Of our terrestrial star, nor borrow light
From the proud regent of our scanty day.”
The stars, therefore, shine with their own native and unborrowed lustre, as the sun does; and since each particular star, as well as the sun, is confined to a particular portion of space, it is plain, that the stars are of the same nature with the sun.
It is not probable that the Almighty, who always acts with infinite wisdom, and does nothing in vain, should create so many suns, fit for so many important purposes, and place them at such distances from one another, without proper objects near enough to be benefited by their influences. Whoever imagines they were created only to give a faint glimmering light to the inhabitants of this globe, must have a very superficial knowledge of astronomy, and a mean opinion of the Divine wisdom: since, by a much less exertion of creating power, God could have given to our earth considerably more light by one single additional moon. Since the fixed stars are prodigious globes of light and heat, like our sun, and at inconceivable distances from one another, as well as from us, it is reasonable to conclude they are made for the same purposes that the sun is; each to bestow light, heat, and produce vegetation, on a certain number of inhabited planets, kept by gravitation within the sphere of its activity.
Instead then of one sun, and one world only, in the universe, as the unskilful in astronomy imagine, that science discovers to us such an inconceivable number of suns, systems, and worlds, dispersed through boundless space, that if our sun, with all the planets, moons, and comets belonging to it, were annihilated, they would with difficulty be missed, by an eye that could take in the whole creation; the space they possess being comparatively so small that it would scarce be a sensible blank in the universe, although Herschell, or the Georgium Sidus, the most remote of our planets, revolves about the sun in an orbit whose mean distance from the sun is 1,822,575,228 miles, and some of our comets make excursions to an amazing distance beyond the bounds of that planet: and yet, they are incomparably nearer to the sun than to any of the stars; as is evident from their keeping clear of the attractive power of all the stars, and returning periodically by the virtue of the sun’s attraction.
“In the immensity of God’s creation,” says a learned author, “we may readily conceive one system of heavenly bodies, and others beyond them, and others still in endless progression, through the whole vortex of space! Every star in the vast abyss of nature being a sun, with its peculiar and numerous attendant worlds. Thus there may be systems of systems, in endless gradation, up to the throne of God!”
“Oh, for a telescope His Throne to reach!
Tell me ye learn’d on earth, or blest above!
Where your great Master’s orb? His planets where?
* * * * * * * * * On nature’s Alps I stand