19 In Somnium Scipionis, lib. i. cap. xi.
20 Ibid. cap. xii.
21 Augustine, De Natura Boni, cap. xliv.
22 De Paradiso Eden, Sermo I.
heavenly floor, "as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind," although so obviously a figure of speech, has been very generally credited as the description of a literal fact yet to occur. And how many thousands of pious Christians have felt, with the sainted Doddridge,
"Ye stars are but the shining dust Of my Divine abode, The pavement of those heavenly courts Where I shall see my God!"
The universal diffusion in civilized nations of the knowledge that the visible sky is no substantial expanse, but only an illimitable void of space hung with successive worlds, has by no means banished the belief, originally based on the opposite error, in a physical heaven definitely located far overhead, the destination of all ransomed souls. This is undoubtedly the most common idea at the present time. An English clergyman once wrote a book, afterwards translated into German, to teach that the sun is hell, and that the black spots often noticed on the disk of that orb are gatherings of damned souls.23 Isaac Taylor, on the contrary, contends with no little force and ingenuity that the sun may be the heaven of our planetary system, a globe of immortal blessedness and glory.24 The celebrated Dr. Whiston was convinced that the great comet which appeared in his day was hell. He imagined it remarkably fitted for that purpose by its fiery vapor, and its alternate plunges, now into the frozen extremity of space, now into the scorching breath of the sun. Tupper fastens the stigma of being the infernal prison house on the moon, in this style:
"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 damned 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!"
Bailey's conception is the darker birth of a deeper feeling:
"There is a blind world, yet unlit by God, Rolling around the extremest edge of light, Where all things are disaster and decay: That black and outcast orb is Satan's home That dusky world man's science counteth not Upon the brightest sky. He never knows How near it comes to him; but, swathed in clouds, As though in plumed and palled state, it steals, Hearse like and thief like, round the universe, Forever rolling, and returning not,