“And what is the result?” I asked.

“The result is a part of ‘the everlasting shame and contempt’ which are the heritage of impiety.”

“There must have been enough for the said vicegerent to do,” I remarked.

“Not so much as you imagine,” said he, smiling.  “The conditions of their theories, so far as even omniscience can comprehend or omnipotence realize them, are indeed exactly complied with; but nevertheless, they often baffle both.  Sometimes the reproof, thus implied, obliquely strikes more than its immediate objects; it alights even on some of the profoundest philosophers, who never had it in their thoughts to call in question the infinite superiority of Divine Power and Wisdom, but who have delivered themselves a little too positively about ‘monads’ and ‘atoms,’ and ultimate constituents of the universe.  They have sometimes been not a little scandalized, as well as laughed at, when some half-witted, muddle-headed followers, glad to escape their trial, pretended to have founded systems of Pantheism, or what is just the same thing, Atheism, on some of their too obscure definitions.  One man declared that he could do nothing without the Monads of Leibnitz, each of which, says that philosopher, ’is a mirror representing the universe, though obscurely, and knows every thing, but confusedly,’ which last clause is unexceptionable enough.  Another rogue asked for the archetypes of Plato,—­he had had a notion, he said, that a good deal might be made out of them without Plato’s Demiurgus; another, for the constituents of the vital automata of Descartes:  he had been misled to believe, that, if animals could be mechanically produced, the whole universe might have been so produced also.  The Archangel assured them and others, with much politeness, that, if the philosophers in question could in any way make their meaning intelligible, Heaven would do its poor best to realize their conceptions; but that it was impossible for even omnipotence to execute commands which even omniscience could not comprehend.

“Similarly, one man requested that he might be provided with a little of Aristotle’s ‘Eternal Matter,’ but he was told that there was no such thing in rerum natura, and that it was unfortunately too late to make it.  He seemed to think himself very unjustly treated.  Another demanded some of the Atoms of Epicurus, to make a slight experiment with; unexceptionably spherical, invisible, and so forth.  These, he was told, he might be accommodated with; and that all he had to do was to shake them long enough, and doubtless the fortuitous jumble would come out at last a miniature world.