Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/224

 they are so as dependent the one upon the other; for there is a vague awe connected with the starry heavens, which, when it comes to be supplanted by scientific notions, is not unlikely, as we find, unhappily, in frequent instances, to be superseded by a feeling absolutely irreligious. But so lamentable a damage to the moral sentiments should be precluded, if possible, by combining, from the very first, precise conceptions with just moral impressions. The atheism of Laplace is not likely to gain admittance along with his theories, if, before these come to be known, the mind has already associated its feelings of devout admiration with the substance of the facts on which those speculations are founded.

To recur to the instance of the Pleiades; or to some of the globular systems of stars:when the telescope has brought before the eye, instead of a confused twinkling, as if of a dozen luminous points, the clear steady splendour of thousands and thousands again, constituting a flaming community of suns, within the range of which there can be no darkness at all, but a perpetual glory, radiating from innumerable sources; when this idea has been vividly realized, and when the actual remoteness of the scene has been lost from the recollection, some such train of thoughts as the following may be suggested:Let us now imagine our-selves the inhabitants of one of those suns, surrounded on every side by ten thousand effulgent globes, and beholding, every where, so much more of life, power, and enjoyment, as may be thought to belong to such a system; and let us then suppose that there were to be described to us some such dim region of the universe as the one we actually occupy, where there is but a single source of light and heat, and this one far remote from us; and where a half of all time is given to darkness and to cold:where life and pleasure are diminished a half by night, and a half by winter; should we not be apt to think of such a system, as