27. Here then we are brought to the view which, it would seem, offers a complete reply to the difficulty, which astronomical discoveries appeared to place in the way of religion:--the difficulty of the opinion that man, occupying this speck of earth, which is but as an atom in the Universe, surrounded by millions of other globes, larger, and, to appearance, nobler than that which he inhabits, should be the object of the peculiar care and guardianship, of the favor and government, of the Creator of All, in the way in which Religion teaches us that He is. For we find that man, (the human race, from its first origin till now,) has occupied but an atom of time, as he has occupied but an atom of space:--that as he is surrounded by myriads of globes which may, like this, be the habitations of living things, so he has been preceded, on this earth, by myriads of generations of living things, not possibly or probably only, but certainly; and yet that, comparing his history with theirs, he has been, certainly has been fitted to be, the object of the care and guardianship, of the favor and government, of the Master and Governor of All, in a manner entirely different from anything which it is possible to believe with regard to the countless generations of brute creatures which had gone before him. If we will doubt or overlook the difference between man and brutes, the difficulty of ascribing to man peculiar privileges, is made as great by the revelations of geology, as of astronomy. The scale of man's insignificance is, as we have said, of the same order in reference to time, as to space. There is nothing which at all goes beyond the magnitude which observation and reasoning suggest for geological periods, in supposing that the tertiary strata occupied, in their deposition and elevation, a period as much greater than the period of human history, as the solar system is larger than the earth:--that the secondary strata were as much longer than these in their formation, as the nearest fixed star is more distant than the sun:--that the still earlier masses, call them primary, or protozoic, or what we will, did, in their production, extend through a period of time as vast, compared with the secondary period, as the most distant nebula is remoter than the nearest star. If the earth, as the habitation of man, is a speck in the midst of an infinity of space, the earth, as the habitation of man, is also a speck at the end of an infinity of time. If we are as nothing in the surrounding universe, we are as nothing in the elapsed eternity; or rather, in the elapsed organic antiquity, during which the earth has existed and been the abode of life. If man is but one small family in the midst of innumerable possible households, he is also but one small family, the successor of innumerable tribes of animals, not possible only, but actual. If the planets _may_ be the seats of life, we know that the seas which have given birth to our mountains _were_ the seats of life.