We are not concerned to deny that it is "a great endowment" which enables men to discern in Nature a manifestation of God; it is a great endowment, but not too great for the mind of man, if he was made in "the image and likeness of God;" a small mirror may reflect the sun.

Is it presumptuous in the mind of man to scale the heavens, and trace the planets in their course, and calculate their distances, their orbits, and their motions in the illimitable fields of space?
And if the sublime truths of Astronomy are not interdicted to our faculties, simply because there is a natural evidence in the light of which they may be clearly discerned, why should it be presumptuous to look from Nature up to Nature's God, if in Nature we behold a mirror in which His perfections are displayed?
If there be presumption on either side, does it not lie rather with those who virtually deny _the power of God to make Himself known_,--His power to create a world capable of exhibiting His perfections, and a mind adapted to that world capable of discerning the perfections which are therein displayed?
There might be modesty, there might be humility in the ingenuous confession of ignorance, saying, "I do not know;" but there can be neither in the confidence which affirms that "no imaginable order would be sufficient" to prove the existence of God, for what is this but to say that "he knows all that matter _can_ do, and all that it _cannot_ do," or be made to do?
2.

Secularism admits the existence of a self-existent and eternal Being, and thereby recognizes the fundamental law of _Causality_ on which the Theistic proof depends, while it forces upon us the question whether these attributes should be ascribed to Nature or to God.
"I am driven," says Mr.Holyoake, "to the conclusion that the great aggregate of matter which we call 'nature' is eternal, because we are unable to conceive a state of things when nothing was.

There must always have been something, or there could be nothing now.

This the dullest feel.