ASTRONOMY. 263 



sition to the impression made upon the senses. An iUusion, 

 for example, must be gotten over, arising from the diotance 

 at which we view the heavenly bodies ; namely, the apparent 

 sloivness of their motions. The moon shall take some hours 

 in getting half a yard from a star which it touched. A 

 motion so deliberate, we may think easily guided. But what 

 is the fact ? The moon, in fact, is all this while diiving 

 through the heavens at the rate of considerably more than 

 two thousand miles in an hour ; which is more than double 

 that with which a ball is shot off from the mouth of a can- 

 non. Yet is this prodigious rapidity as much imder govern- 

 ment as if the planet proceeded ever so slowly, or were con- 

 ducted in its course inch by inch. It is also difficult to bring 

 the imagination to conceive — what yet, to judge tolerably 

 of the matter, it is necessary to conceive — how loos^, if we 

 may so express it, the heavenly bodies are. Enormous 

 globes held by nothing, confined by nothing, are turned into 

 free and boundless space, each to seek its course by the vir- 

 tue of an invisible principle ; but a principle, one, common, 

 and the same in all, and ascertainable. To preserve such 

 bodies from being lost, from running together in heaps, from 

 hindering and distracting one another's motions, in a degree 

 inconsistent with any continuing order ; that is, to cause them 

 to form planetary systems — systems that, when formed, can 

 be upheld ; and more especially, systems accommodated to 

 the organized and sensitive natures which the planets sus- 

 tain, as we know to be the case, where alone we can know 

 what the case is, upon our earth : all this requires an io- 

 teliigent interposition, because it can be demonstrated con- 

 cerning it, that it requires an adjustment of force, distance, 

 direction, and velocity, out of the reach of chance to have 

 pro-iuced — an adjustment, in its view to utility, similar to 

 that which we see in ten thousand subjects of nature which 

 are nearer to us, but in power, and in the extent of space 

 through which that power is exerted, stupendous. 



But many of the heavenly bodies, as the sun and fixed 



