duce for the sake of
its sacred lesson. Pure religion is an Attic salt, which wise men use
in all of their entertainments: a condiment which seasons what is
otherwise insipid, and assists healthy digestion in the compound
organism of man's mental and moral constitution. About seventy
years since, a little tract was published, in which the writer imagined
himself on _luna firma_. After giving the inhabitants of the moon an
account of our terrestrial race, of its fall and redemption, and of the
unhappiness of those who neglect the great salvation, he says, "The
secret is this, that nothing but an infinite God, revealing Himself by
His Spirit to their minds, and enabling them to believe and trust in
Him, can give perfect and lasting satisfaction." He then adds, "My
last observation received the most marked approbation of the lunar
inhabitants: they truly pitied the ignorant triflers of our sinful world,
who prefer drunkenness, debauchery, sinful amusements, exorbitant
riches, flattery, and other things that are highly esteemed amongst
men, to the pleasures of godliness, to the life of God in the soul of
man, to the animating hope of future bliss." [61]

Here the man in the moon and we must part. Hitherto some may
have supposed their thoughts occupied with a mere creature of
imagination, or gratuitous creation of an old-world mythology.
Perhaps the man in the moon is nothing more: perhaps he is very
much more. Possibly we have information of every being in the
universe; and possibly there are beings in every existing world of
which we know nothing whatever. The latter possibility we deem
much the more probable. Remembering our littleness as contrasted
with the magnitude of the whole creation, we prefer to believe that
there are rational creatures in other worlds besides this small-sized
sphere in, it may be, a small-sized system. Therefore, till we acquire
more conclusive evidence than has yet been adduced, we will not
regard even the moon as an empty abode, but as the home of beings
whom, in the absence of accurate definition, we denominate men.
Whether the man in the moon have a body like our own, whether his
breathing apparatus, his digestive functions, and his cerebral organs,
be identical with ours, are matters of secondary moment. The
Fabricator of terrestrial organizations has limited himself to no one
type or form, why then should man be the model of beings in distant
worlds? Be the man in the moon a biped or quadr