planets exterior to the orbit of Mars, have been discovered; while Jupiter, the first planet exterior to the asteroids, is nearly five hundred millions of miles from the sun; it is ninety thousand miles in diameter, and is attended by four moons or satellites. Saturn's orbit is four hundred millions of miles beyond Jupiter, and is attended by eight moons or satellites; while Uranus is double the distance of Saturn. Neptune is the most remote known member of the planetary system, its distance being nearly three thousand millions of miles. A cannon ball flying at the rate of five hundred miles per hour would not reach the orbit of Neptune from the sun in less than six hundred and eighty years.
The appearance of more than seven hundred comets belonging to our system has been recorded. These are new worlds thrown off from the sun, in gaseous form, travelling through space for millions of ages before assuming a solid form or producing vegetation; and this was the process our earth had to pass through. In gazing beyond the planets we behold millions of stars, all worlds, many of far greater magnitude than ours, while far beyond these and Neptune are other solar systems of worlds stretching out through illimitable space.
You "created" not these, O God; but we created you. You are made in the image of man; in the image of man are you made. Long ago ye were made out of the mists of our ignorance ; ye were dyed in the streams of our blood. We knew little of the expanse and glory of the subjective and objective world. But, even in our rude savagery, the stale contingencies of life were too narrow for us; and, in the incipient longings of our immortal energies, we invented you. We made you rude as the stone cairn we piled over our dead, and gory as the axe with which we did battle with our foes. You were then the best god we were capable of making. And that we had even a god like you kept alive in our hearts the vestal flame of aspiration and hope, and differentiated us from the steed that obeyed our bridle and the boar overthrown by our spear.
Even you, O God, rude as we had made you, were yet the highest line on the shore to which the tide-mark
