hanging over the infinitely remote space, a sprawling
terror, every point holding millions of worlds, thinking of these
all transcendent wonders, and then remembering his own
inexpressible littleness, how that the visible existence of his
whole race does not occupy a single tick of the great Sidereal
Clock, will he not sink under helpless misgivings, will he not
utterly despair of immortal notice and support from the King of
all this? In a word, how does the solemn greatness of man, the
supposed eternal destiny of man, stand affected by the modern
knowledge of the vastness of creation? Regarding the immensities
receding over him in unfathomable abysses bursting with dust heaps
of suns, must not man be dwarfed into unmitigated contempt, his
life and character rendered absolutely insignificant, the utmost
span of his fortunes seeming but as the hum and glitter of an
ephemeron in a moment's sunshine? Doubtless many a one has at
times felt the stupendous truths of astronomy thus palsying him
with a crushing sense of his own nothingness and burying him in
fatalistic despair. Standing at night, alone, beneath the august
dome studded from of old with its ever blazing lights, he gazes up
and sees the innumerable armies of heaven marshalled forth above
him in the order and silence of their primeval pomp. Peacefully
and forever they shine there. In nebula separated from nebula by
trillions of leagues, plane beyond plane, they stretch and glitter
to the feet of God. Falling on his knees, he clasps his hands in
speechless adoration, but feels, with an intolerable ache of the
heart, that in this infinitude such an one as he can be of no
consequence whatever. He waits passively for the resistless round
of fate to bear him away, ah, whither? "Conscious that he dwells
but as an atom of dust on the outskirts of a galaxy of
inconceivable glory" moving through eternity in the arms of law,
he becomes, in his own estimation, an insensible dot lost in the
uncontainable wilderness of firmamental systems. But this
conclusion of despair is a mistake as sophistical as it is
injurious, as baseless in reality as it is natural in seeming. Its
antidote and corrective are found in a more penetrative thought
and juster understanding of the subject, which will preserve the
greatness and the immortal destiny of man unharmed despite the
frowning vastitudes of creation. This will appear from fairly
weighing the following considerations.

In the first