own labours must force into fertility, but the heir of all the cultivation of all the old successive masters of the land. Yet, unlike all other, the mental culture never wears out the ground. Every advance is in the direction of first principles. The more vigorous the intellect that leads the way, the more rapid is the simplification of its discoveries. Every invasion into the kingdom of ignorance, furnishes a new force for still larger triumph; every new exertion actually generates new instruments of power: progress is thus utterly unrestrained. With the immeasurable depths and heights of nature for the exercise of the understanding, and with its largest acquisitions acting, not as an incumbrance, but a stimulant, not as a weight, but a wing, it is palpably designed to expatiate, enjoy, and conquer, for ever.

The third distinguishing attribute of man was of a still loftier order. The moral sense 1-a totally

'Paley's "selfish doctrine" of Expediency has been long since exploded, as a plagiarism from Hume's profligate doctrine of Utility; but his denial of the Moral Sense still has its advocates. It is surprising to find so matter-of-fact a reasoner rejecting a doctrine founded on the experience of every man, and rejecting it on such slippery grounds as, that different nations have had different estimates of the acts which constitute vice; that theft lost its criminality in Sparta, or suicide in Rome, as cannibalism does in New Zealand, or duelling in France. He forgets, that he is here confounding the law with the judge; that it is the opinion of society which makes the vice, (supposing the law of God unknown.) But it is the

new principle, by which his nature was to be connected with the beings of another existence; a divine portal, which opened to him the perceptions of the world of spirits, sacred obedience, faith, and hope; the communion of the great family of heaven; the inheritance of happiness beyond all duration or degree; the whole uncircumscribed vision of immortality.

This intellect was clothed in a form worthy of its rank. We justly call that perfect, to which we cannot conceive any superior; and such is the

moral sense which instantly declares to the individual his transgression of that opinion, and condemns him accordingly. Paley objects, that the wild boy of Hanover would not exhibit a moral sense on hearing the story of a Roman parricide. True. And for this reason, that the moral sense being solely exercised on acts declared, by human convention or Divine law, to be right or wrong, and a solitary savage in the woods of Hanover having no knowledge of either, the moral sense could not be brought into action. It would be a judge without a tribunal. But the more direct answer to all doubts of the doctrine, is the appeal to experience. It may be unhesitatingly said, that no man, in possession of his understanding, ever committed an act of acknowledged guilt, without feeling at the instant the condemning principle-the moral sense, conscience, busy in his breast. Its purpose is not to decide on the guilt, or the degree of guilt of actions; but to strike the doer of actions, already declared guilty, with a feeling of wrong. He may refuse to

obey the conviction, but he cannot refuse to hear the monitor. Perhaps there is no state of the mind, however desperate and depraved, in which conscience does not retain its power to penetrate. Its warnings may be useless; but if they cannot cure, they still sting.

perfect beauty of the human form in its finer instances, that it actually reaches the highest flight of even that soaring and fastidious thing, the imagination of man. We may create in fancy, but we have before us the limit of all loveliness conceivable by human thought. Let the doubter make the experiment, and he will find that, in his highest conception of beauty, he is always borrowing from the human form. Even his angel is but a youth with wings.

But admirable as the form, the faculties, and the spirit, of the first man might have appeared to the sons of heaven, still loftier contemplations must have been connected with him as the head of mankind. Whatever may be the ties that bind the spiritual world, we know that parentage is not among them; and the absence of a tie, which with us constitutes the primal and universal source of social obligation, implies a totally different construction of society. In the idea of parentage, new foundations of society lay before their sight, the gradual existence of countless millions, with their result in the formation of empires, the progressive knowledge, the increasing happiness, the tried and triumphant virtue, the whole vivid and diversified machinery of a vast and novel system of moral impulses, calculated to exist for thousands of years, and to exhibit, in novel and perpetual action, the mercy and the wisdom of the Supreme.

But, elevated and cheering as this view must be, to beings equal to its complete and instant apprehension, why are we to conceive that their view was chained down to our diminutive globe? Why, if the original act of Deity in calling the universe into existence, was made a source of angelic rejoicing, should the furnishing of the universe with life have been hidden from them? Why should the great productive process, which had so richly developed the resources of the Divine hand in the earth, have been checked in the expanse of the skies? And why should the high capacities, ardent affections, and devoted love of angels; those who "always behold the face of their Father in heaven," and are formed to exult in every new declaration of his attributes, have been shut out from so magnificent a revelation of his sovereignty as the simultaneous repletion of the starry worlds with the living works of his will.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PLANETARY WORLDS.

THAT the orbs of our system are inhabited, and inhabited by embodied minds, perhaps not differing in essentials from ourselves, we have all the evidence that analogy can give; an evidence closely approaching to demonstration. The general similitude of the planets is so complete, that an observer, standing in the sun, would have as much right to pronounce the earth uninhabitable as Mercury or the Georgium Sidus. They all have the same source of light, the same rotation, the same shape, the same form of orbit, the same direction, the same law of impulse and attraction. But their habitancy and its nature may be still more closely reasoned from the palpable provision for that habitancy'.

In the work of the celebrated Huygens on this subject, the Cosmotheros, deciding on the state of the planetary population, rather illogically, takes it for granted that they must have human organs, from the inconvenience which we should feel in wanting them; thus, that they must have eyes, because