are numberless.

Another great change, rather of impression than of conviction, has been
creeping over the religious scene. We have hitherto, largely, perhaps,
under the influence of the Bible, been fancying rather than thinking
that this little earth of ours was the centre of all things, the
special object of interest to the Creator; and that the grand drama of
existence was that enacted on this terrestrial stage and culminating in
Redemption. Astronomical science is now making us distinctly feel that
this world is only one, and, if magnitude is to be the measure, very
far from the most important, of myriads of worlds governed by the same
physical laws as ours, forming a system of which ours is a member,
while the destiny of the whole system is to us utterly inscrutable;
proofs of the most sublime and glorious order presenting themselves on
the one hand, while on the other we see signs of disorder and
destruction, errant bodies such as comets and aerolites, a moon without
an atmosphere, the conflagration of a star. Whether the whole is
moving towards any end and, if it is, what that end is to be, we cannot
hope to divine. When with Infinity we take into our thought Eternity,
past and future, if in Eternity there can be said to be past or future,
our minds are completely overwhelmed.

Is belief in a future life generally holding its ground? My friend,
the late Mr. Chamberlain, was by no means alone in resigning it. But
if this life is all, how can we continue to hold our faith in divine
justice? Mr. Chamberlain, as I said before, was evidently happy as
well as good. His life, though short and regarded by him as ending in
the grave, was to him so much gain, and proved beneficence on the part
of the Author of his being. But if Mr. Chamberlain's theory is true,
what is to be said in the case of the myriads to whom life has been
wretchedness, ending perhaps in agony, often without the slightest
responsibility on their part? For these unhappy ones would it be well,
as Mr. Chamberlain holds it was for him, that there should be no
hereafter? Is their being brought into existence only to suffer
compatible with our faith in supreme benevolence? Is confidence in
supreme justice compatible with the conviction that the tyrant and the
tortured victims of his tyranny, alike, repose forever in the grave?
Such, it is true, was the belief of the Hebrew; indication of any other
belief, at all events, he has left us none, un