CHAP. XIII - SUPERVISION AND CONTROL

Summary

It has been customary, in treatises on the plurality of worlds, to discuss the religious difficulties which seem to suggest themselves when man regards the universe around him as thronged with worlds, each peopled with millions of living creatures, and many perchance the abode of intelligent and therefore responsible beings. Accustomed to regard himself as in a special manner the object of God's care and solicitude, it is not without a sense of pain that he is brought to contemplate the possibility that other creatures may exist in uncounted millions whom God regards with infinite love and interest. ‘If this be so,’ asks Whewell, ‘how shall the earth and men, its inhabitants, annihilated as it were by the magnitude of the known universe, continue to be anything in the regard of Him who embraces all? Least of all, how shall men continue to receive that special, preserving, providential, judicial, personal care, which religion implies; and without the belief in which, any man who has religious thoughts must be disturbed and unhappy, desolate and for saken?’

I do not, however, feel by any means invited to consider ‘the religious difficulty’ by the success which has attended the efforts made by others to remove it.