able.' He set
the sun spinning through the heavens at such a rate, or rather at
such a jaunty pace, that no one knew when to expect either light or
darkness; men now froze with cold, and now melted with heat; the
seasons seemed playing one grand masquerade; the longest day and the
shortest day, and no day at all, succeeded one another in rapid
succession, and the whole universe seemed threatened with ruin and
desolation. Now, he thought, was the time to put an end to all this
strange disorder, and avow himself the great agent in all these marvels!
But he found, to his chagrin, that, so far from having convinced men
of the being and attributes of God, and of the truth of the revelation
which he had brought them, they were never less disposed to listen to
any such story; and, in fact, that the very few whose terror had
left them at all in possession of their senses, had become perfectly
convinced that the universe was under the dominion of Chance; and that
the only orthodox belief in such a world was stark Atheism. As there
will always be men who will speculate upon chance itself, there were
not wanting philosophers who concocted admirable theories of all this
disorder, but not one of them dreamed of the true. They all agreed,
however, that the state of things admitted of no remedy from any gods,
celestial or infernal; for if a divine artificer had existed, they said,
it could not have occurred. And thus the miracles which were designed
by this great man to convince the world of a God, served for a
demonstration that there was and could be none! They equally served
also to stifle the sage's claims to be considered God's messenger,
for, unhappily exhorting a large crowd to believe that he was the
cause of all the misery and terror which they had suffered, they were
so exasperated that they took summary vengeance on him: upon which
the sun resumed his wonted quiet pace again through the heavens, and
every thing fell into the old harmonious jogtrot of uniformity.
Philosophers who lived at a distance from the scene of the prophet's
exit quietly adjusted their old theory to the new phenomena, and showed
most conclusively that the whole train of things had been just what
must necessarily have been, and could not but have happened, without
the most serious consequences; while those who lived near to the scene
aforesaid, and were privy to the circumstances, speculated upon the
curious coincidence between the impostor's death and t