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.

"Praeclare ergo Aristoteles, 'Si essent,' inquit, 'qui sub terra semper
habitavissent, bonis et illustribus domiciliis quae essent ornat