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The Fundamentals the heaven of heavens? In like manner, reasons that great astronomer, William Herschel, with regard to the Milky-Way, that just as its breaking up into different parts shows that it cannot always endure, so we have, in this same fact, proof that it has not eternally existed. GOD THE AUTHOR OF ALL THINGS There remains, therefore, only this alternative: either the world produced itself, or it was created. That all things came into existence spontaneously, and therefore that we must suppose an origination of immeasurably great effects with out any cause, or believe that at some time a nothing, without either willing or knowing it, and without the use of means, became a something—this is the most unreasonable assumption that could possibly be attributed to a human being. How could anything act before it existed? or a thing not yet created produce something? There is nothing more unreasonable than the creed of the unbeliever, notwithstanding all his prat ing about the excellence of reason. But if this world did not produce itself, then it must have been created by some Higher Power, some Cause of all causes, such as was that First Principle upon which the dying Cicero called. Or, to use the words of Dr. Klein, that originating cause must have been a “Supreme Intelligence that has at its command unlimited creative power” (Kosmologische Briefe, p. 27). Hence what that Intelligence does is both illimitable ann unfathomable, and it can at any time either change this world or make a new one. It is therefore prima facie silly for us, with our prodigiously narrow experience, to set any kind of bounds to the Supreme Being; and a God who works no miracles and is the slave of his own laws implanted in nature, such a God as the New Theology preaches, is as much lacking in being a true Divinity as is the unconscious, but all-wise “cosmic ether” of Spiller, or the “eternal stuff” of other materialists.
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