Take your soul away from earth, and send it on a mission of research among other worlds.  Let it soar far away to where the dog-star, Sirius, holds its course; and then, though nineteen billion two hundred million miles from earth, a distance so great, that light, travelling, as it does, at the rate of six million six hundred and twenty thousand miles a minute, would require three years to pass it,—­even then, when the journeying spirit had reached such a point, it might pass on and on,—­new worlds meeting its gaze at every advance, and new wonders being seen as far beyond the point it had attained as the inconceivable length of the path it had already travelled multiplied a myriad of times.

We can scarcely comprehend the vast distance of Sirius; yet, great as this distance is, it is the nearest star to our system, and stars have been seen whose distance from the earth is estimated to be a thousand times as great!

Can human mind mark that range?  A thousand times nineteen billion two hundred million!  And were we to stand on the last of these discovered stars, we might look yet far beyond, and see “infinity, boundless infinity, stretching on, unfathomed, forever.”

To have an idea of the vastness of creation, we must possess the mind of the Creator.  What are we?  We live and move and have our being on a grain of creation, that is being whirled through boundless space with inconceivable rapidity.  And we affect to be proud of our estate!  We build houses and we destroy them; we wage war, kill, brutify, enslave, ruin each other; or, we restore, beautify, and bless.  We are vain, sometimes.  We think the world was made for us; the stars shine for us, and all the hosts that gem the drapery of night created for our special benefit.  Astonishing presumption!-born of ignorance and cradled in credulity!

The mind grows dizzy as it attempts to conceive of constellation beyond constellation, on and on, through endless space.

Commencing with this earth, the mind given up to serious reflection muses upon its broad extent of territory, its continents and its oceans, and it appears very large indeed.  Forgetting, for a moment, its knowledge of other planets, it believes that this world is the whole universe of God; that the sun, moon and stars, are but lights in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth.  But truth steps in and change the mind’s view.  It shows that, large and important as this earth may appear, the sun, which is spoken of as inferior, is three hundred and fifty-four thousand nine hundred and thirty six times larger; and the stars, that seem like diamond points above us, are, many of them, larger than the sun, one being one billion eight hundred million miles in diameter.  Yet, such a bulk, when compared to the universe, is less than a monad.

A “monad” is an indivisible atom.  It is as incomprehensible as the mysteries of creation, or the duration of eternity.