; its Presiding
Angel will resume his place with the angels of his train; humans that were
damned shall be with them numbered amongst the good angels; this chief of
our globe shall render homage to the Messiah, chief of created beings. The
glory of this angel reconciled shall be greater than it was before his
fall.

_Inque Deos iterum factorum lege receptus_
_Aureus aeternum noster regnabit Apollo._

The vision seemed to me pleasing, and worthy of a follower of Origen: but
we have no need of such hypothesis or fictions, where Wit plays a greater
part than Revelation, and which even Reason cannot turn to account. For it
does not appear that there is one principal place in the known universe
deserving in preference to the rest to be the seat of the eldest of created
beings; and the sun of our system at least is not it.

19. Holding then to the established doctrine that the number of men damned
eternally will be incomparably greater than that of the saved, we must say
that the evil could not but seem to be almost as nothing in comparison with
the good, when one contemplates the true vastness of the city of God.
Coelius Secundus Curio wrote a little book, _De Amplitudine Regni
Coelestis_, which was reprinted not long since; but he is indeed far from
having apprehended the compass of the kingdom of heaven. The ancients had
puny ideas on the works of God, and St. Augustine, for want of knowing
modern discoveries, was at a loss when there was question of explaining the
prevalence of evil. It seemed to the ancients that there was only one earth
inhabited, and even of that men held the antipodes in dread: the remainder
of the world was, according to them, a few shining globes and a few
crystalline spheres. To-day, whatever bounds are given or not given to the
universe, it must be acknowledged that there is an infinite number of
globes, as great as and greater than ours, which have as much right as[135]
it to hold rational inhabitants, though it follows not at all that they are
human. It is only one planet, that is to say one of the six principal
satellites of our sun; and as all fixed stars are suns also, we see how
small a thing our earth is in relation to visible things, since it is only
an appendix of one amongst them. It may be that all suns are peopled only
by blessed creatures, and nothing constrains us to think that many are
damned, for few instances or few samples suffice to show the advantage
which good extracts f