Considerations of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, with…

3. To the still voice of Reason, the loud voice of all Nations accords in confirming this Truth. The Civil, the Barbarous, those ⟨p. 79⟩who by their distance are without the least commerce, and are contrary in a thousand fashions and customs that depend on the liberty of Men that is mutable, yet^‖ all consent in the acknowledgement of a God, being instructed by Nature that is always the same, and immutable. 'Tis as natural to the humane understanding by considering the frame of the World, to believe there is a God, as 'tis the property of the Eye to see the light. The assent to this truth is unforced, but, without offering extreme violence to the rational faculties, none can contradict it. Indeed in their conceptions of him, few have the glass of the mind so clear and even as to represent him aright. Some divide what is indivisible, and of one make many Gods. Some attribute corporeal ⟨p. 80⟩parts to a pure spirit; some figure him in Statues to make the invisible seen; and in other manner deform him. Yet no error, no ignorance has absolutely defaced the notion of him. And that no societies of Men are without the belief of a first Being, superior to all things in the World, and of absolute power over them, and consequently worthy of supreme Honour from all reasonable Creatures, their Prayers, Vows, Sacrifices, Solemnities, Oaths, are a visible Testimony. The force and weight of the Argument is great: for that which is common to the whole species, and perpetual from its first being through all its duration, is the^* Impression of Nature, which in its universal Principles either of the Understanding, or the Will, is never deceived. ⟨p. 81⟩Thus the inclination to that good that is convenient to our faculties; the approving as most just to do to another what we desire in the same circumstances should be done to us, are natural principles, whose rectitude and verity are so evident, that no Man is so contumacious as to require a proof of them. If we discredit its authority in this single instance, that there is a God, we may with equal reason suspect its testimony in all other things; that the persons we converse with are phantoms, that the objects that strike our senses are only shadows, that what appears white is black, that what is felt as cold is hot, that what is evident to all Mens minds is false, viz. that the whole is greater than a part.