They all listened to Gabriel open-mouthed with astonishment, and their bright eyes seemed dazed and bewildered.

“It is enough to drive one mad,” murmured the bell-ringer.  “What then is man, Gabriel?”

“Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large, and that we have peopled with religions, kingdoms and revelations from God, is nothing.  Dreams of ants! even less!  This same sun which seems so enormous compared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity.  What you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size.  How many are they?  Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever more and more.  Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in the depths of space others and again others appear, and so on everlastingly.  They are unaccountable.  Some are worlds inhabited like ours; others were so, and revolve solitary in space, waiting for a fresh evolution of life; many are still forming; and yet all these worlds are no more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the infinite.  Space is peopled by fires that have burnt for millions, trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing out heat and light.  The milky way is nothing but a cloud of stars that seem to us as one mass, but which in reality are so far apart that thousands of suns like ours with all their planets could revolve among them without ever coming into collision.”

Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light.  “Their velocity is insignificant compared with the distances in space.  The sun, which is the nearest to us, is still so far that for a sound to go from us to it would take three millions of years.  Poor human beings will never be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.

“These suns travel like ours towards the unknown with giddy flight, but they are so distant that three or four thousand years may pass without man being aware that they have moved more than a finger’s breadth.  The distances of infinity are maddening.  The sun is a nebula of inflammatory gas, and the earth an imperceptible molecule of sand.

“The luminous ray of the Polar star requires half a century to reach our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we should see it in space.

“And all these worlds are created, grow and die like human beings.  In space there is no more rest than on earth.  Some stars are extinguished, others vary, and others shine with all the power of their young life.  The dead planets dissolved by fires furnish the material for new worlds; it is a perpetual renewal of forms, throughout millions and millions of centuries, that represent in their lives what the few dozen years to which we are limited, are in our own.  And beyond all those incalculable distances there is space, and more space on every side, with fresh conglomerations of worlds without limit or end.”