J 2 Vastness of Creation. [Jan., 



reason, a purer essence than the brightest sun that lights the depths 

 of heaven. The organized human eye, instinct with life and soul, 

 which, gazing through the telescope, travels up to the cloudy speck 

 in Orion's sword, and bids it blaze forth into a galaxy as A^astas ours, 

 stands hioher in the order of being than all that host of luminaries. 

 The intellect of Newton, which discovered the law that holds the re- 

 volving worlds together, is a nobler work of God than a universe of 

 universes of unthinking matter. 



If, still treading the loftiest paths of analogy, we adopt the sup- 

 position — to me, I own, the grateful supposition — that the countless 

 suns, are the abodes of rational beings like men, instead of bringing 

 back from this exalted conception a feeling of insignificance, as if 

 the individuals of our race were but poor atoms in the infinity of 

 being, I regard it, on the contrary, as a glory of our human nature, 

 that it belongs to a family, which no man can number, of rational 

 natures like itself. In the order of being, they may stand beneath 

 us, or they may stand above us ; Tie may well be content with his 

 place, who is made ' a little lower than the angels.' " 



An Infidel Rebuked. — An Infidel, boasting in a published 

 letter that he had raised two acres of 'Sunday corn ' which he intend- 

 ed to devote to the purchase of Infidel books, adds: 'All the work 

 done on it was done on Sunday, and it will yield some seventy bush- 

 els to the acre ; so that I do 'nt see but that Nature or Providence 

 has smiled upon my Sunday work, however the priests or the Bible 

 may say that work done on that day never prospers. My corn tells 

 another story.' To this the editor of an agricultural paper replies: 

 'If the author of this shallow nonsense had read the Bible half as 

 much as he has the works of its opponents, he would have known 

 that the Great Ruler of the Universe does not always square up his 

 accounts with mankind in October.' 



