Natural Table of the Correspondences Existing Between God, Man, and the Universe

without time, yet the terrestrial globe offers apparent traces of a slow and successive formation; we present the birth of the Universe as a single fact, and the surface of the earth is covered with a number of substances which seem to have been able to be born and consolidated only following several centuries; finally, the chronology of the Hebrew Books gives the world a mediocre antiquity, compared to that which observations made on Nature seem to attribute to it. We must examine these difficulties.

Observers of Nature teach that such extreme heat accompanied the origin of things that the Universe was long uninhabitable after the moment of its birth.

We will ask them first if their thought does not revolt against this tardy progression, this suspension in the execution of the works of a powerful hand, which by its nature cannot be an instant without acting; we will ask them at the same time what goal, what object will fill this interval that they wish to admit between the origin of things and their formation; what destination they will suppose for a world without Inhabitants: for to show us works without a goal, without an object, is to paint for us in its Author a Being devoid of wisdom; and it would be abusing reason to employ it to announce such a Being to us.