loat around our globe, and the most majestic
of the orbs that roll through the immeasurable fields of space--all
are parts of one system, productions of one power, creations of one
intellect, the offspring of Him, by whom all that is inert and inorganic
in creation was formed, and from whom all that have life derive their
being.

Of this immense system,--all that we can examine,--this little globe
that we inherit, is full of animation, and crowded with forms,
organized, glowing with life, and generally sentient. No space is
unoccupied; the exposed surface of the rock is incrusted with living
substances; plants occupy the bark, and decaying limbs, of other plants;
animals live on the surface, and in the bodies, of other animals:
inhabitants are fashioned and adapted to equatorial heats, and polar
ice;--air, earth, and ocean teem with life;--and if to other worlds the
same proportion of life and of enjoyment has been distributed which has
been allotted to ours, if creative benevolence has equally filled every
other planet of every other system, nay, even the suns themselves, with
beings, organized, animated, and intelligent, how countless must be
the generations of the living! What voices which we cannot hear, what
languages that we cannot understand, what multitudes that we cannot see,
may, as they roll along the stream of time, be employed hourly, daily,
and forever, in choral songs of praise, hymning their great Creator!

And when, in this almost prodigal waste of life, we perceive that every
being, from the puny insect which flutters in the evening ray; from the
lichen which we can scarcely distinguish on the mouldering rock;
from the fungus that springs up and re-animates the mass of dead and
decomposing substances; that every living form possesses a structure as
perfect in its sphere, an organization sometimes as complex, always as
truly and completely adapted to its purposes and modes of existence
as that of the most perfect animal; when we discover them all to be
governed by laws as definite, as immutable, as those which regulate the
planetary movements, great must be our admiration of the wisdom which
has arrayed, and the power which has perfected this stupendous fabric.

Nor does creation here cease. There are beyond the limits of our system,
beyond the visible forms of matter, other principles, other powers,
higher orders of beings, an immaterial world which we cannot yet know;
other modes of existence which