And now we record a few visits which men of this sublunary sphere are said to have paid to the moon. The chronicles are unfortunately very incomplete. Aiming at historical fulness and fidelity, we turned to our national bibliotheca at the British Museum, where we fished out of the vasty deep of treasures a MS. without date or name. We wish the Irish orator's advice were oftener followed by literary authors. Said he, "Never write an anonymous letter without signing your name to it." This MS. is entitled "Selenographia, or News from the world in the moon to the lunatics of this world. By Lucas Lunanimus of Lunenberge." [53] We are here told how the author, "making himself a kite of ye hight(?) of a large sheet, and tying himself to the tayle of it, by the help of some trusty friends, to whom he promised mountains of land in this his new-found world; being furnished also with a tube, horoscope, and other instruments of discovery, he set saile the first of Aprill, a day alwaies esteemed prosperous for such adventures." Fearing, however, lest the date of departure should make some suspicious that the author was desirous of making his readers April fools, we leave this aërial tourist to pursue his explorations without our company, and listen to a learned bishop, who ought to be a canonical authority, for the man in the moon himself is an overseer of men. Dr. Francis Godwin, first of Llandaff, afterwards of Hereford, wrote about the year 1600 The Man in the Moone, or a discourse of a voyage thither. This was published in 1638, under the pseudonym of Domingo Gonsales. The enterprising aeronaut went up from the island of El Pico, carried by wild swans. Swans, be it observed. It was not a wild-goose chase. The author is careful to tell us what we believe so soon as it is declared. "The further we went, the lesser the globe of the earth appeared to us; whereas still on the contrary side the moone showed herselfe more and more monstrously huge." After eleven days' passage, the exact time that Arago allowed for a cannon ball to reach the moon, "another earth" was approached. "I perceived that it was covered for the most part with a huge and mighty sea, those parts only being drie land, which show unto us here somewhat darker than the rest of her body; that I mean which the country people call el hombre della Luna, the man of the moone." This last clause demands a protest. The bishop knocks the country-people's man out of the moon, to make room for his own man, which episcopal creation is twenty-eight feet high, and weighs twenty-five or thirty of any of us. Besides ordinary men, of extraordinary measurement, the bishop finds in the moon princes and queens. The females, or lunar ladies, as a matter of course, are of absolute beauty. Their language has "no affinity with any other I ever heard." This is a poor look-out for the American divine who expects to send English Bibles to the moon. "Food groweth everywhere without labour": this is a cheering prospect for our working classes who may some day go there. "They need no lawyers": oh what a country! "And as little need is there of physicians." Why, the moon must be Paradise regained. But, alas! "they die, or rather (I should say) cease to live." Well, my lord bishop, is not that how we die on earth? Perhaps we need to be learned bishops to appreciate the difference. If so, we might accept episcopal distinction.
Lucian, the Greek satirist, in his Voyage to the Globe of the Moon, sailed through the sky for the space of seven days and nights and on the eighth "arrived in a great round and shining island which hung in the air and yet was inhabited. These inhabitants were Hippogypians, and their king was Endymion." [54] Some of the ancients thought the lunarians were fifteen times larger than we are, and our oaks but bushes compared with their trees. So natural is it to magnify prophets not of our own country.
William Hone tells us that a Mr. Wilson, formerly curate of Halton Gill, near Skipton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, in the last century wrote a tract entitled The Man in the Moon, which was seriously meant to convey the knowledge of common astronomy in the following strange vehicle: A cobbler, Israel Jobson by name, is supposed to ascend first to the top of Penniguit; and thence, as a second stage equally practicable, to the moon; after which he makes the grand tour of the whole solar system. From this excursion, however, the traveller brings back little information which might not have been had upon earth, excepting that the inhabitants of one of the planets, I forget which, were made of "pot metal." [55] This curious tract, full of other extravagances, is rarely if ever met with, it having been zealously bought up by its writer's family.
We must not be detained with any detailed account of M. Jules Verne's captivating books, entitled From the Earth to the Moon, and Around the Moon. They are accessible to all, at a trifling cost. Besides, they reveal nothing new relating to the Hamlet of our present play. Nor need we more than mention "the surprising adventures of the renowned Baron Munchausen." His lunarians being over thirty-six feet high, and "a common flea being much larger than one of our sheep," [56] Munchausen's moon must be declined, with thanks.
"Certain travellers, like the author of the Voyage au monde de Descartes, have found, on visiting these different lunar countries, that the great men whose names they had arbitrarily received took possession of them in the course of the sixteenth century, and there fixed their residence. These immortal souls, it seems, continued their works and systems inaugurated on earth. Thus it is, that on Mount Aristotle a real Greek city has risen, peopled with peripatetic philosophers, and guarded by sentinels armed with propositions, antitheses, and sophisms, the master himself living in the centre of the town in a magnificent palace. Thus also in Plato's circle live souls continually occupied in the study of the prototype of ideas. Two years ago a fresh division of lunar property was made, some astronomers being generously enriched." [57]
That the moon is an abode of the departed spirits of men, an upper hades, has been believed for ages. In the Egyptian Book of Respirations, which M. p. J. de Horrack has translated from the MS. in the Louvre in Paris, Isis breathes the wish for her brother Osiris "that his soul may rise to heaven in the disk of the moon." [58] Plutarch says, "Of these soules the moon is the element, because soules doe resolve into her, like as the bodies of the dead into the earth." [59] To this ancient theory Mr. Tylor refers when he writes, "And when in South America the Saliva Indians have pointed out the moon, their paradise where no mosquitoes are, and the Guaycurus have shown it as the home of chiefs and medicine-men deceased, and the Polynesians of Tokelau in like manner have claimed it as the abode of departed kings and chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with that ancient theory mentioned by Plutarch, that hell is in the air and elysium in the moon, and again with the mediaeval conception of the moon as the seat of hell, a thought elaborated in profoundest bathos by Mr. M. F. Tupper:
'I know thee well, O Moon, thou cavern'd realm,
Sad satellite, thou giant ash of death,
Blot on God's firmament, pale home of crime,
Scarr'd prison house of sin, where damnèd souls
Feed upon punishment. Oh, thought sublime,
That amid night's black deeds, when evil prowls
Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners well,
Glarest o'er all, the wakeful eye of--Hell!'
Skin for skin, the brown savage is not ill-matched in such speculative lore with the white philosopher." [60]
The last journey to the moon on our list we introduce for the sake of its sacred lesson. Pure religion is an Attic salt, which wise men use in all of their entertainments: a condiment which seasons what is otherwise insipid, and assists healthy digestion in the compound organism of man's mental and moral constitution. About seventy years since, a little tract was published, in which the writer imagined himself on luna firma. After giving the inhabitants of the moon an account of our terrestrial race, of its fall and redemption, and of the unhappiness of those who neglect the great salvation, he says, "The secret is this, that nothing but an infinite God, revealing Himself by His Spirit to their minds, and enabling them to believe and trust in Him, can give perfect and lasting satisfaction." He then adds, "My last observation received the most marked approbation of the lunar inhabitants: they truly pitied the ignorant triflers of our sinful world, who prefer drunkenness, debauchery, sinful amusements, exorbitant riches, flattery, and other things that are highly esteemed amongst men, to the pleasures of godliness, to the life of God in the soul of man, to the animating hope of future bliss." [61]
Here the man in the moon and we must part. Hitherto some may have supposed their thoughts occupied with a mere creature of imagination, or gratuitous creation of an old-world mythology. Perhaps the man in the moon is nothing more: perhaps he is very much more. Possibly we have information of every being in the universe; and possibly there are beings in every existing world of which we know nothing whatever. The latter possibility we deem much the more probable. Remembering our littleness as contrasted with the magnitude of the whole creation, we prefer to believe that there are rational creatures in other worlds besides this small-sized sphere in, it may be, a small-sized system. Therefore, till we acquire more conclusive evidence than has yet been adduced, we will not regard even the moon as an empty abode, but as the home of beings whom, in the absence of accurate definition, we denominate men. Whether the man in the moon have a body like our own, whether his breathing apparatus, his digestive functions, and his cerebral organs, be identical with ours, are matters of secondary moment. The Fabricator of terrestrial organizations has limited himself to no one type or form, why then should man be the model of beings in distant worlds? Be the man in the moon a biped or quadruped; see he through two eyes as we do, or a hundred like Argus; hold he with two hands as we do, or a hundred like Briarius; walk he with two feet as we do, or a hundred like the centipede, "the mind's the standard of the man" everywhere. If he have but a wise head and a warm heart; if he be not shut up, Diogenes--like, within his own little tub of a world, but take an interest in the inhabitants of kindred spheres; and if he be a worshipper of the one God who made the heavens with all their glittering hosts;--then, in the highest sense, he is a man, to whom we would fain extend the hand of fellowship, claiming him as a brother in that universal family which is confined to no bone or blood, no colour or creed, and, so far as we can conjecture, to no world, but is co-extensive with the household of the Infinite Father, who cares for all of His children, and will ultimately blend them in the blessed bonds of an endless confraternity. Whether we or our posterity will ever become better acquainted in this life with the man in the moon is problematical; but in the ages to come, "when the manifold wisdom of God" shall be developed among "the principalities and powers in heavenly places," he may be something more than a myth or topic of amusement. He may be visible among the first who will declare every man in his own tongue wherein he was born the wonderful works of God, and he may be audible among the first who will lift their hallelujahs of undivided praise when every satellite shall be a chorister to laud the universal King. Let us, brothers of earth, by high and holy living, learn the music of eternity; and then, when the discord of "life's little day" is hushed, and we are called to join in the everlasting song, we may solve in one beatific moment the problem of the plurality of worlds, and in that solution we shall see more than we have been able to see at present of the man in the moon.