The first law of mechanics is that action and reaction are equal; consequently machinery can never create power.

You will never lift yourself by pulling at your boot-straps; much less can a machine lift and carry itself.
It is no matter how big you make the wheels of your machine, as big as the orbits of the planets if you like, still it is only a machine, unless it has a mind in it; and your big machine can no more create power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch.

Nor does it make the least difference in respect to making power, of what materials your perpetual motion peddler makes his machine--whether of a skein of silk on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these materials, as destitute of power as the smaller machines made out of it.
The atheists' universe is only a big machine, and no machine can create power, no more than a paving stone.
It has been, however, proposed to manufacture power by the law of gravitation, according to which all bodies attract each other, directly in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the square of their distances.

This law appears to prevail as far as our observation extends through space; and our world builders affirm that it must have operated eternally, and that not only were the separate parts of our earth thus drawn together, but that all the orbs of heaven were caused to revolve under its influence.
Suppose, however, we grant that matter was eternal, and the force of gravitation eternally operating upon it, would that sufficiently account for the building up of even our own little planetary system?
By no means.
The unresisted force of gravitation would, in far less than an eternity, draw all things together toward the center of gravity of the universe.
We should not have separate stars, and suns, and planets, and moons, revolving in orderly orbits, but one vast mass of matter, in which all motion had long since ceased.

There must be some power of resistance to gravitation, and nicely balanced against it, a centrifugal force--no matter whether you call it heat, light, or electricity, or by any other name--from which balance of power the movements of the universe are regulated.