V. to be quite unascertainable. This system has the LETTER double effect of magnifying our conceptions of our Creator, and of precluding all disproportioned and inflated notions of ourselves; for if none of the heavenly hosts had been visible to us, how greatly would our ideas of Him have been diminished, and how much should we not have misconceived the importance of ourselves, from the inference which would then have been unavoidable, that the human race composed the whole of existing nature."4 Of the planets which are connected with our Sun, two of them, Mars and Venus, are the most likely to have on them animated beings of some analogy "How prone the human mind has been to exaggerate its own importance and that of its little earth, we see from the opinions of such men as Seneca and the Stoics, who had, nevertheless, altogether, upon a fair balance of error and truth, a larger portion of sound mind than most of the other philosophers. Seneca says, what his School believed, 'all the heavens, which the fiery ether, the highest part of the universe, includes; all those stars, whose number cannot be told; all this host of heavenly bodies, their sun running his course so near us, draw their nourishment from the earth (alimentum ex terreno trahunt), and share it among them; nor are they sustained by any thing else than by the breath of the earth (nec ullo alio quam halitu terrarum sustinentur.') Nat. Quest. I. vi. c. 16. Only 200 years ago, Dubartas found this old opinion still so The heaven's bright sapphires to be living creatures, Still sucking up, in their eternal motion, The earth for meat, and for their drink the ocean. Nor can I see how earth and sea should feed Seven times the bulk of their own bulk in meat.' V. LETTER with those which inhabit our earth. They are sufficiently near the sun to have several resemblances to us; but yet our men of science distinguish so many diversities, that we cannot positively infer that their population has the same bodies of flesh and blood, as invest our vital principle here. ours. No identity with a nature like ours can be presumed as to the inhabitants of Mercury, on account of its greater proximity to the solar radiance: nor as to those of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, because their remoteness and discernible peculiarities imply great dissimilarities to us and to our globe: neither can their vegetable animals, if any, be the same as Hence their external worlds must be unlike that from which we derive our sensations and our knowlege. They must severally have modes of being, component parts and substance, impressions, ideas and inclinations, very different from all that we are conscious of here. Yet they may, notwithstanding this diversity of their natures, be sentient and intelligent beings. We cannot deny this probability, tho we are entitled to infer that they do not feel and act as we do; if they reason, it must be on ideas we do not possess; if they think, it cannot be on the subjects which occupy our thoughts. Their sensations will be the materials of their mental powers, and these must be taken from their own external worlds, and not from ours. Their desires and pursuits will correspond with the impressions they receive in their respective abodes, as ours arise from the objects on our surface; and thus we and they must be unlike each other in knowlege, habit and nature, whatever kind of beings they may be. V. From these reflections, we seem to be justified in LETTER considering it to be another principle of the Divine economy, under which we live, that there shall not be human beings at present any where but on this earth; for it is the peculiar construction and position of our planet, its substances, organized classes, laws and course of things, which, with our bodily frame and figure, combine to make us what we are. These not being the same in any other orb above us, human nature must be distinguished by their effects, from all other modes of sentient existence. In the bony, arterial, fleshy and nervous systems of our frame, we resemble the birds and quadrupeds about us. But our configuration, limbs and motivities, have no parallel among these, but transcend them with a superiority that never can be lessened, except by that wilful debilitation and self-degradation, which gross sensualities or habitual intoxication cannot be continued without producing. It is also a part of the system of our creation, which we do not know to prevail in any other orb, that we consist of a double nature, united in a temporary and dissoluble union, but which never ends until our present life closes. It is this association of our spirit, or thinking principle, with the material body into which we grow, that constitutes human nature. It is the continuance of this combination which makes our human life; it is the termination of it which causes death. Tho eastern stories amuse our imagination with some magician characters, who can dart their soul into other bodies, abandoning for a time their own; yet this, in sober truth, we know to be impossible. The union of the reasoning and feeling mind with the corporeal form that we are born with, is inseparable LETTER While we live. Not even a trance, or a death-like fit, V. or any suspension of our senses or sensibility, is a parting of the one from the other. All such phenomena are but a recession of the principle of life and sensation, from its exterior organizations into its interior functions. But the fracture of the combination is in all cases death; and, once taking place, can never be remedied by mortal power. It is the appointed law, that the union shall form human nature, and its subsistence be human life. There is no life until it takes place, and none after it is severed. When the combination is dissolved, the body decombines into its component elements, which it could not do while its living principle was within it. This, on its separation, departs we know not whither. Being no subject of our sight or other senses in any other individual, we cannot, tho watching at their death-bed, trace its movements when it becomes disunited from their material forms. And as we shall necessarily lose the power of utterance, when such an event shall occur to ourselves-for in leaving the body, it quits the nerves and muscles of its vocal organs-no communication can be made of what is taking place at that eventful moment. It is from Revelation alone that we can derive any knowlege of what awaits us, when we thus die away from our fellow-beings here; and it is the glory and happiness of human nature, that it is distinguished by having from its Creator, the promise of another existence, different from its present one, in a new form of body, and in some other locality, and in a new external world. Thus it is another part of our scheme of being, that we shall have a double life, as well as a double nature, but with this distinction, that the body V. with which our living principle is here connected, is LETTER only to be temporary and dissolvable, but that the frame in which our double nature will be renewed to us hereafter, will be imperishable, and as everlasting as the spirit itself. Thus it has been planned and appointed, that human nature and human existence shall have in every one this striking peculiarity, that its conscious life shall be divided into two unequal portions, separated by death in this world from each other. One part, the smallest, our present life; the other part in some future state and region, as it shall be assigned to us hereafter, which will not be interrupted again. The body we have now is adapted to the transiency of our present existence, and its durability is therefore purposely made brief and uncertain. The next investment of our living principle, must be as different from our present one, as the quality of immortality is from fragility, disunion and decay.25 We do not know that any other orders of intelligent being, are living any where else under such a system as this. For any thing that we know, human nature may be the only class in the universe which has this 25 The great principle as to our future life, that we shall there again assume our double nature, and be a body and soul, was one of the new truths established in the human mind by our Saviour and His Apostles. There are many indications that most of the Christian doctrines had been more or less intimated to the primeval times, but were superseded by others of human invention. Thus this idea of the soul being reunited to a body, pervaded the whole ancient Egyptian nation, as every mummy testifies to us; but they lost the truth of the re-formation of the body into a superior kind from the elements of the present one, at the final resurrection, to be the resident of the celestial kingdom appointed for it; and chose to believe instead, that the soul was to live again on this earth after a period of 3,000 years, and to reanimate its former habitual body (Herod. Eut. s. 124); and therefore they embalmed H 3 |