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SCENERY OF THE HEAVENS. 



ignorance cannot excuse their presumption, is regarded as in a very high degree probable 

 by some of the finest and most Christian minds. If I may venture to utter my own 

 impressions, I must profess it as the most reasonable supposition, and the correlate of the 

 nebular theory, that God originally gave being to the primordial elements of things, the 

 very small number of simple bodies, endowing each with its own wondrous properties. 

 Then, that the action of those properties in the ways which His wisdom ordained, and 

 which we call laws, produced and is still producing all the forms and. changes of organic 

 and inorganic natures ; and that the series is by Him destined to proceed in combinations 

 and multiplications ever new, without limit of space or end of duration, to the unutter- 

 able admiration and joy of all holy creatures, and to the eternal display of His glory who 

 fixed the wondrous frame." We have no more occasion to stumble at the idea that our 

 world dates its origin from a few primordial elements, endowed with properties to com- 

 plete the structure, than a colony of ants, at a tree root, would have cause to start at the 

 fact, could they be made cognisant of it, that leaves, branches, and trunk proceeded from 

 a single seed. The pine is as mighty and majestic to the insects invisible to the naked 

 eye that cluster on its rind, as the globe to us. The primal germ to which vegetable 

 physiology assigns it is as insignificant to its full-grown form, as the simple elements of 

 the nebular philosophers to the planetary spheroids. The thousand years, in which its 

 arms may have embraced the gale, bear about the same proportion to the hour in which 

 the ephemeron lives amidst its branches, as the antiquity claimed by physics for the earth, 

 does to man's age, threescore years and ten. 



With these notices, the view proposed to be taken of the SCENERY OF THE HEAVENS 

 concludes. It cannot close more appropriately than with the advice to Adam, which 

 Milton puts into the mouth of the angel : 



" And for the heaven's wide circuit, LET IT SPEAK 

 THE MAKER'S HIGH MAGNIFICENCE ; who built 

 So spacious, and his line stretch'd out so far, 

 That man may know he dwells not in his own." 



