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taught to turn to use some of her most tremendous agencies, the western 

 nations, little by little, have ceased to yield her a divine regard. At last, 

 nothing in nature excites a sacred awe but those unusual effects in which the 

 hand of God is still, for the time, thought to be specially at work. 



Modern science has completed this great revolution of feeling and opinion. 

 Certainly, at the present day, no educated person supposes the Divine influence 

 to be more peculiarly manifested in an eclipse — of which he will find the time 

 of occurrence, and area of visibility, predicted in his Almanac with perfect 

 accuracy — than in the phases of the moon, or the regular recurrence of the 

 seasons. If the periodical return of comets is as yet less exactly calculated, 

 this is only, as we all understand, because the elements of the problem are 

 more complex ; and no one doubts that, sooner or later, our present compara- 

 tive ignorance will be removed. The advance of Meteorology is gradually 

 unfolding to us the laws obeyed by the seemingly capricious winds and clouds ; 

 enabling us to plot out beforehand the destructive path of the cyclone ; making 

 it impossible to regard seasons of excessive rain or drought as the chastisement 

 of special sins. Plague, typhus, and cholera, may, indeed, be looked on as 

 penalties affixed, by an ininmtable law, to filth and laziness ; but in the 

 mediaeval sense, can no longer be taken as specially expressive of God's dis- 

 satisfaction with human deeds. And the laws of nature are found to be as 

 universal in Space as invariable in Time. The order which reigns amongst 

 the minute particles disclosed to us by the microscope, extends to the remotest 

 regions accessible to the powers of those huge instruments which aid the 

 research of the modern Astronomer. The same law that brings a feather to the 

 ground, and wheels the planets in their orbits, governs, it seems, the vast 

 revolutions of the multiple systems of stars ; white, red, green, and blue suns, 

 circling about their several common centres, at inconceivable distances, distances 

 compared with which the whole diameter of the Earth's orbit is but as a point. 

 Nor is the substance of the remotest bodies different, as it appears, from those 

 forms of matter with which we are familiar. The latest experiments on the 

 light emitted by what are called the fixed stars, are believed to give positive 

 assurance that the chemical constituents of these bodies are in part, at least, 

 identical with those of our own planet. Thus, while the Divine power seems 

 everywhere replaced by Natural force, the scrutiny of Science leaves in the 

 wide Universe no befitting seat of Deity. What has become of the conception 

 of a local Heaven 1 What place have the astronomers left for it 1 Herschel 

 has tried to gauge for us the visible Universe in vain ; his plummet lowered 

 into an ocean, every drop of which is a solar system, finds no bottom. The 

 faint and hazy light, dimmed by immeasurable distance, of suns and systems, 

 sown in countless multitudes on the dark background, still keeps dawning on 

 the increasing powers of our space-penetrating instruments ; and beyond 

 these visible forms of matter, if indeed they have an end, there is nothing but 

 a sense of vacuity more appalling still. Let any one, on a starry night, look 

 steadfastly into the starless spaces of our antarctic heavens, and let him try to 

 fancy God's unclouded presence as shining out beyond the verge of what is 

 visible : he will feel that Heaven can no longer seem to us, as to the eaily 

 world : we cannot say of it " Lo here ! Lo there !" that awful depth seems 

 rather the abode of Eternal Night. In presence of considerations such as these, 

 almost overwhelming as they may be found at times, even by the steadiest 

 intellect and the most lively faith, is it surprising that, to very many, Matter and 

 its Laws, seem all in all ; or can we wonder, that the speculative mind, 

 descending to the lowest level, sometimes finds at last a dull repose in the Dead 

 Sea of Thought, the creed of the Materialistic atheist 1 This then, is the great 

 cycle of opinion, we find the station of the bold and self-sufficient unbeliever 

 of our days diametrically opposed to that of the submissive Asiatic — Nature, 



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