Was it so from eternity?
No man who was ever in a quarry, or a gravel pit, will say so, much less one who has the least smattering of chemistry or geology.

Do you assert the eternity of the fifty-seven single substances, either separate or combined in some other way than we now find them in the rocks, and rivers, and atmosphere of the earth?
Then how came they to get together at all, and particularly how did they put themselves in their present shapes?
Each of them is a piece of matter of which _inertia_ is a primary and inseparable property.

Matter _of itself_ can not begin to move, or assume a quiescent state after being put in motion.
Will you tell us that the fifty-seven primary elements danced about till the air, and sea, and earth, somehow jumbled themselves together into the present shape of this glorious and beautiful world, with all its regularity of day and night, and summer and winter, with all its beautiful flowers and lofty trees, with all its variety of birds, and beasts, and fishes?
To bring the matter down to the level of the intellect of the most stupid pantheist, tell us in plain English, _Did the paving stones make themselves ?_ For the paving stones are _made_ out of a dozen different chemical constituents, and each one is built up more ingeniously than the house you live in.

_Now, did the paving stones make themselves ?_ No conviction of the human mind is more certain than the belief that every combination of matter proves the existence of a combiner, that every house has had a builder, and that every machine has had a maker.
No matter how simple the combination, if it be only two laths fastened together by a nail, or two bricks cemented with mortar, or the sole of an old pegged boot, all the atheists in the world could not convince you that those two laths, or those two bricks, or those two bits of leather existed in such a combination from all eternity.

If any wise philosopher tried to persuade you that for anything you could tell they might have been always so, you would reply, "No, sir! You can't cram such stuff down my throat.