MEDITATIONS AND CRITICISMS 181 



nomy what becomes of the notion that the heavens 

 are above us, far away, and are of a higher and 

 purer creation, or hell beneath us, that the earth is 

 corrupted or blighted by the Pall, — kindred notions 

 of one theology ? Do we not know that the earth 

 is a star in the heavens, as incorruptible and unde- 

 filed as the rest ? and that all worlds are kindred 

 and of our stuff; that there is no up and no down, 

 no high and no low in the universe ? The light- 

 ning does not come out of heaven, nor the rain out 

 of heaven, but out of the clouds. An eclipse is not 

 a warning or a calamity, but purely a natural event, 

 merely the lunar or the terrestrial shadow. Our 

 actual physical smallness and insignificance is what 

 science reveals ; our grandeur and importance is 

 what the eye and the untutored mind behold. 



Science is impersonal ; it tends to belittle and dif- 

 fuse man. Theology and literature tend to exalt 

 him, and concentrate him, and set him above all. 

 Mythology, theology, philosophy, literature, all ex- 

 aggerate man and distort his true relations to the 

 universe ; but in these latter ages comes science and 

 shows man what he really is, where he belongs in 

 the scheme of the whole, and what an insect of an 

 hour, an ephemera of a moment, he really is, and 

 what a bubble is the world he inhabits. In a late 

 religious work by Julia Wedgewood I find this re- 

 mark : — 



" When once Galileo and Newton had forced the 

 world to recognize that Heaven, if it was anywhere, 

 was everywhere, the moral took a new direction. 



