270 RELIGIOUS VIEWS. 



tion to conjecture, that these globes, some of 

 them much larger than our own, are not dead 

 and barren; that they are, like ours, occupied 

 with organization, life, intelligence. To con- 

 jecture is all that we can do, yet even by the 

 perception of such a possibility, our view of the 

 domain of nature is enlarged and elevated. The 

 outermost of the planetary globes of which we 

 have spoken is so far from the sun, that the 

 central luminary must appear to the inhabitants 

 of that planet, if any there are, no larger than 

 Venus does to us ; and the length of their year 

 will be 82 of ours. 



But astronomy carries us still onwards. It 

 teaches us that, with the exception of the planets 

 already mentioned, the stars which we see have 

 no immediate relation to our system. The ob- 

 vious supposition is that they are of the nature 

 and order of our sun : the minuteness of their 

 apparent magnitude agrees, on this supposition, 

 with the enormous and almost inconceivable 

 distance which, from all the measurements of 

 astronomers, we are led to attribute to them. If 

 then these are suns, they may, like our sun, have 

 planets revolving round them; and these may, 

 like our planet, be the seats of vegetable and 

 animal and rational life : we may thus have in 

 the universe worlds, no one knows how many, no 

 one can guess how varied ; but however many, 

 however varied, they are still but so many pro- 



