Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/415

Rh luminary is the actual Hell; perhaps that every fixed star is a distinct Hell appropriated to the use of its several systems of planets, so great a proportion of the inhabitants of which are probably devoted to everlasting damnation, if the belief of one particular creed is essential to their escape, and the testimony of its truth so very far remote and obscure as in the planet which we inhabit. I do not envy the theologians, who first invented this theory. The Magian worship of the Sun as the creator and Preserver of the world, is considerably more to the credit of the inventors. It is in fact a poetical exposition of the matter of fact, before modern science had so greatly enlarged the boundaries of the sensible world, and was, next to pure deism or a personification of all the powers whose agency we know or can conjecture, the religion attended by the fewest evil consequences.

If the sun is Hell the Devil has a magnificent abode, being elevated as it were on the imperial throne of the visible world. If we assign to the Devil the greatest and most glorious habitation within the scope of our senses, where shall we conceive his mightier adversary to reside? Shall we suppose that the Devil occupies the centre and God the circumference of existence, and that one urges inwards with the centripetal, whilst the other is perpetually struggling outwards from the narrow focus with the centrifugal force, and that from their perpetual conflict results the mixture of good and evil, harmony and discord, beauty and deformity, production and decay, which are the general laws of the moral and material world? Alas! the poor theologian never troubled his fancy with nonsense of so philosophical a form. He