ter which
will follow the blessed millennium.

The reader should be informed, that, according to the opinion of many
respectable writers of that age, there was good scriptural ground for
presuming that the garden bestowed upon our first parents was not on the
earth itself, but above the clouds, in the middle region between our
planet and the moon. Burnet approaches with becoming gravity the
discussion of so important a topic. He was willing to concede that the
geographical position of Paradise was not in Mesopotamia, yet he
maintained that it was upon the earth, and in the southern hemisphere,
near the equinoctial line. Butler selected this conceit as a fair mark
for his satire, when, amongst the numerous accomplishments of Hudibras,
he says,--

"He knew the seat of Paradise,
Could tell in what degree it lies;
And, as he was disposed, could prove it
Below the moon, or else above it."

Yet the same monarch, who is said never to have slept without Butler's
poem under his pillow, was so great an admirer and patron of Burnet's
book, that he ordered it to be translated from the Latin into English.
The style of the "Sacred Theory" was eloquent, and the book displayed
powers of invention of no ordinary stamp. It was, in fact, a fine
historical romance, as Buffon afterwards declared; but it was treated as
a work of profound science in the time of its author, and was
panegyrized by Addison in a Latin ode, while Steele praised it in the
"Spectator."

_Whiston, 1696._--Another production of the same school, and equally
characteristic of the time, was that of Whiston, entitled, "A New Theory
of the Earth; wherein the Creation of the world in Six Days, the
Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as laid down in the
Holy Scriptures, are shown to be perfectly agreeable to Reason and
Philosophy." He was at first a follower of Burnet; but his faith in the
infallibility of that writer was shaken by the declared opinion of
Newton, that there was every presumption in astronomy against any former
change in the inclination of the earth's axis. This was a leading dogma
in Burnet's system, though not original, for it was borrowed from an
Italian, Alessandro degli Alessandri, who had suggested it in the
beginning of the fifteenth century, to account for the former occupation
of the present continents by the sea. La Place has since strengthened
the arguments of Newton, against the probability of any former
revoluti