Moons to be Worlds; solid, dark,
opaque Bodies, habitable, and (as they would have us believe) inhabited
by the like Animals and rational Creatures as on this Earth; so that
they may, at this rate, find room enough for the _Devil_ and all his
Angels, without making a Hell on purpose; nay they may, for ought I
know, find a World for every _Devil_ in all the _Devil'_s _Host_, and so
every one may be a Monarch or _Master-Devil_, separately in his own
Sphere or World, and play the _Devil_ there by himself.
And even if this were so, it cannot be denied but that one _Devil_ in a
place would be enough for a whole systemary World, and be able, if not
restrained, to do mischief enough there too, and even to ruin and
overthrow the whole body of People contain'd in it.
But, I say, we need not fly to these shifts, or consult the Astronomers
in the decision of this point; for wherever _Satan_ and his defeated
Host went, at their expulsion from _Heaven_, we think we are certain,
none of all these Beautiful Worlds, or be they Worlds or no, I mean the
fix'd Stars, Planets, _&c._ had then any existence; for the Beginning,
as the Scripture calls it, was not yet Begun.
But to speak a little by the rules of Philosophy, that is to say, so as
to be understood by others, even when we speak of things we cannot fully
understand ourselves: Tho' in the Beginning of Time all this glorious
Creation was form'd, the Earth, the starry Heavens, and all the
Furniture thereof, and there was a Time when they were not; yet we
cannot say so of the Void, or that nameless _no-where_, as I call'd it
before, which now appears to be a _some-where_, in which these glorious
Bodies are plac'd. That immense Space which those take up, and which
they move in at this Time, must be supposed, before they had Being, to
be plac'd there: As God himself was, and existed before all Being, Time,
or Place, so the Heaven of Heavens, or the Place, where the Thrones and
Dominions of his Kingdom then existed, inconceivable and ineffable, had
an existence before the glorious Seraphs, the innumerable company of
Angels which attended about the Throne of God existed; these all had a
Being long before, as the Eternal Creator of them all had before them.
Into this void or abyss of Nothing, however unmeasurable, infinite, and
even to those Spirits, themselves Inconceivable, they certainly launch'd
from the bright Precipice which they fell from, and here they shifted as
well as the
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