substitutions. They are the 
resources of a laboring imagination. False religions usu¬ 
ally fall in with the natural propensity; true religions, or 
such as have derived themselves from the true, resist it. 
It is one of the advantages of the revelations which we 
acknowledge, that whilst they reject idolatry with its many 
pernicious accompaniments, they introduce the Deity to 
human apprehension, under an idea more personal, more 
determinate, more within its compass, than the theology 
>f nature can do. And this they do by representing him 
exclusively under the relation in which he stands to our¬ 
selves; and, for the most part, under some precise charac¬ 
ter, resulting from that relation, or from the history of his 
providences. Which method suits the span of our intellects 
much better than the universality which enters into the 
idea of God, as deduced from the views of nature. When, 
therefore, these representations are well founded in point 
