I. _Why should there be_ more worlds than one? “Astronomy,” says Dr Whewell, “no more reveals to us extra-terrestrial moral agents, than religion reveals to us extra-terrestrial plans of Divine government;” and to remedy the assumption of moral agents in other worlds, by the assumption of some operation of the Divine plan in other worlds, is unauthorised and fanciful, and a violation of the humility, submission of mind, and spirit of reverence, which religion requires.[21] He considers Dr Chalmers’s allowance of astronomy’s offering strong analogies in favour of such opinions as “more than rash:” he regards such “analogies” as, “to say the least, greatly exaggerated; and by taking into account what astronomy really teaches us, and what we learn also from other sciences, I shall attempt to reduce such analogies to their true value.” We have seen Dr Whewell, in 1833, expressing an opinion very doubtfully, with a “_perhaps_, that, as analogy would suggest, a few of the heavenly bodies appearing to be of the same nature as the earth, _may_ be, like it, the seats of organised beings.” He is now disposed to annihilate those analogies, so far as they are deemed sufficient to warrant such an immense conclusion. But that to which he is now disposed to come is equally immense. He says, “That the earth is inhabited, is not a reason for believing that the other planets are so, but for believing that they are _not_ so.”[22] Her orbit “is the temperate zone of the solar system, where only is the play of hot and cold, moist and dry, possible.... The earth is really the largest planetary body in the solar system; its domestic hearth; adjusted between the hot and fiery haze on one side, the cold and watery vapour on the other. This region only is fit to be a domestic hearth, a seat of habitation; in this region is placed the largest _solid_ globe of our system; and on this globe, by a series of _creative_ operations, entirely different from any of those which separated the solid from the vaporous, the cold from the hot, the moist from the dry, have been established, in succession, plants, and animals, and MAN. So that the habitations have been occupied; the domestic hearth has been surrounded by its family; the fitnesses so wonderfully combined have been employed; and the earth alone, of all the parts of the frame which revolve round the sun, has become a _WORLD_.”[23] Now, let us here cite two or three passages of Scripture, one of them very remarkable. “The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s; _but the earth hath he given to the children of men_.”[24] “Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people _upon it_, and spirit to them that walk _therein_:[25] ... I have made the earth, and created man _upon it_; I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded.... Thus saith the