The celestial bodies were among the earliest objects of science, and before there was any science they stimulated religious thought and awakened religious feeling. The sun and moon have given rise to so extraordinary a number of myths that some authors have referred to them the whole of heathen mythology. There can be little doubt that the growth of astronomical knowledge contributed greatly to bring about the transition from polytheism to monotheism, and that so soon as the heavens were clearly understood to be subject to law, and the countless bodies which circle in them not to be independent agents but parts or members of a single mechanical or organic system, the triumph of the latter was for ever secured. No science, indeed, has hitherto had so much influence on man's religious beliefs as astronomy, although there may now appear to be indications that chemistry and biology will rival it in this respect in the future. And it has been thus influential chiefly because through its whole history it has been a continuous, conspicuous, and ever-advancing, ever-expanding demonstration of a reign of law on the most magnificent scale,--a demonstration begun when with unassisted vision men first attempted roughly to distribute the stars into groups or constellations, and far from yet ended when the same laws of gravitation, light, heat, and chemical combination which rule on earth have been proved to rule on orbs so distant that their rays do not reach us in a thousand years. The system of which our earth is a member is vast, varied, and orderly, the planets and satellites of which it is composed being so adjusted as regards magnitude and mass, distance, rate, and plane of direction, &c., that the whole is stable and secure, while part ministers to part as organ to organ in an animal body. Our own planet, for example, is so related to the sun and moon that seed-time and harvest never fail, and the ebb and flow of the tides never deceive us. And the solar system is but one of hundreds of millions of systems, some of which are incalculably larger than it, yet the countless millions of suns and stars thus "profusely scattered o'er the void immense" are so arranged and distributed in relation to one another and in accordance with the requirements of the profoundest mathematics as to secure the safety of one and all, and to produce everywhere harmony and beauty. Each orb is affecting the orbit of every other--each is doing what, if unchecked, would destroy itself and the entire system--but so wondrously is the whole constructed that these seemingly dangerous disturbances are the very means of preventing destruction and securing the universal welfare, being due to reciprocally compensating forces which in given times exactly balance one another. Is it, I ask, to be held as evidence of the power of the human mind that it should have been able after many centuries of combined and continuous exertion to compute with approximate accuracy the paths and perturbations of the planets which circle round our sun and the returns of a few comets, but as no evidence even of the existence of mind in the First Cause of things that the paths and perturbations of millions on millions of suns and planets and comets should have been determined with perfect precision for all the ages past and future of their existence, so that, multitudinous as they are, each proceeds safely on its destined way, and all united form a glorious harmony of structure and motion?[22]