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gent, active MIND was the first cause of all things,' for of this Aristotle and Plato both assure us; and indeed it is thought by many, that we should name a school of philosophy after Homer, who lived at least four hundred years before our sage, and among whose poetical fictions much remarkable truth is apparent. In one of the fragments called Orphia,-because by some supposed to have been written by Orpheus, but more correctly attributed to Cecrops, a philosophic founder of a colony in Attica, 1556 years before Christ, or more than a thousand years before Socrates,-we find this sentence: There is one Power, one Deity, one Great Governor of all things.' The reader is aware, also, that the learned Greeks, (as Pythagoras and Herodotus,) before and about the Socratic period, were accustomed to travel in Egypt, as the then treasure-house of ancient wisdom, and there, though the common people were so degraded as to worship not only beasts and birds, but vegetables, (the onion being one of their gods,) the priests preserved in their secret and guarded mysteries certain great truths, with which the stranger student was permitted to become acquainted. What some of these doctrines were, we may learn from a verse sung in the mysteries of Eleusis, which were copied from those of Egypt: Pursue thy path rightly and contemplate the King of the world. He is One and of himself alone; and to that One all things have owed their being. He encompasses all things. No mortal hath beheld him, but he sees all things.' Over the statue of Isis, the chief deity of Egypt, was this wonderful inscription: I am all that has been, and all that shall be, and no man hath ever lifted my veil.' I need not ask the reader to mark the parallelism between this and the words of God to Moses, "I AM THAT I am.' This view of the subject is made still more clear from chronology, which fixes the date of the Phoenician colonies under Ivachus, who settled Greece, in 1856, or about fifty years after Abraham, who lived in the days of Shem, the son of Noah, and one of the survivors of the old world, according to Moses. The same historian gives us reason to believe that the worship of the true God was then prevalent in Egypt, (for he declares that the reigning Pharaoh worshipped him,) and probably universal; for Melchisedek, (whom many suppose, with much reason, to have been Shem,) was the royal priest of Jehovah. And though there is much absurd contradiction in the Chinese chronology, they also, like the Brahmins of India, fix the origin of their religious opinions in a very remote antiquity; while their god Fo or Fohi seems to have been no other than Noah. Our own Indians, too, who hold to the Unity and spirituality of God, are declared by

the

late venerable Boudinot, whose work entitled The Star in the West,' proves his laborious researches among them, to have very distinct traditions of the deluge. Thus, then, we find the opinions of all mankind converging upward to one period-a period when truth prevailed. The moral philosophy of Socrates may thus be supposed to be the gathered fragments of a better and revealed religion, which were too mighty, not to have survived the concussions of the iron ages which preceded him.

The very fables of the classic poets show whence their prevalent opinions came corrupted by the muddy stream of tradition. Homer makes water to have been the principle of all things, and they all refer to an original chaos,

When air was void of light, and earth unstable,

And water's dark abyss unnavigable,

No certain form on any was imprest,

All were confused and each disturbed the rest.' OVID.

The story of Pandora is very striking She was, according to Hesiod, the first woman made from clay, and animated. She was given as a wife to Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven and presented her husband with a box, which being opened, there flew from it innumerable evils, such as sickness and death, which have ever since plagued the world, one blessing, hope, only remaining. Now Plato tells us, that the meaning of this fable is, that the desire of forbidden luxuries was the cause of all mortal evil. We see at once this story came from the tradition of the fall, and the promise of redemption which immediately succeeded it. So, when he describes Jupiter as sending his commands to Neptune, that he should allay the storms which threatened the destruction of the Grecian fleet, he makes Iris, the rainbow, the messenger who carried the divine will. I will give one more instance of such agreement. Socrates and Plato, and others of the ancients, believed that Divine Providence was administered by inferior agents of the Great Deity. This was the origin of their multiplicity of deities, so that we may say,

The Naiad bathing in her crystal spring,
The guardian nymph of ev'ry leafy tree,
The rushing olus on viewless wing,

The flower-crowned queen of ev'ry cultured lea,
And He who walked with monarch-tread the sea,
The awful Thunderer, threatening them aloud,
God! were their dim imaginings of Thee,
Who saw Thee only through the misty cloud,

Which sin had thrown around their spirits like a shroud?'

This belief in inferior, yet good demons, I have already said appears to have been a corruption of the Scripture doctrine of ministering angels. To show the probability of this opinion, the reader is requested to compare two extracts; the first from our Christian poet, Spenser, the other from Hesiod, who lived before Homer:

And is there care in heaven, and is there love
In heavenly spirits to us creatures base,
That may compassion of our evils move?
There is, else much more wretched were the race
Of men than beasts; but oh, th' exceeding grace

Of Highest God, that loves his creatures so,
And all his works with mercy doth embrace;
The blessed angels he sends to and fro,

To serve to wicked men, to serve his wicked foe

'How oft do they their silver bowers leave,
To come to us who succor want;

How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The flitting skies, like flying pursuivant,
Against foul fiends to aid us militants.
They for us fight, they watch and duly guard,
And their bright squadrons all around us plant;
And all for love, and nothing for reward:

why should heavenly God for men have such regard?'

But thus Hesiod, after speaking of the golden age:

When in the grave this guiltless race were laid,

Soon was a world of holy demons made;

Aerial spirits, by great Jove designed

To be on earth the guardians of mankind;

Invisible to mortal eyes, they go,

And mark our actions, good or bad, below;

The immortal spies with watchful care preside,

And thrice ten-thousand round their charges glide;
They can reward with glory or with gold,

A power they by divine permission hold.'

Instances of these interesting resemblances of classic fable to sacred story might be greatly multiplied.

Thus it is, that in studying the character and opinions of him for whom unassisted reason did the most, we are the most convinced of the necessity of revelation. All that he knew, which was valuable, was derived from it; and he was himself most fully persuaded, that what he desired yet to know, could only learn from a heavenly instructer. Alas! that many who profess such a veneration for the sage of Athens, should neglect to learn from him this most important lesson which he

he

taught! It is not necessary to take from Socrates the due credit for virtue and wisdom which the candid scholar must award him, to prove that we need a better wisdom than man can teach. Socrates in the height of his fame is one of the best witnesses that the apologist for Christianity can summon. to his cause.

THY WILL BE DONE!'

It is a short and simple prayer, but 'tis the Christian's stay,
Through every varied scene of care, until his dying day;
As through the wilderness of life, calmly he wanders on,
His prayer in every time of strife, is still Thy will be done!'

When, in his happy infant years, he treads midst thornless flowers,
When pass away his smiles and tears, like April suns and flowers,
Then, bending at his mother's knee, play-tired at set of sun,
What is the prayer he murmurs forth? Father, thy will be done!'

When the bright summer sky of time, cloudless, is o'er him spread,
When love's bright wreath is in its prime, with not one blossom dead-
While o'er his hopes and prospects fair, no mist of wo hath gone,
Still he repeats the first-taught prayer · Father, thy will be done!'

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But when his sun no longer beams, and love's sweet flowers decay,
When all hope's rainbow-colored dreams are sadly swept away,
As a flowret bent beneath the storm still fragrantly breaths on,

So when dark clouds life's heaven deform, he prays, "Thy will be done!'

And when the winter of his age sheds o'er his locks its snows,
And when his weary pilgrimage is drawing to a close,—
Then, as he finds his strength decline, this is his prayer alone;
'To Thee my spirit I resign-Father, thy will be done!'

Democritus, who was always laughing, lived a hundred and nine years; Heraclitus, who never ceased crying, but sixty. Laughing, then, is best; and to laugh at another is perfectly justifiable, since we are told that the gods themselves, though they made us as they pleased, cannot help laughing

at us.

Stevens.

ASTRONOMY.

PROFESSOR MITCHELL'S LECTUELS.

NUMBER THREE.

Reported for the New York Tribune," by O. DYER, Phonographic Writer.

Distances of the Fixed Stars-Explanation of the Parallax-Difficulties in casting the Parallax of the Fixed Stars-Sir William Herschel takes up the Investigation-The Double Stars-Astonishing Discoveries of HerschelThe intense interest excited by them--The Parallax of the Fixed Stars still undiscoverable-The Heliometer is constructed by Frauenhofer and Bessel, of Konigsberg-The Triumph of Herschel-The Sidereal Heavens-Mædler— The Great Centre of the Universe-Herschel again-Argelander-StruveMadler again-His Discovery of the Great Centre of the Universe-Concluding Remarks of Professor Mitchell.

Ladies and Gentlemen:-I meet the responsibilities of this night with feelings of the deepest solicitude. When I look around upon this vast assemblage, and see the thousands of eyes that are fixed upon me-when I reflect upon the magnitude of the subject upon which I am to treat-of its complexity-its difficulties, I feel, with the little physical strength which I possess to-night, more like retreating from this position than attempting to go forward in the discharge of my duty.

the

Thus far, in the very short course of lectures I have had the pleasure of delivering to you, I have, in some sense, confined remarks to our own system-to the laws which my govern movements of the planets and their satellites, and the farsweeping comets, but to-night I am to leave this system-tonight we are obliged to go out into the depths of space-we are obliged to recede, until our own Sun dwindles to a minute star-until all the planets are lost, and even indeed, until the mighty orb of LEVERRIER himself shrinks to a mere point. But we are not only to penetrate space, we are to examine how the vast orbs that fill space are distributed-we are to watch their slow movements, and, from these minute motions, we are to deduce one of the most sublime results that the human mind has ever reached. How shall I introduce this subject? How

* Inaccurately stated, in the previous Number, to have been reported for the Emporium.