ght spread over the universe! How sad would it render the
contemplation of the heavens! How full of melancholy the conception that
throughout the measureless fields of space there may be the same
wretchedness and depravity that have formed the mournful history of our
earth, and which we fail to see in its true intensity, because we have
become hardened through long and intimate familiarity with its scenes. And
yet, for all that natural science merely, and natural theology can prove,
it may be so, and even far worse. For all that they can affirm, either as
to possibility or probability, a history of woe surpassing any thing that
earth has ever exhibited, or inhabitant of earth has ever imagined, may
have every where predominated. The highest reasoning of natural theology
can only set out for us some cold system of optimism, which may make it
perfectly consistent with its heartless intellectuality to regard the
sufferings of a universe, and that suffering a million-fold more intense
than any thing ever yet experienced, as only a means to some fancied good
time coming, and ever coming, for other dispensations and other races, and
other types of being in a future incalculably remote. To a right thinking
mind nothing can be more gloomy than that view of the universe which is
given by science alone, taking the earth as its base line of measurement,
and its present condition (assumed to have come from no moral catastrophe,
but to be a necessary result of universal physical laws) as the only
ground of legitimate induction. But we have a surer guide than this.
Besides the moral sense, we have the representations the Bible gives of
God and Christ. These form the ground of the belief that our earth is not
a fair sample of the universe, that fallen worlds are rare and
extraordinary, as requiring extraordinary mediatorial remedies--that
blessedness is the rule and not the exception, and that the Divine love
and justice have each respect to individual existences, instead of being
both absorbed in that _impersonal_ attribute which has regard only to
being in general, or to worlds and races viewed only in reference to some
interminable progress, condemned by its own law of development to eternal
imperfection, because never admitting the idea of finish of workmanship,
or of finality of purpose, either in relation to the universe or any of
its parts.

EDITOR'S EASY CHAIR

New-Yorkers have a story to tell of the winter just now