lever, leaving the
weight of the lever out of the case.

It may also be said, that man can make a wheel and axis; that he can put
wheels of different magnitudes together, and produce a mill. Still the
case comes back to the same point, which is, that he did not make the
principle that gives the wheels those powers. This principle is as
unalterable as in the former cases, or rather it is the same principle
under a different appearance to the eye.

The power that two wheels of different magnitudes have upon each other
is in the same proportion as if the semi-diameter of the two wheels
were joined together and made into that kind of lever I have described,
suspended at the part where the semi-diameters join; for the two wheels,
scientifically considered, are no other than the two circles generated
by the motion of the compound lever.

It is from the study of the true theology that all our knowledge of
science is derived; and it is from that knowledge that all the arts have
originated.

The Almighty lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the
structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It
is as if he had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours,
"I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the
starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now
provide for his own comfort, AND LEARN FROM MY MUNIFICENCE TO ALL, TO BE
KIND TO EACH OTHER."

Of what use is it, unless it be to teach man something, that his eye is
endowed with the power of beholding, to an incomprehensible distance, an
immensity of worlds revolving in the ocean of space? Or of what use is
it that this immensity of worlds is visible to man? What has man to do
with the Pleiades, with Orion, with Sirius, with the star he calls the
north star, with the moving orbs he has named Saturn, Jupiter, Mars,
Venus, and Mercury, if no uses are to follow from their being visible?
A less power of vision would have been sufficient for man, if the
immensity he now possesses were given only to waste itself, as it were,
on an immense desert of space glittering with shows.

It is only by contemplating what he calls the starry heavens, as the
book and school of science, that he discovers any use in their being
visible to him, or any advantage resulting from his immensity of
vision. But when he contemplates the subject in this light, he sees an
additional motive for saying, that nothing w