It may be thought that conceptions like these are calculated rather to depress than to elevate us in the scale of being; that, banished as he is by these contemplations to a corner of creation, and there reduced to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds.  But a second thought corrects the impression.  These vast contemplations are well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement.  Mind and matter are incommensurable.  An immortal soul, even while clothed in “this muddy vesture of decay,” is in the eye of God and reason, a purer essence than the brightest sun that lights the depths of heaven.  The organized human eye, instinct with life and soul, which, gazing through the telescope, travels up to the cloudy speck in the handle of Orion’s sword, and bids it blaze forth into a galaxy as vast as ours, stands higher in the order of being than all that host of luminaries.  The intellect of Newton which discovered the law that holds the revolving worlds together, is a nobler work of God than a universe of universes of unthinking matter.

If, still treading the loftiest paths of analogy, we adopt the supposition,—­to me I own the grateful supposition,—­that the countless planetary worlds which attend these countless suns, are the abodes of rational beings like man, instead of bringing back from this exalted conception a feeling of insignificance, as if the individuals of our race were but poor atoms in the infinity of being, I regard it, on the contrary, as a glory of our human nature, that it belongs to a family which no man can number of rational natures like itself.  In the order of being they may stand beneath us, or they may stand above us; he may well be content with his place, who is made “a little lower than the angels.”

CONTEMPLATION OF THE HEAVENS.

Finally, my Friends, I believe there is no contemplation better adapted to awaken devout ideas than that of the heavenly bodies,—­no branch of natural science which bears clearer testimony to the power and wisdom of God than that to which you this day consecrate a temple.  The heart of the ancient world, with all the prevailing ignorance of the true nature and motions of the heavenly orbs, was religiously impressed by their survey.  There is a passage in one of those admirable philosophical treatises of Cicero composed in the decline of life, as a solace under domestic bereavement and patriotic concern at the impending convulsions of the state, in which, quoting from some lost work of Aristotle, he treats the topic in a manner which almost puts to shame the teachings of Christian wisdom.