ing a yet higher system; and so on _ad
infinitum_. Such ideas would seem to them not merely inconceivable, but
many degrees beyond the widest conceptions of space and time which they
could regard as admissible.

Our position differs only in degree, not in kind, from that of these
imagined creatures, and the reasoning which we perceive (though they
could not) to be just for such creatures is just for us also. It was
perfectly natural that before men recognised the evidences of
development in the structure of our earth they should regard the earth
and all things upon the earth and visible from the earth as formed by
special creative acts precisely as we see them now. But so soon as they
perceived that the earth is undergoing processes of development and has
undergone such processes in the past, it was reasonable, though at
first painful, to conclude that on this point they had been mistaken.
Yet as we recognise the absurdity of the supposition that, because
fruits and trees grow, and were not made in a single instant as we know
them, therefore there is no Supreme Being, so may we justly reject as
absurd the same argument, enlarged in scale, employed to induce the
conclusion that because planets and solar systems have been developed to
their present condition, and were not created in their present form,
therefore there is no Creator, no God. I do not know that the argument
ever has been used in this form; but it has been used to show that those
who believe in the development of worlds and systems must of necessity
be atheists, an even more mischievous conclusion than the other; for
none who had not examined the subject would be likely to adopt the
former conclusion, but many might be willing to believe that a number of
their fellow-men hold obnoxious tenets, without inquiring closely or at
all into the reasoning on which the assertion had been based.

But it is more important to notice how our views respecting other worlds
should be affected by those circumstances in the evidence _we_ have,
which correspond with the features of the evidence on which the imagined
inhabitants of the fruit world would form their opinion. It was natural
that when men first began to reason about themselves and their home they
should reject the idea of other worlds like ours, and perhaps it was
equally natural that when first the idea was entertained that the
planets may be worlds like ours, men should conceive that all those
worlds are in the