SPECULATORS AMONG THE STARS.. "Whatever we talk, things are as they are; not as we grant, dispute, or hope: depending on neither OUR affirmative nor negative, but upon the rate and value which GOD sets upon things."-JEREMY TAYLOR. † LET us imagine one of our species, at an early period of its history, destitute of any artificial aid to the sense of sight, contemplating the aspect of things around him. He perceives that, somehow or other, he lives upon a Something, apparently a flat surface, of indefinite extent in all directions from the spot where he stands, consisting of land and water, alternately visited with light and darkness, heat and cold; with a regular succession of seasons, somehow or other connected with the growth of vegetables of various kinds, suitable and unsuitable for his purposes, with beautiful flowers and magnificent forests: while the air, water, and earth, teem with insects, birds, fishes, and animals, which seem almost altogether at his command. There are also winds, dews, showers, mists, frost, snow, hail, thunderstorms, volcanoes, and earthquakes. He himself, equally with the vegetables and animals, passes through divers gradations, from birth to decay-from life Blackwood's Magazine, September and October 1854. Of the Plurality of Worlds: an Essay. Also a Dialogue on the same subject. Second Edition. Parker and Son, 1854. [A third has since appeared. but we quote from the second.] More Worlds than One, the Creed of the Philosopher, and the Hope of the Christian. By Sir DAVID BREWSTER, K.H., D.C.L. Murray, 1854. [Another Edition has since appeared, but we quote from the former one.] The Planets: Are they Inhabited Worlds? Museum of Science and Art. By DIONYSIUS LARDNER, D.C.L., Chapters i., ii., iii., iv.; vols. i., ii., iïï. Walton and Maberly, 1854. + Works, vol. xi. p. 198. (Bishop Heber's Edition.) death but during life, alike with the animals, alteritely sleeping and waking, subject to vicissitudes of pain ad pleasure, of health and disease: - but apparently, like them, capable of mental action of a high order, and oral feeling. If he look beyond the locality on which all this takes lace, he beholds a blazing body alternately visible and inisible, at regular intervals, and to which he attributes both ght and heat; another luminous body brightly visible nly at night, which it gently illuminates; and both these bjects are occasionally subject to brief but portentous bscurations. During the night there also appear a reat number of glittering white specks in the blue listance, which he calls stars; all he knows of them being, that they are beautiful objects in the dark; even contributing a little light, in the absence of the moon. Why, and how, he himself, and all these things, came to be as they are, he knows no more than the bird that is blithely carolling on the branch above him, but for a certain Book, which tells him that GOD ALMIGHTY made him, and everything he sees about him; the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, with all the arrangements securing night and day, light and darkness, seasons, days, and years; forming him, in HIS IMAGE; giving him the earth for a dwelling, and dominion over everything that lives and breathes in it; adapting it exactly to his capacities and necessities, with countless arrangements for affording him happiness; and commanding him to be obedient to the will of his Maker. That the first Man and Woman placed on the earth became, nevertheless, almost immediately disobedient; whereby they incurred the anger of God, and their position became wofully changed for the worse. That God, nevertheless, loved man, formed in His own image, after His likeness, with such tenderness, that He devised means for his restoration, if he chose, to the favour which he had forfeited; and Himself visited the earth, vouch VOL. II. 2 B safing to assume the form of that being whom He had created in His image; submitted to mockery, suffering, and death, on his behalf; rose again, and returned to heaven with the very body which He had assumed on earth. That though man's body must die and decay, equally with that of every animal, his shall rise again, and be rejoined by its spirit, to stand before the judgment-seat of God, to be judged in respect of the deeds done in the body, and be eternally miserable or happy, according to the righteous judgment then pronounced. This Book, moreover, tells him, with reference to the locality in which he exists, that all things shall not always remain as they are; but that the earth, and all that is in it, shall be burned up; that it, and the heaven, shall pass away with a great noise; that the elements shall melt with fervent heat; and that for those on whom a favourable doom shall have been pronounced in the day of judgment, there shall be a new heaven, and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Believing all this, and his inner nature telling him that the law of action laid down in the Book is righteous, and exactly conformable to that nature, he endeavours to regulate his conduct by it, and dies, as dies generation after generation of his species, in calm and happy reliance on the Truth of that Book. Ages pass away, and vast discoveries appear to be made, by the exercise of man's own thought and ingenuity, independently of any revelations contained in his Great Book. Whereas he had thought the earth stationary, he now finds it, the sun, and the moon, to be round bodies, each turning round on its own axis,-the earth once in twenty-four hours; that the earth also goes round the sun once in every year, the moon accompanying it, and at the same time turning round it once in every month; and that these are the means by which are caused light and darkness, night and day, heat and cold, and the various changes of the seasons! The stars, however, main twinkling, the mere bright specks they ever ppeared. Let us now suppose our thoughtful observer's sight assted by the aid of glass, in two ways: so as to place him, a the one hand, nearer to distant objects, and on the other, veal objects close to him, the existence of which he had ever suspected. In the latter case, his microscope exibits an astounding spectacle: almost every atom turned, 3 it were, into a world, peopled with exquisitely-organed animal forms, adapted perfectly to the elements in hich they are seen disporting themselves. In the forher case, his telescope makes equally amazing revelaions in an opposite direction. The heavens are swarmag with splendid structures unseen to the naked eye: new planets are visible: others with rings, belts, and noons and the stars seem to be resplendent suns, the entres of so many systems peopling infinitude; and hese, moreover, obeying laws of motion the same as those xisting in the system of which the earth forms part! Well, says our overwhelmed observer, it is certainly late in the day to make these sublime and awful discoveries; but here they are, unless my instruments play me false, so that I am the victim of mere optical delusion; the boundless, numberless realms of insect life being only imaginary; and the stars really no suns or worlds at all, but simply the glittering spots, existing for purposes utterly inconceivable by me, which alone mankind has hitherto believed them. But if my telescope tell me truly, the little speck on which I live, is, in fact, but a grain of dust in the heavens, circling obscurely round a sun, itself a mere star, perhaps eclipsed in splendour by every other star in existence, each probably containing many more and greater planets circling about it than has our sun! And about these matters THE BOOK is silent! Pondering these discoveries, and assuming them to be real, our observer echoes the inquiry of our greatest living astronomer- "Now, for what purpose are we to suppose such magnificent bodies scattered through the abyss of space?" And at length the grander one occurs—Are there human beings, or beings similar to myself, anywhere else than on this earth? On the sun, moon, planets, and their satellites? Nay, on all the other inconceivably numerous suns, planets, and satellites, in existence? He pauses, as though in a spasm of awe. But he may next, and rationally, ask, If it be so, how does all this affect me? Has it any practical bearing on the condition of a denizen of this earth? If our bewildered inquirer unfortunately had at his elbow Thomas Paine, he would hear this blasphemous whisper: "The system of a plurality of worlds renders THE CHRISTIAN FAITH at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind, like feathers in the air. The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind; and he who thinks he believes both, has thought but little of either."† By this impious drivel is meant, that if this infinitude of systems be made by one God, who has peopled every orb as our own is peopled, with rational and moral inhabitants, it is absurd to suppose that He can have such a special regard for us, as the Scriptures assure us He has that He was made flesh, and dwelt among us: lived with us, died for us, rose again for us; us, the insignificant occupants of this insignificant speck amidst the resplendent, magnificence of the infinite universe! Now, that such a notion is equally irreligious and unphilosophical, we trust no intelligent reader of ours requires to be persuaded; but that there are both friends and ene mies of the Christian Faith, who respectively fear or believe otherwise, may be assumed; and hence the importance of viewing the matter soberly, by such light as we have,as God has been pleased to vouchsafe to us. If we have little, we cannot help ourselves, but must gratefully and re * Hersch. Astron., sec. 592.- We quote from the first edition.] |