SECT.  V.  Noble Comparisons proving that Nature shows the Existence of its Maker.  First Comparison, drawn from Homer’s “Iliad.”

Who will believe that so perfect a poem as Homer’s “Iliad” was not the product of the genius of a great poet, and that the letters of the alphabet, being confusedly jumbled and mixed, were by chance, as it were by the cast of a pair of dice, brought together in such an order as is necessary to describe, in verses full of harmony and variety, so many great events; to place and connect them so well together; to paint every object with all its most graceful, most noble, and most affecting attendants; in short, to make every person speak according to his character in so natural and so forcible a manner?  Let people argue and subtilise upon the matter as much as they please, yet they never will persuade a man of sense that the “Iliad” was the mere result of chance.  Cicero said the same in relation to Ennius’s “Annals;” adding that chance could never make one single verse, much less a whole poem.  How then can a man of sense be induced to believe, with respect to the universe, a work beyond contradiction more wonderful than the “Iliad,” what his reason will never suffer him to believe in relation to that poem?  Let us attend another comparison, which we owe to St. Gregory Nazianzenus.