Lord of all, and that every other home to us will be as much his world, as the present one which we are enjoying. There is enough around us here, to make us happy in the thought of being anywhere in his creation; and the sacred history of all that he has made and done for mankind, in the globe which he has here given us, will, as we become more acquainted with it, dispose us to rejoice that he takes upon himself to remove us from it to some other place of his own appointment, and at such period of our individual existence as he thinks most proper. Who that is wise would not rather leave the choice of both points to him, than exercise it for ourselves in such an ignorance of all beyond what we see, as every one of us must remain in, until our departure from it? Here the advice of the greatest Roman satirist comes appositely to us, which he expressed to his fellow-citizens, as their most prudent conduct towards their divinities: "Leave them to manage for thee, and to grant From our God we shall always have what is best for us, though it may not be what at the time would be most gratifying to us. But we may intrust and desire his wisdom to be the judge and disposer in this respect for us; and upon the same principle of that exhilarating truth, which even Juvenal could discern, that the human race is even dearer to its Maker than we are to ourselves.‡ We cannot gaze upon the stars without the thought that the site of our future abode may be among them, however impossible it is here to ascertain its locality. The conviction of this uncertainty never destroys the hope. We admit that the home of the living dead is inscrutable to all who have not passed that bourn, from which no traveller has returned. We know that we shall change into invisibility when we die, from the natural invisibility of our living principle here. But the same mind which carries us now to the orbit of Uranus, and reasons upon the immeasurable space * Nil ergo optabunt homines? Si consilium vis; Permittes ipsis expendere Numinibus quid Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris. † Nam pro jucundis, aptissima quoque dabunt Dii. Carior est illis homo, quam sibi.—Juy. Sat. x. ver. 346–50, and innumerable orbs that appear beyond it, pursues likewise the unseen spirit after it has withdrawn from the human eye, and believes that it is stationed and survives elsewhere.* It will be always laudable, as well as felicitating, to indulge this feeling, though we need not, like some of the ancients, presume to say where.† We leave the discovery of our future home to the time assigned for our becoming acquainted with it. The dead only know the destination and residence of the dead; they form a class of beings quite different from what they were in their earthly vitality, and the great secret remains with them as impenetrable as ever. In the meantime it is quite sufficient for every present purpose of our existence, to know that we, like our forefathers, shall in due time be dismissed from what we are now sensorially connected with; and that, as our whole population here is but a section of a most multitudinous quantity of intelligent existence, scattered through myriads of other *The great Cyrus is made by Xenophon thus to express this sentiment to his sons on his deathbed: "My children! respect each other, if you desire to please me. You should not think that I shall be as nothing when I have quitted my human life. You cannot indeed see my soul (de en εwparε); but from what it does now, you can perceive that it exists. O my sons! I never can be persuaded that iny soul is living while in its mortal body, and yet perishes when it is separated from that. I see that it gives life to our frames while it is within them, and I cannot believe that it ceases to be intelligent, because the body becomes insensate. Being then more pure and entire by leaving it, the probability is, that it will be wiser than before. When the man is dissolved, every part returns to what is congenial with it, except his soul (λnν τns 4uxns); this alone remains, always moveable, as well while it is present here, as when it departs hence."-Xenoph. Cyrop. 1. viii. c. 47. Cicero has quoted and translated this passage at the close of his "De Senectute," as if it had peculiarly gratified him. † Socrates, in Plato's expansion of his last discourse before his death, places the pure earth we are to inhabit hereafter among the stars in the ether.-Phed. p. 170. He composes it of materials "more pure and splendid than those in ours; some are purple, of wonderful beauty, others of a golden colour, others whiter than snow."-p. 172. "The inhabitants live without disease, and far longer than we do. They excel us in sight, hearing, and understanding. They have groves and temples of the gods, who reside familiarly with them."-p. 173. The fancy more popular among the philosophers and others, seems to have been, that the moon was to be the residence of the disimbodied soul; at first it is to wander for a time in a middle region, between the earth and the moon; wicked ones to suffer till they were purified, and then to go into her orb; "for the moon is the element of these souls; because souls resolve into her, as the bodies of the dead into the earth."-Plutarch, de Facie Lunæ 1184. worlds, yet we all compose one family of one common pa rent. We have this affinity indelibly with each other, though we are not yet associated by personal acquaintance; and from this circumstance we may reasonably infer, that amid all our dissimilarities, there must be many analogies between us and them, which mark our grand paternal ancestry and our mutual kinship. Yet still, as neither our natural nor our civil histories can be alike, neither can our respective sacred histories be more identified. They have each their own, and ours must be limited to ourselves. Theirs will be adapted to their distinct modifications of being, as ours has been to those which characterize our present nature, our social relations, and our connexion with the external world amid which we move and act. But although our divine philosophy must relate principally to ourselves, it will be right to study it with the recollection, that our globe is but one of the uncounted hosts which surround the throne of our marvellous Creator; and that he is at all times the Sovereign Lord, the preserver and the benefactor equally of all. That he sustains them in being, as well as ourselves, we see by their continued existence; for, although some changes have been noticed by astronomical observers;* and the scientific assistances to our natural eyesight have enabled us, beyond expectation, to multiply their number, yet, as far as we can judge, the vast multitudes have remained in unaltered conservation, and in the same position and array in which they have in every age been seen.† We know, indeed, that they have not been thus steadily in their visible stations, because, as some ancient philosophers thought, they were fixed, like nails, in a solid ་ . *Thus Hipparchus, about 135 years before the Christian era, saw a new star in the heavens (Pliny, I. ii. c. 24), which is the first of this description that has been recorded. In November, 1572, a second splendid appearance of this sort took place in Cassiopeia, which lasted till March, 1574, when it vanished from the sight. Tycho Brahe thought it to be 800 times bigger than the earth.-Tych. de Nova Stelle. "A smaller one was seen in 1596 in Cœtus, and about 1600 another in Cygnus. Kepler mentions one in 1602 in Pisces; others have since appeared. In 1604 a new one shone, at first as bright as Venus, in Ophiuncus, which our good fathers thought had a certain reference to the next year's gunpowder plot. t "Hipparchus," says Pliny," dared to number the stars."-L. ii. c. 34. Ptolemy, above two centuries after him, enlarged his catalogue to 1,022 fixed stars. They have been since found to be above a hundred times this amount, phere.* Whatever they may be, they are floating in space or her, as freely and as unpropped and unfastened as we are. Mighty laws of suspension uphold those that never move, others of revolution impel and guide such as circulate. ut their continued appearance, and its unchanging uniform7, demonstrate to us that his power is as beneficently acve towards them, as it is towards us; and from the beginng of human consciousness at least, has always been so. Whether they preceded us in existence, or commenced hen we did, we have not been informed, and therefore canot know; for nothing that is discernible in them, gives any ark of the chronology of their being. This absence of all dication of their date would be the same, whatever might the greater or less degree of its remoteness. Their visile phenomena would be the same to us, whether they were reated one hundred years ago, or one hundred thousand. I was therefore an egregious error of antiquity so boldly to ronounce that they had eternally existed :† an extravagance f supposition like that of encouraging man to think himself god; poor, perishable, dependant and erring man, who wes every thing that he has or is to the only real Deity, by hose favours and blessings, specially given for that purpose, it is that his intelligent mind can make the acquisi ions, and display the powers which have drawn down his unbecoming and exaggerated panegyric upon him; a anegyric not left to be a word, because it was carried acually into operation when the Egyptians deified and worship ed their kings; Greece, her heroes; and Rome, her often alf-mad and most frequently profligate, cruel, or commoninded tyrants; and when even Cicero himself, who ex *It was the fancy of Empedocles, that the heavens were a solid mast 7 air, condensed by fire into crystal, and that the fixed stars were stened into this crystal, while the planets were loose, and moved eely along.--Plut. Pl. Ph. 1. ii. c. 11-13. Anaximines also thought that they stuck fast in the crystalline sky. ke nails.-Ib. c. 14. †The eternity of the heaven is the great doctrine of Aristotle, in hi De Cœlo," and other works; and Cicero calls the stars, " illis sempi rnis ignibus" (those everlasting fires).-Som. Sc. 151. + "Deum te igitur scito esse: siquidem Deus est qui viget, qui senti ai meminit, qui providet, qui tam regit et moderatur."-Cic. Som. S Phoovilides declares that after death mankind 66 will become gode! presses with such complacency the impious self-adulation, took some trouble to give his own daughter a participation of this venerated character.* It is for us to be grateful to our Creator, for assigning to us a nature so wonderful, so improvable, so capable of excellences, and licensed to cherish such heavenly aspirations; but it is also for us never to forget our personal imperfections, our unworthiness in his sight, who knows so fully what he has done to raise us from it; our sinning actions and propensities, and our general unwillingness to correct them.t It may therefore be made one of the first points of our sacred history, that the heavens, like our earth, contain numerous kingdoms, states, and beings; and though it pleased the ancients to consider our world as the centre of all existence, to which every thing had reference, and to make it also an actual Deity,‡ yet we must not for a moment suppose, that the human race monopolizes the attention or the regard of the Great Parent of all. Both the Grecian and Roman mind persisted in believing that our globe was in the middle of the universe, round which all the hosts of heaven continually revolved; and the oriental imagination has been so self-flattering as to deem it the most precious of all.|| * The instance of Cicero's making a little temple for the apotheosis, or deification of his daughter, was stated, from his own account of it, in my Mod. Hist. Engl. v. iii. p. 104, note 96. "Lorenzo! swells thy bosom at the thought? The swell becomes thee; 'tis an honest pride. CAN UNDERRATE HIS MERIT."-Night Thoughts, B. vi. Plutarch says, "The name of the earth is dear and venerable to every Grecian, and it has been our custom, from our forefathers, to worship it (oεbεobal) like any other god."-De Fac. Lun. 1723. Plato represents it as "the first and most ancient of the gods which are generated within the heavens."-Plat. Tim. Tayl. p.,471. The central position of the earth was so early an opinion, that Thales maintained it.-Plut. Plac. 1. iii. c. 2. Plato, in his Timæus, teaches it; Aristotle likewise, De Cœlo, 1. ii. c. 14. The Alexandrian astronomers, Hipparchus, as well as Ptolemy also, though both Philolaus and Aristarchus had maintained otherwise; and among the Romans, Cicero and Manilius assert it; and Pliny declares that, by "haud dubiis argumentis," it is manifest "medium esse mundi totius."--L. ii. c. 69. The Cinghalese Raja Vali states, "There are an infinite number of worlds, whereof 100,000 lacs of worlds are more precious than the ethers, and 10,000 worlds are still more precious than these. But this world, called Magol Sakwell (the earth), is more precious than all the |