For I
judge it as certain and clear a truth as can anywhere be delivered,
that "the invisible things of God are clearly seen from the creation
of the world, being understood by the things that are made, even his
eternal power and Godhead." Though our own being furnishes us, as I
have shown, with an evident and incontestable proof of a Deity; and
I believe nobody can avoid the cogency of it, who will but as
carefully attend to it, as to any other demonstration of so many
parts: yet this being so fundamental a truth, and of that consequence,
that all religion and genuine morality depend thereon, I doubt not but
I shall be forgiven by my reader if I go over some parts of this
argument again, and enlarge a little more upon them.
8. Recapitulation- something from eternity. There is no truth more
evident than that something must be from eternity. I never yet heard
of any one so unreasonable, or that could suppose so manifest a
contradiction, as a time wherein there was perfectly nothing. This
being of all absurdities the greatest, to imagine that pure nothing,
the perfect negation and absence of all beings, should ever produce
any real existence.
It being, then, unavoidable for all rational creatures to
conclude, that something has existed from eternity; let us next see
what kind of thing that must be.
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