11. Any examination of what has been written on this subject would show that, in speculating about moral and intellectual beings in other regions of the universe, we merely make them to be men in another place. With regard to the plants and animals of other planets, fancy has freer play; but man cannot conceive any moral creature who is not man. Thus Fontenelle, in his _Dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds_, makes the inhabitants of Venus possess, in an exaggerated degree, the characteristics of the men of the warm climates of the earth. They are like the Moors of Grenada; or rather, the Moors of Grenada would be to them as cold as Greenlanders and Laplanders to us. And the inhabitants of Mercury have so much vivacity, that they would pass with us for insane. "Enfin c'est dans Mercure que sont les Petites-Maisons de l'Univers." The inhabitants of Jupiter and Saturn are immensely slow and phlegmatic. And though he and other writers attempt to make these inhabitants of remote regions in some respects superior to man, telling us that instead of only five senses, they may have six, or ten, or a hundred, still these are mere words which convey no meaning; and the great astronomer Bessel had reason to say, that those who imagined inhabitants in the Moon and Planets, supposed them, in spite of all their protestations, as like to men as one egg to another.[1] 12. But there is one step more, which we still have to make, in order to bring out this difficulty in its full force. As we have said, the moral law has been, to a certain extent, established, developed, and enforced among men. But, as I have also said, looking carefully at the law, and at the degree of man's obedience to it, and at the operation of the sanctions by which it is supported, we cannot help seeing, that man's knowledge of the law is imperfect, his conviction of its authority feeble, his transgressions habitual, their punishment and consequences obscure. When, therefore, we regard God, as the Lawgiver and Judge of man, it will not appear strange to us, that he should have taken some mode of promulgating his Law, and announcing his Judgments, in addition to that ordinary operation of the faculties of man, of which we have spoken. Revealed Religion teaches us that he has done so: that from the first placing of the race of man upon the earth, it was his purpose to do so: that by his dealing with the race of man in the earlier times, and at various intervals, he made preparation for the mission of a special Messenger, whom, in the fulness of time, he sent upon the earth in the form of a man; and who both taught men the Law of God in a purer and clearer form than any in which it had yet been given; and revealed His purpose, of rewards for obedience, and punishments for disobedience, to be executed in a state of being to which this human life is only an introduction; and established the means by which the spirit of man, when