AND THEORY OF THE HEAVENS. 151 



of the universe, after they have played out their parts. 

 The infinitude of the creation is great enough to make a 

 world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison 

 with it, what a flower or an insect does in comparison 

 with the earth. But while nature thus adorns eternity 

 with changing scenes, God continues engaged in incessant 

 creation in forming the matter for the construction of still 

 greater worlds. 



" He sees with equal eye, as God of all, 

 A hero perish, or a sparrow fall ; 

 Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, 

 And now a bubble burst, and now a world," 



POPE. 



Let us then accustom our eye to these terrible catastrophes 

 as being the common ways of providence, and regard them 

 even with a sort of complacency. And in fact nothing 

 is more befitting the riches of nature than such an attitude 

 towards her. For when a world-system in the long succes- 

 sion of its duration exhausts all the manifold variation which 

 its structure can embrace; when it has at last become a 

 superfluous member in the chain of beings ; there is nothing 

 more becoming than that it should play the last part in 

 the drama of the closing changes of the universe, a part 

 which belongs to every finite thing, namely, that it should 

 pay its tribute to mortality. Nature as has been said 

 already shows in the smallest part of her system that rule 

 of procedure which eternal fate has prescribed to her on 

 the whole. And, I say it again, the greatness of what has 

 to perish, is not the least obstacle to it ; for all that is 

 great becomes small, nay, it becomes as it were a mere 

 point, when it is compared with the Infinitude which 



