When it came to be believed that the universe teemed with suns, moons, and planets, composed of material substances, subject to day and night, and various other laws and changes, like our own abode, it was natural to infer that these innumerable worlds were also inhabited by rational creatures akin to ourselves and capable of worshipping God. Numerous considerations, possessing more or less weight, were brought forward to confirm such a conclusion. The most striking presentation ever made of the argument, perhaps, is that in Oersted's essay on the "Universe as a Single Intellectual Realm." It became the popular faith, and is undoubtedly more so now than ever before. Towards the end of the seventeenth century a work was published in explicit support of this faith by Fontenelle. It was entitled "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds," and had marked success, running through many editions. A few years later, Huygens wrote a book, called "Cosmotheoros," in maintenance of the same thesis. The more this doctrine obtained root and life in the convictions of men, the more strongly its irreconcilableness with the ordinary theology must have made itself felt by fearless and competent thinkers. Could a quadrillion firmaments loaded with stars, each inhabited by its own race of free intelligences, all be burned up and destroyed in the Day of Judgment provoked on this petty grain of dust by the sin of Adam? 32 Were the stars mere sparks and spangles stuck in heaven for us to see by, it would be no shock to our reason to suppose that they might be extinguished with our extinction; but, grasping the truths of astronomy as they now lie in the brain of a master in science, we can no longer think of God expelling our race from the joys of being and then quenching the splendors of his hall "as an innkeeper blows out the lights when the dance is at an end." God rules and over rules all, and serenely works out his irresistible ends, incapable of wrath or defeat. Would it be more incongruous for Him to be angry with an ant hill and come down to trample it, than to be so with the earth and appear in vindictive fire to annihilate it?
From time to time, in the interests of the antiquated ideas, doubts have been raised as to the validity of the doctrine of stellar worlds stocked with intellectual families.33 Hegel, either imbued with that Gnostic contempt and hatred for matter which described the earth as "a dirt ball for the extrication of light spirits," or from an obscure impulse of pantheistic thought, sullies the stars with every demeaning phrase, even stigmatizing them as "pimples of light." Michelet, a disciple of Hegel, followed his example, and, in a work published in 1840, strove vigorously to aggrandize the earth and man at the expense of the accepted teachings of astronomy.34 With argument and ridicule, wit and reason, he endeavored to make it out that the stars are no better than gleaming patches of vapor. We are the exclusive autocrats of all immensity. Whewell has followed up this species of thought with quite remarkable adroitness, force, and brilliance.35 Whether his motive in this undertaking is purely scientific and artistic, or whether he is impelled by a fancied religious animus, having been bitten by some theological fear which has given him the astrophobia, does not clearly appear.
32 As specimens of the large number of treatises which have been published asserting the destruction of the whole creation in the Day of Judgment, the following may be consulted. Osiander, De Consummatione Saculi Dissertationum Pentus. Lund, De Excidio Universi Totali et Substantiali. Frisch, Die Welt im Feuer, oder das wahre Vergehen und Ende der Welt durch den letzen Sundenbrand. For a century past the opinion has been gaining favor that the great catastrophe will be confined to our earth, and that even this is not to be annihilated, but to be transformed, purged, and beautified by the crisis. See, e. g., Brumhey, Ueber die endliche Umwandlung der Erde durch Feuer.
33 Kurtz, Bibel and Astronomie. Simonton's Eng. trans., ch. vi. sect. 14: Incarnation of God.
34 Vorlesungen uber die ewige Personlichkeit des Geistes. 35 Of a Plurality of Worlds: An Essay.
Brewster has replied to Whewell's disturbing essay in a volume which more commands our sympathies and carries our reason, but is less sustained in force and less close in logic.36 Powell has still more recently published a very valuable treatise on the subject;37 and with this work the discussion rests thus far, leaving, as we believe, the popular faith in an astronomic universe of inhabited worlds unshaken, however fatal the legitimate implications of that faith may be to other doctrines simultaneously held.38 It is curious to observe the shifting positions taken up by skepticism in science, now, with powerful recoil from the narrow bigotries of theology, eagerly embracing the sublimest dreams of astronomic speculation, and now inclining to the faith that the remoter stars are but brilliant globules trickling from the poles of some terrible battery in the godless heights of space. But if there be any thing sure in science at all, it is that the material creation is inconceivably vast, including innumerable systems, and all governed by invariable laws. But let us return from this episode.
The foregoing sixfold argument, preserving us from the remorseless grasp of annihilation, leaves to us unchanged the problem of the relations which shall be sustained by the disembodied soul to time and space, the question as to the locality of the spirit world, the scene of our future life. Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, Valhalla with its mead brimmed horns, Blessed Isles, Elysium, supernal Olympus, firmamental Heaven, paradisal Eden, definite sites of celestial Worlds for departed souls, the Chaldee's golden orbs, the Sanscrit Meru, the Indian Hunting Ground, the Moslem's love bowers, and wine rivers, and gem palaces thronged with dark eyed houris, these notions, and all similar ones, of material residences for spirits, located and bounded, we must dismiss as dreams and cheats of the childish world's unripe fancy. There is no evidence for any thing of that coarse, crude sort. The fictitious theological Heaven is a deposit of imagination on the azure ground of infinity, like a bird's nest on Himalaya. What, then, shall we say? Why, in the first place, that, while there are reasons enough and room enough for an undisheartened faith in the grand fact of human immortality, it is beyond our present powers to establish any detailed conclusions in regard to its locality or its scenery.
But surely, in the second place, we should say that it becomes us, when reflecting on the scenes to be opened to us at death, to rise to a more ideal and sublime view than any of those tangible figments which were the products of untrained sensual imagination and gross materialistic theory. When the fleshly prison walls of the mind fall, its first inheritance is a stupendous freedom. The narrow limits that caged it here are gone, and it lives in an ethereal sphere with no impeding bounds. Leaving its natal threshold of earth and the lazar house of time, its home is immensity, and its lease is eternity. Even in our present state, to a true
36 More Worlds than One the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian.
37 Essay on the Unity or Plurality of Worlds. See, furthermore, in Westminster Review, July, 1858, Recent Astronomy and the Nebular Hypothesis.