as rest, in an extent to which the utmost possible magnitude of Nature is but a point.” The reader will now be prepared for the remarks of this free thinker upon the Plurality of Worlds. Observe I call him free thinker not in disparagement, but in honour; he belongs to that service in which alone is perfect freedom. “Perceiving,” he says, “as it is easy to do, the imperfection of our present system, instead of contemplating the immense prospect opened to our view in the progress of man, in the powers and the means he possesses, the philosopher sees through his telescope worlds and scales of being to his liking. By means of these, without the least reference to the Bible, or the human heart, Pope, the pretty talking parrot of Bolingbroke, with the assistance of his pampered goose, finds it easy to justify the ways of God to man. From worlds he never saw, he proves ours is as it should be.” “To form the children of God for himself, to raise them to a capacity to converse with him, to enjoy all his love, this grand scenery is not unnecessary,—not extravagant. A smaller exhibition would not have demonstrated his wisdom and power. You would make an orrery serve perhaps! By a plurality of Gods, error degraded the Supreme Being in early ages; by a plurality of worlds it would now degrade his children, deprive them of their inheritance.” “What are they doing in these planets? Peeping at us through telescopes? We may be their Venus or Jupiter. They are perhaps praying to us, sending up clouds of incense to regale our nostrils. Hear them, far-seeing Herschel! gauger of stars. I will pray to One only, who is above them all; and if your worlds come between me and Him, I will kick them out of my way. In banishing your new ones, I put more into the old than is worth them all put together.” “These expanding heavens, the residence of so many luminous bodies of immeasurable distance and magnitude, and which the philosopher thinks must be a desert if devoted to man, at present possessing but so small a portion of his own globe, shall yet be too little for him,—the womb only in which the infant was inclosed, incapable of containing the mature birth.” “We shall yet explore all these celestial bodies more perfectly than we have hitherto done our own globe, analyse them better than the substances we can shut up in our retorts, count their number, tell their measure.” “As nature grows, mind grows. It grows to God, and in union with him shall fill, possess all.”