akin to ourselves and capable
of worshipping God. Numerous considerations, possessing more or
less weight, were brought forward to confirm such a conclusion.
The most striking presentation ever made of the argument, perhaps,
is that in Oersted's essay on the "Universe as a Single
Intellectual Realm." It became the popular faith, and is
undoubtedly more so now than ever before. Towards the end of the
seventeenth century a work was published in explicit support of
this faith by Fontenelle. It was entitled "Conversations on the
Plurality of Worlds," and had marked success, running through many
editions. A few years later, Huygens wrote a book, called
"Cosmotheoros," in maintenance of the same thesis. The more this
doctrine obtained root and life in the convictions of men, the
more strongly its irreconcilableness with the ordinary theology
must have made itself felt by fearless and competent thinkers.
Could a quadrillion firmaments loaded with stars, each inhabited
by its own race of free intelligences, all be burned up and
destroyed in the Day of Judgment provoked on this petty grain of
dust by the sin of Adam? 32 Were the stars mere sparks and
spangles stuck in heaven for us to see by, it would be no shock to
our reason to suppose that they might be extinguished with our
extinction; but, grasping the truths of astronomy as they now lie
in the brain of a master in science, we can no longer think of God
expelling our race from the joys of being and then quenching the
splendors of his hall "as an innkeeper blows out the lights when
the dance is at an end." God rules and over rules all, and
serenely works out his irresistible ends, incapable of wrath or
defeat. Would it be more incongruous for Him to be angry with an
ant hill and come down to trample it, than to be so with the earth
and appear in vindictive fire to annihilate it?

From time to time, in the interests of the antiquated ideas,
doubts have been raised as to the validity of the doctrine of
stellar worlds stocked with intellectual families.33 Hegel, either
imbued with that Gnostic contempt and hatred for matter which
described the earth as "a dirt ball for the extrication of light
spirits," or from an obscure impulse of pantheistic thought,
sullies the stars with every demeaning phrase, even stigmatizing
them as "pimples of light." Michelet, a disciple of Hegel,
followed his example, and, in a work published in 1840, strove
vigorously to aggrandize the earth and