Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith | Page 8

one vast mass of matter, in which all motion had long since ceased. There must be some power of resistance to gravitation, and nicely balanced against it, a centrifugal force--no matter whether you call it heat, light, or electricity, or by any other name--from which balance of power the movements of the universe are regulated. But here again we arrive at the same conclusion from the balance of power to which we were before driven by the combination of matter--regulated power proclaims a regulator, a governor. Power belongeth unto God.
In world-building we need not only a quarry of materials, and power for transportation, but a head to plan their arrangement. For, as ten thousand loads of brick and stone dumped down higgledy piggledy will not build a house, neither will ten thousand millions of materials poured into a chaos make a world like this earth, arranged in order and beauty. It is grossly absurd to imagine that the inanimate materials of the earth arranged themselves in their present orderly structure.
Absurd as it seems to every man of common sense, there are persons claiming to be philosophers who not only assert that they did, but will tell you how they did it. One class of them think they have found it out by supposing every thing in the universe reduced to very fine powder, consisting of very small grains, which they call atoms; or, if that is not fine enough, into gas, of which it is supposed the particles are too fine to be perceived; and then by different arrangements of these atoms, according to the laws of attraction and electricity, the various elements of the world were made, and arranged in its present form.
Suppose we grant this gassy supposition, that the world millions of ages ago existed as a cloud of atoms, does that bring us any nearer the object of getting rid of a Creator than before? The atoms must be material, if a material world is to be made from them; and so they must be extended; each one of them must have length, breadth and thickness. The atheist, then, has only multiplied his difficulties a million times, by pounding up the world into atoms, which are only little bits of the paving stones he intends to make out of them. Each bit of the paving stone, no matter how small you break it, remains just as incapable of making itself, or moving itself, as was the whole stone composed of all these bits. So we are landed back again at the sublime question, Did the paving stones make themselves, and move themselves?
Others will tell you that millions of years ago the world existed as a vast cloud of fire mist, which, after a long time, cooled down into granite, and the granite, by dint of earthquakes, got broken up on the surface, and washed with rain into clay and soil, whence plants sprang up of their own accord, and the plants gradually grew into animals of various kinds, and some of the animals grew into monkeys, and finally the monkeys into men. The fire mist they stoutly affirm to have existed from eternity. They do not allege that they remember that (and yet as they themselves are, as they say, composed body and soul of this eternal fire mist, they ought to remember), but only that there are certain comets which occasionally come within fifty or sixty millions of miles of this earth, which they suppose may be composed of the fire mist which they suppose this world is made of. A solid basis, truly, on which to build a world! A cloud in the sky, fifty million of miles away, may possibly be fire mist, may possibly cool down and condense into a solid globe; therefore, this fire mist is eternal, and had no need of a Creator; and our world, and all other worlds, may possibly have been like it; therefore, they also were never created by Almighty God. Such is the atheist's ground of faith. The thinnest vapor or the merest supposition will suffice to risk his eternal salvation upon; provided only it contradicts the Bible and gets rid of God. We can not avoid asking with as much gravity as we can command, Where did the mist come from? Did the mist make itself? Where did the fire come from? Did it kindle of its own accord? Who put the fire and mist together? Was it red hot enough from all eternity to melt granite? Then why is it any cooler now? How could an eternal red heat cool down? If it existed as a red hot fire mist from eternity, until our atheist began to observe it beginning to cool, why should it ever begin to cool at all, and why begin