“Light, and darkness its perpetual contrast; the succession of days and nights, the periodical order of the seasons; the career of the brilliant luminary which regulates their course; that of the moon his sister and rival; night, and the innumerable fires which she lights in the blue vault of heaven; the revolutions of the stars, which exhibit them for a longer or a shorter period above our horizon; the constancy of this period in the fixed stars, its variety in the wandering stars, the planets; their direct and retrograde course, their momentary rest; the phases of the moon waxing, full, waning, divested of all light; the progressive motion of the sun upwards, downwards; the successive order of the rising and setting of the fixed stars, which mark the different points of the course of the sun, while the various aspects which the earth itself assumes mark, here below also, the same periods of the sun’s annual motion; * * * all these different pictures, displayed before the eyes of man, formed the great and magnificent spectacle by which I suppose him surrounded at the moment when _he is about to create his gods_.”[31] What is this (divested of its wanton levity of expression) but to say, that when man has so far traced the course of nature as to be irresistibly impressed with the existence of order, law, variety in constancy, and fixity in change; of relations of form and space, duration and succession, cause and consequence, among the objects which surround him; there springs up in his breast, unbidden and irresistibly, the thought of superintending intelligence, of a mind which comprehended from the first and completely that which he late and partially comes to know? The worship of earth and sky, of the host of heaven and the influences of nature, is not the ultimate and fundamental fact in the early history of the religious impressions of mankind. These are but derivative streams, impure and scanty, from the fountain of religious feeling which appears to be disclosed to us by the contemplation of the universe, as the seat of law and the manifestation of intellect. Time suggests to man the thought of eternity; space of infinity; law of intelligence; order of purpose; and however difficult and long a task it may be to develope these suggestions into clear convictions, these thoughts are the real parents of our natural religious belief. The only relation between true religion and the worship of the elemental world is, that the latter is the partial and gross perversion, the former the consistent and pure developement of the same original idea.