e over this huge world, the sun
is the nearest: the distance of the moon is twice as great; the lesser
fixed stars occur immediately beyond; then Mercury, then Venus, then
Mars, then Jupiter, then Saturn; and finally, the great bear and the
polar star. And such is that cosmogony and astronomy of the Brahmins to
which their religion, in its character as a revelation, stands
committed, and in which a very lenient criticism has found the geologic
revolutions. Let me draw my next illustration from Buddhism, the most
ancient and most widely spread religion of the East; for, though
partially overlaid in the great Indian peninsula by the more modern
monstrosities of Brahminism, it extends in one direction from the
Persian Gulf to Formosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of
Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms of heathenism
darken so large a portion of the map as Buddhism,--a superstition which
is estimated to include within its pale nearly one third of the whole
human species.

It has been held, I need scarce say, by most astronomers since the times
of Newton, that the universe consists of innumerable systems of worlds,
furnished each with its own sun; and held by most geologists during the
last fifty years, that the past duration of our earth was divided into
periods of vast extent, each of which had a creation of its own. And
certainly in Buddhism we find both these ideas,--the idea of the
existence of separate systems, each with its own sun; and the idea of
successive periods, each with its own creation. We ascertain on
examination; however, that in the superstition they are not scientific
ideas at all, but mere chance guesses, set, like those of Brahminism,
in a farago of wild and monstrous fable. Each of the many systems of
which the universe is composed consists, say the Buddhists, of three
worlds of a circular form, joined together at the edges, so that there
intervenes between them an angular interspace, which constitutes their
common hell; and to each of these systems there is a sun and moon
apportioned, that take their daily journeys over them, returning at
night through a void space underneath. And each of the bygone successive
creations was a creation originated, it is added, out of chaos, through
the stored-up merits of the Buddhas, and the effects of a
life-invigorating rain, and which sank into chaos again when the old
stock of merit, accumulated in the previous period, was exhau