The notion of necessarily existing matter seems to the Author of this
Apology fatal to belief in God; that is, if by the word God be
understood something not matter, for 'tis precisely because priests were
unable to reconcile such belief with the idea of matter's self-existence
or eternity, that they took to imagining a 'First Cause.' In the
'forlorn hope' of clearing the difficulty of necessarily existing
_matter_, they assent to a necessarily existing _spirit_; and when the
nature of spirit is demanded from these assertors of its existence they
are constrained to avow that it is material or nothing.
Yes, they are constrained to make directly or indirectly one or other of
these admissions; for, as between truth and falsehood there is no middle
passage, so between something and nothing there is no intermediate
existence. Hence the serious dilemma of Spiritualists, who gravely tell
us their God is a Spirit, and that a Spirit is not any thing, which not
any thing or nothing (for the life of us we cannot distinguish between
them) 'framed the worlds nay, _created_ as well as framed them.
If it be granted, for the mere purpose of explanation, that Spirit is an
entity, we can frame 'clear and distinct ideas of'--a real though not
material existence, surely no man will pretend to say an uncreated
reality called Spirit, is less inexplicable than uncreated Matter.
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