To them, all the lights of the firmament were created only to give light to the earth, as its lamps or candles hung above it. The earth was supposed to be the only inhabited portion of the Universe. The world and the Universe were synonymous terms. Of the immense size and distance of the heavenly bodies, men had no conception. The Sages had, in Chaldæea, Egypt, India, China, and in Persia, and therefore the sages always had, an esoteric creed, taught only in the mysteries and unknown to the vulgar. No Sage, in either country, or in Greece or Rome, believed the popular creed. To them the Gods and the Idols of the Gods were symbols, and symbols of great and mysterious truths. The Vulgar imagined the attention of the Gods to be continually centred upon the earth and man. The Grecian Divinities inhabited Olympus, an insignificant mountain of the Earth. There was the Court of Zeus, to which Neptune came from the Sea, and Pluto and Persephoné from the glooms of Tartarus in the unfathomable depths of the Earth's bosom. God came down from Heaven and on Sinai dictated laws for the Hebrews to His servant Moses. The Stars were the guardians of mortals whose fates and fortunes were to be read in their movements, conjunctions, and oppositions. The Moon was the Bride and Sister of the Sun, at the same distance above the Earth, and, like the Sun, made for the service of mankind alone. If, with the great telescope of Lord Rosse, we examine the vast nebulæ of Hercules, Orion, and Andromeda, and find them resolvable into Stars more numerous than the sands on the seashore; if we reflect that each of these Stars is a Sun, like and even many times larger than ours,--each, beyond a doubt, with its retinue of worlds swarming with life;--if we go further in imagination, and endeavor to conceive of all the infinities of space, filled with similar suns and worlds, we seem at once to shrink into an incredible insignificance. The Universe, which is the uttered Word of God, is _infinite_ in extent. There is no empty space beyond creation on any side. The Universe, which is the Thought of God pronounced, never was _not_, since God never was inert; nor WAS, without thinking and creating. The forms of creation change, the suns and worlds live and die like the leaves and the insects, but the Universe itself is infinite and eternal, because God Is, Was, and Will forever Be, and never did _not_ think and create. Reason is fain to admit that a Supreme Intelligence, infinitely powerful and wise, must have created this boundless Universe; but it also tells us that we are as unimportant in it as the zoöphytes and entozoa, or as the invisible particles of animated life that float upon the air or swarm in the water-drop.