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Rh cut wood and to hew stones blindly and without any purpose in view; suppose that he had set them to build a house blindly and without any purpose in view, a house which was not purposely designed to minister either to his own good or to the good of any other creature; in short, that the idea of an ultimate end or good never entered his mind, and that nothing that had been done was done with the view of giving satisfaction either to himself or others; then I am sure that, however much we might admire the power and energy of the savage, we should have a very poor opinion of his intelligence; we should deny, indeed, that his proceedings had been directed by any degree of thought or intellect at all. We might consider him a powerful, but we could not regard him as an intelligent, agent.

16. I leave the application of this illustration very much to yourselves. I may just suggest that if you suppose the universe made for no good purpose whatever, that is, made just as you might suppose a house built by a man blindly, and into whose head no notion of the comfort or utility of a house ever entered; if that be your supposition, then, however active and powerful you may conceive the author of all things to be, you cannot conceive him to be intelligent; while on the other hand, if you suppose that the universe exists for some good purpose, that it answers in all its parts and arrangements some great and beneficent end, however dim and limited your knowledge of that end may be; then,