phere.* Whatever they may be, they are floating in space or ether, as freely and as unpropped and unfastened as we are. Mighty laws of suspension uphold those that never move, is others of revolution impel and guide such as circulate. But their continued appearance, and its unchanging uniformty, demonstrate to us that his power is as beneficently active towards them, as it is towards us; and from the beginning of human consciousness at least, has always been so. Whether they preceded us in existence, or commenced when we did, we have not been informed, and therefore cannot know; for nothing that is discernible in them, gives any mark of the chronology of their being. This absence of all indication of their date would be the same, whatever might be the greater or less degree of its remoteness. Their visible phenomena would be the same to us, whether they were created one hundred years ago, or one hundred thousand. It was therefore an egregious error of antiquity so boldly to pronounce that they had eternally existed :† an extravagance of supposition like that of encouraging man to think himself a god; poor, perishable, dependant and erring man, who owes every thing that he has or is to the only real Deity, by whose favours and blessings, specially given for that purpose, it is that his intelligent mind can make the acquisitions, and display the powers which have drawn down this unbecoming and exaggerated panegyric upon him; a panegyric not left to be a word, because it was carried actually into operation when the Egyptians deified and worshipped their kings; Greece, her heroes; and Rome, her often half-mad and most frequently profligate, cruel, or commonminded tyrants; and when even Cicero himself, who ex *It was the fancy of Empedocles, that the heavens were a solid mass of air, condensed by fire into crystal, and that the fixed stars were fastened into this crystal, while the planets were loose, and moved freely along.--Plut. Pl. Ph. 1. ii. c. 11-13. Anaximines also thought that they stuck fast in the crystalline sky like nails.-Ib. c. 14. †The eternity of the heaven is the great doctrine of Aristotle, in his "De Cœlo," and other works; and Cicero calls the stars," illis sempi ternis ignibus" (those everlasting fires).-Som. Sc. 151. "Deum te igitur scito esse: siquidem Deus est qui viget, qui sentit, qui meminit, qui providet, qui tam regit et moderatur."-Cic. Som. Sc. 158. Phocyllides declares, that after death mankind" will become gods" (OEOL TEXεOOVTAL), v. 99. So the golden verses of Pythagoras, You shall become an immortal deathless god (αθανατος θεος αμβροτος), and be a mortal being no more."-Aur. Car. v. 77. 66 presses with such complacency the impious self-adulation, took some trouble to give his own daughter a participation of this venerated character.* It is for us to be grateful to our Creator, for assigning to us a nature so wonderful, so improvable, so capable of excellences, and licensed to cherish such heavenly aspirations; but it is also for us never to forget our personal imperfections, our unworthiness in his sight, who knows so fully what he has done to raise us from it; our sinning actions and propensities, and our general unwillingness to correct them.t It may therefore be made one of the first points of our sacred history, that the heavens, like our earth, contain numerous kingdoms, states, and beings; and though it pleased the ancients to consider our world as the centre of all existence, to which every thing had reference, and to make it also an actual Deity, yet we must not for a moment suppose, that the human race monopolizes the attention or the regard of the Great Parent of all. Both the Grecian and Ro man mind persisted in believing that our globe was in the middle of the universe, round which all the hosts of heaven continually revolved; and the oriental imagination has been so self-flattering as to deem it the most precious of all. * The instance of Cicero's making a little temple for the apotheosis, or deification of his daughter, was stated, from his own account of it, in my Mod. Hist. Engl. v. iii. p. 104, note 96. 1 "Lorenzo! swells thy bosom at the thought? CAN UNDERRATE HIS MERIT."-Night Thoughts, B. vi. Plutarch says, "The name of the earth is dear and venerable to every Grecian, and it has been our custom, from our forefathers, to worship it (oebeσ0a) like any other god."-De Fac. Lun. 1723. Plato represents it as "the first and most ancient of the gods which are generated within the heavens."-Plat. Tim. Tayl. p..471. The central position of the earth was so early an opinion, that Thales maintained it.-Plut. Plac. 1. iii. c. 2. Plato, in his Timæus, teaches it; Aristotle likewise, De Cœlo, 1. ii. c. 14. The Alexandrian astronomers, Hipparchus, as well as Ptolemy also, though both Philolaus and Aristarchus had maintained otherwise; and among the Romans, Cicero and Manilius assert it; and Pliny declares that, by "haud dubiis argumentis," it is manifest "medium esse mundi totius."--L. ii. c. 69. The Cinghalese Raja Vali states, "There are an infinite number of worlds, whereof 100,000 lacs of worlds are more precious than the athers, and 10,000 worlds are still more precious than these. But this world, called Magol Sakwell (the earth), is more precious than all the This position and estimation of our state was indeed a prepossession very difficult to eradicate from the human mind. That the earth, instead of being fixed in the centre of the universe, was but a moving planet, like the others, was so strange an idea in England so late as the end of the reign of Charles II., that Bishop Wilkins makes the first proposition of the book he wrote to enforce it, to be, "that the seeming novelty and singularity of this opinion can be no sufficient reason to prove it erroneous."* A little before this, the same zealous prelate composed and published fourteen propositions to convince his countrymen that the moon may be a world, though Orpheus had intimated the same truth above twenty-five centuries before. But the natural fact was so immediately nullified by the infatuation of making it a divinity, that it never obtained a general credit. Orpheus himself led the way to this delirous absurdity, which continued down rest." This book is translated in the Annals of Oriental Literature, p. 385. * See "A Discourse concerning a new Planet, tending to prove that it is probable our earth is one of the planets."-By John Wilkins, late Lord Bishop of Chester. Lond. 1684. f See his "Discovery of a new World, to prove there may be another habitable World in the Moon."-Fifth edit. 1684. Proclus has preserved these Orphic verses on this point. "He constructed another extensive earth, Which the immortals call Selene, and men the moon. In the Orphic Hymn to her she is addressed, "Hear me, O goddess queen! light-bearer! In Tim. p. 154 He calls her "Mother of Time! Allwise virgin! Save thy suppliants, O good virgin Σώζεσα τους ικετας, ες λοκύρη. The two last words of this line, es λokson, have given some trouble to the commentators, the word λokson having no meaning. Scaliger proposed to strike them out, and Rhunkenius to alter them into dεo kupη, and reus into aytes by which, Gesner says, he has mended versum desperatum feliciter, p. 191. These learned men seem to have missed an emendation which requires neither omission nor change. If we join the es to the λοκυρη, we shall have the applicable compound εσλοκύρη, which will have the very probable meaning of "O good virgin!" from codos, good, Dorice for coλos; it will then stand, as translated above, Σώζεσα τεως ικετας, εσλόκαρη! to the days of Plutarch, and would have still prevailed if Christianity had not abolished it.* The creation of the stars has been for purposes connected with themselves, and independent of our earth. But that they are seen by us, is a fact which proves that it has been one principle of the divine system, both in our and their formation, that we should, by their visibility, be prevented from considering ourselves as the only beings in existence. The other planets must, from the same cause, be under the same impression, and this result could not have occurred unless it had been specially provided for. The perception thus given to every one of the wonderful extent of creation, has been produced by causing each starry world to be an island in an immense ocean of what we call space; and by keeping this in such subtile tenuity, or transparency, that it nowhere precludes our eyesight from receiving luminous sensations from these celestial orbs, although they are at a distance from us so prodigious as to be quite unascertainable. This system has the double effect of magnifying our conceptions of our Creator, and of precluding all disproportioned and inflated notions of ourselves; for if none of the heavenly hosts had been visible to us, how greatly would our ideas of him have been diminished, and how much should we not have misconceived the importance of ourselves, from the inference which would then have been unavoidable, that the human race composed the whole of existing nature.† * Plutarch remarks, "The moon has not lost its divinity (ro Ostov), nor the sentiment of veneration for it."-De Fac. Lun. p. 1723. How prone the human mind has been to exaggerate its own importance and that of its little earth, we see from the opinions of such men as Seneca and the Stoics, who had, nevertheless, altogether, upon a fair balance of error and truth, a larger portion of sound mind than most of the other philosophers. Seneca says, what his school believed, "all the heavens, which the fiery ether, the highest part of the universe, includes; all those stars, whose number cannot be told; all this host of heavenly bodies, their sun running his course so near us, draw their nourishment from the earth (alimentum ex terreno trahunt), and share it among them; nor are they sustained by any thing else than by the breath of the earth (nec ullo alio quam halitu terrarum sustinentur).”— Nat. Quest. 1. vi. c. 16. Only 200 years ago, Dubartas found this old opinion still so favoured and maintained, as to think it necessary to attack it in his poem on Creation. The passage is thus translated by Sylvester: "And therefore smile I at these fable forgers, Of the planets which are connected with our sun, two of them, Mars and Venus, are the most likely to have on them animated beings of some analogy with those which inhabit our earth. They are sufficiently near the sun to have several resemblances to us; but yet our men of science distinguish so many diversities, that we cannot positively infer that their population has the same bodies of flesh and blood, as invest our vital principle here. No identity with a nature like ours can be presumed as to the inhabitants of Mercury, on account of its greater prox imity to the solar radiance: nor as to those of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, because their remoteness and discernible peculiarities imply great dissimilarities to us and to our globe: neither can their vegetable animals, if any, be the same as ours." Hence their external worlds must be unlike that from which we derive our sensations and our knowledge. They must severally have modes of being, component parts and substance, impressions, ideas, and inclinations, very different from all that we are conscious of here. Yet they may, notwithstanding this diversity of their natures, be sentient and intelligent beings. We cannot deny this probability, though we are entitled to infer that they do not feel and act as we do; if they reason, it must be on ideas we do not possess ; if they think, it cannot be on the subjects which occupy our thoughts. Their sensations will be the materials of their mental powers, and these must be taken from their own external worlds, and not from ours. Their desires and pursuits will correspond with the im pressions they receive in their respective abodes, as ours arise from the objects on our surface; and thus we and they must be unlike each other in knowledge, habit, and nature, whatever kind of beings they may be. From these reflections, we seem to be justified in con The heaven's bright sapphires to be living creatures, The earth for meat, and for their drink the ocean. |