Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/172

 inhabit, it seems impossible to discover any connection between the ruin of those immense bodies and the transgression of men, upon so small a planet as we inhabit. And with respect to the falling of the stars, how could that occur? where are they to fall to? This earth, certainly, could not be the spot upon which they would fall. Those bodies which are popularly called the stars, are of two sorts: first the planets; these are earths, some of which are immensely larger than this we inhabit, and all of them doubtless, have inhabitants as responsible for their conduct to the Creator as ourselves. These may be distinguished in the sky by the steadiness of their splendour. Secondly, we have the stars proper; these are suns like that which constitutes the centre of our system, and of these there are myriads, all having systems of their own. These are fixed, and, in our latitudes, may be distinguished in the sky by the twinkling light which they emit. How then can it be supposed that such a number of bodies with magnitudes so incalculably great,—with all their systems too, for all this would be involved,—could fall from the sky to the earth? The thing is no more possible than it would be to force the ocean into a nutshell. Besides, the distance of the stars is so great that the diameter of the earth's orbit, one hundred and ninety-one millions of miles, is but a point in comparison with it: from whatever situation in this orbit a star be viewed, no difference in its appearance is presented, nor is any sensible parallax to be discovered. Astronomers, therefore, have not been enabled to assign to any star a distance, however immense, that it may not surpass. Casini, from some observations which he made upon Arcturus, calculated that its distance from the earth was twenty thousand two hundred and fifty times greater than that of the sun. Now the distance of the sun from